patrick

I don’t care for the promise of a final agreement in a conversation. And so the first words of my response to Appiah’s final sentence of the third chapter in Cosmopolitanism are thrown down. Utter hokum I say. Positivist or what have you; I regularly involve the people around me in conversation solely based on their geographical specificity of happening to be sitting next to me in a bookstore. I look for nothing more. Regardless of any agreement or covenant from their response alone I learn something of that person. Perhaps I have only learned never to talk to you in a bookstore again. Then I have simultaneously learned and unlearn something of the Dao.

That being said I did appreciate the types and classes of fundamentals that Positivism supposes drive humans’ actions. “Beliefs–the first kind-–are supposed to reflect how the world is. Desires, by contrast, reflect how we’d liked it to be.” (Appiah, p. 18) I love that philosophers and psychologists from across time and culture utilize binary relationships for the description of the indescribable. The Conscience and the Unconscious against the Belief and the Desire. Now Yin and Yang are in the ring! It is like some highly touted tag team professional wrestling match. I’m sure Burton would have wanted to attend if not personally fight in the match.

Lao Tzu is credited with the same sort of dualistic expression from Jonathan Star’s translation of Tao Te Ching. Although the relationships move beyond binary, or rather they become interconnected multiple couplets of binary verse:

The crooked become straight
The empty become full
The worn become new
Have little gain much
Have much and be confused
Verse 22

Here the translator is creating and releasing tension. The binary states’ of objects are another common theme. Again:

Eyes look but cannot see it
Ears listen but cannot hear it
Hands grasp but cannot touch it
Beyond the sense lies the great Unity–
Invisible, inaudible, intangible
Verse 14

The final division of “sense” and “Unity” is founded–literally settled on top of–a reiteration of the senses’ etymological incapacities for comprehending Dao. The line is absolutely lovely in both content and structure. Star seems dazzled with the synecdoche that his translation has to offer. I enjoy it, too.

Appiah does discuss a duality with the semi-autobiographical chapter that includes witchcraft and his Ghana culture. There exists a separate world of power and effect with which his kinfolk adhere. A dichotomy is created with the witch and the victim, and it is repeated with those who do believe in witchcraft and those who do not. His point could be argued to say that although the general health and age of the Western lifespan may have increased due to our medical wonder, so has our national obesity and our inability to properly care for our elderly. It is truly valuable. This sort of insight and direction are what philosophers help us discover.

I am struggling to find meaning when meaning is seemingly ever expanding. Here Appiah grounds us like Yu Shu Lien trapping Jen Yu’s foot from the night sky in their first combative meeting. He pursues us saying that all of these are just sets of ideologies that help us deal with the commonalities of life. All of these collective idiosyncratic gestures are related to the day-to-day.

Or perhaps a quip from American folklorist Utah Philips quoting a local from his hometown, “No matter how “New Age” you get, old age is gonna kick your ass.” (Philips, 1996)

Sources:

Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. (W.W. Norton, NYC, 2007)

Lao Tzu. Tao Te Ching. Trans. Jonathan Star. (New York: Penguin, 2003).

Utah Philip. The Past Didn’t Go Anyway. Righteous Babe Records. CD. October, 1996.