A Curious Little Blog

I am strangely attracted to the concept of Taoism.  I say "strangely," because I normally have no interest in mystical thought.  I was nearly an adult when "The Tao of Pooh" became a bestseller, and I was not impressed at all.  Somewhere along the line, however, I found myself attracted to Taoist thought, in particular the concept of wu-wei.  When I recently read the Tao Te Ching, therefore, it was not the first time I had done so.  It is a challenging work, deliberately so, and one can read it repeatedly without fully comprehending it.  Fortunately, it is also very short and therefore easy to re-read.  The real question is whether there is something to understand at all, or whether it is a lot of nonsense. I have not devoted myself to understanding Tao the way I have to Christianity, but I have been curious about it for a long time and so I was happy that recently I could read some excerpts from the work of Zhuangzi, a Taoist thinker who lived about...

I have taken a small detour to read some Chinese classics:  the Analects, the Tao Te Ching, Zhuangzi, and Sun Tzu's Art of War.  They are all short works, but challenging. I thought about trying to learn Chinese once, but I don't think I'm cut out for it.  On one hand (and feel free to correct me if any of this is wrong), it seems to have a very simple grammar:  no cases or declensions, no real verb conjugations, no moods, simple markers for tenses.  On the other hand, the very simplicity of it makes it difficult to interpret.  I saw the following example of a Chinese sentence, each word translated directly into English:  "Tiger father no dog son."  I stared at it for some time without having any idea what it meant.  The explanation:  "if the father is a tiger, his son will not be a dog" -- i.e., the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.  Now that I know it, it makes sense, but I suspect that in reading there must be many cases wh...

Progressive:  "We want to make a colour-blind society." Observer:  "That's a great idea!  I suppose the government will no longer collect information about race then." P:  "No, we still do that." O:  "Oh.  Well, maybe you want the data, but you're not going to make any decisions based off of race, certainly." P:  "Actually, we will.  We need to correct the historical wrongs of racism by active measures." O:  "Hmm, I don't understand...well, at least in society you will downplay racial issues, emphasizing togetherness and the common humanity of all races, and not bring race into an issue unless it is clearly and overtly part of the problem. P:  "Absolutely not!  We must root out all racism, overt and covert, conscious and unconscious, macro and micro.  We scrutinize every action for any hint of racism and force people to apologize if there is the remotest possibility of racist implication, even in actions that...

I have written before about what it means to be "cool" (not from first hand experience, but from observation) but I think I overlooked one of the central aspects of coolness:  magnanimity.  "Magnanimous" literally means to have a "great soul," in the sense of a large soul.  A person with a great soul does not concern himself with trifles; hence, the common meaning of "magnanimous" as a person who overlooks insults because they are beneath him. Being magnanimous is not the same as being cool, but they are clearly related.  If you are cool, in the sense that you don't react strongly to events, it could be because you are magnanimous, i.e. you are focussed on things more important than particular events.  This is a central feature of the noble ethos in European history, and indeed, as far as I can tell, nobility from just about any society (I was inspired to write this after reading the sayings of Confucius).  A noble is only supposed to care...

I felt like I had a revelation recently toward understanding Plato and the realm of forms.  Upon re-reading my previous blog entries ( here and here ), I actually expressed pretty much the same ideas that I am going to say here, except that I now understand them somewhat differently. To be brief:  Plato says that things on earth are not real, they are poor copies of the "real" things from the realm of ideas.  This has never made sense to me before, because I could not understand what the real idea behind common things (chairs, rocks, dogs, etc.) would be.  And that was the problem:  I had been trained to look from the realm of the immanent to the transcendent.  This is natural, because we can see the immanent, but it is also backwards, because we are looking for the essences of things that don't have a permanent existence. What Plato meant, I now feel certain, was not that there was an ideal corresponding to a particular object, but that representation...