T. Rev ([info]st_rev) wrote,
@ 2005-12-08 00:39:00
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Narrow Technical Matters of No Interest
This looks like a fascinating article on the philosophy of Zhuangzi that brings together a number of intellectual currents of great interest to me: skepticism, relativism, liberalism and anarchism. From the conclusion:
The problem with a full extrapolation of this modern theory of justice context to the Zhuangzi is that, along with 'sentences' and 'truth', it is clearly hard to find any neat counterpart of 'justice' in ancient Chinese political theory. The paradigm political theories, Confucianism, Mohism and Legalism, typically address nothing resembling constitutional structure at any deeper level than Mozi's Hobbes-like justification of the wise ruling-elder. The chief task of political theory, as the community delivered it to Zhuangzi, is how to identify the wise leader who can correctly choose to impose a single way of life on all.

Clearly, then the contextual point of the Zhuangzi's skepticism is precisely that we should not attempt to do any such thing. No such person exists and we should give up acting as if he/she does. There are no sages in the Confucian or Mohist sense. Skepticism about ways of life in the context of ancient Chinese political theory is skepticism of government--an argument for anarchy. The delivered conception of government in ancient China is intrinsically hostile to liberal neutrality and intolerant of diversity of ways of life. If the purpose of government is to pick and impose a dao on the whole society, then, Zhuangzi correctly concludes, government has no value—I will drag my tail in the mud.


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[info]sealwhiskers
2005-12-08 04:42 pm UTC (link)
The historical mirror context is interesting too. Particularly if you compare it to old Russia with its nobility despotism (and rulership over vast masses of land and peasants), in a number of ways politics in old Russia was similar to old China...minus the philosophy.
It's a fun game to play in your mind, all the logical possibilities to why these two nations eventually embraced communism, corrupted it, why it fell in Russia but not in China, and what will happen with both countries in the future.

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[info]forvrin
2005-12-08 06:42 pm UTC (link)
I always viewed China as having a similar gentry culture as Britain, only instead of rights and liberty, they had really, really neat pottery.

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Why Marx was wrong about the Brittish revolution
[info]sealwhiskers
2005-12-08 08:13 pm UTC (link)
The peasants 100 years after the French revolution had an abnormal degree of poverty in combination with slavery in Russia and in China. The gentry owned the people working the land and had incredibly vast amounts of land (compared to for instance England and France), all this while the industrial revolution took place in other parts of the world, creating a strong working class (that was composed of landless farmers basically).

A lot of historical dynamics can be explained with the amount of personal freedom the farmers experienced, and Russia and China are two of the most extreme negative examples here.

(and why the French didn't lose their nobility power in spite of the revolution, can partly be explained to it being mostly pre-industrial, and partly to other State-forming factors)

...god, I'm ranting like a college freshman today. Yeah, really neat potter! (that the brits promptly stole/imported)

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Re: Why Marx was wrong about the Brittish revolution
[info]sealwhiskers
2005-12-08 08:14 pm UTC (link)
p-o-t-t-e-r-y.

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Re: Why Marx was wrong about the Brittish revolution
[info]st_rev
2005-12-08 08:15 pm UTC (link)
The Brits didn't steal the pottery, they traded it fair and square for good, high-quality opium.

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Re: Why Marx was wrong about the Brittish revolution
[info]sealwhiskers
2005-12-08 08:29 pm UTC (link)
stole/imported</>/drug-dealed

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[info]st_rev
2005-12-08 06:52 pm UTC (link)
The author is an American expatriate at Hong Kong University, which gives the political content some interesting extra context.

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