The Bartleby Case

 

Melville’s “Bartleby,” which has often been the object of metaphysical and theological interpretations,1 also admits a pathological reading. This “Story of Wall-Street”2 describes an inhumane working world whose inhabitants have all degraded to the state of animal laborans. The sinister atmosphere of the office, choked by skyscrapers on every side, is hostile to life and portrayed in detail. Less than three meters from the window there surges a “lofty brick wall, black by age and everlasting shade” (5). The workspace, which seems like “a huge square cistern,” proves “deficient in what landscape painters call ‘life’” (5). Melancholy and gloominess are often mentioned, and they set the basic mood for the narrative. The attorney’s assistants all suffer from neurotic disorders. “Turkey,” for example, runs around in “a strange, inflamed, flurried, flighty recklessness of activity” (6). Psychosomatic digestive troubles plague the overly ambitious assistant “Nippers,” who grinds his teeth perpetually and hisses curses through them. In their neurotic hyperactivity, these figures represent the opposite pole of Bartleby, who falls into silent immobility. Bartleby develops the symptoms characteristic of neurasthenia. In this light, his signature phrase, “I would prefer not to,” expresses neither the negative potency of not-to nor the instinct for delay and deferral that is  essential for “spirituality.” Rather, it stands for a lack of drive and for apathy, which seal Bartleby’s doom.

The society that Melville describes is still a disciplinary society. Walls and partitions, the elements of disciplinary architecture, traverse the entire narrative. After all, “Bartleby” tells “A Story of Wall-Street.” “Wall” is one of the most frequently used words. Reference often occurs to the “dead wall”: “The next day I noticed that Bartleby did nothing but stand at his window in his dead wall revery” (28). Bartleby works behind a screen and stares empty-headedly at the “dead brick wall.” The wall is always associated with death.3 Last but not least, disciplinary society is signified by the recurrent motif of the thick-walled prison called the “Tombs.” There, all life is extinguished. Bartleby ultimately lands in the Tombs and dies in complete isolation and solitude. He still represents an obedience-subject. He does not develop symptoms of depression, which is a hallmark of late-modern achievement society. Feelings of inadequacy, inferiority, or fear of failure do not belong to Bartleby’s emotional household. Constant self-reproach and self-aggression are unknown to him. He does not face the imperative to be himself that characterizes late-modern achievement society. Bartleby does not fail in the project of being an “I.” Monotonous copying—the sole activity he has to perform—leaves no free space in which private initiative would prove necessary, or even possible. What makes Bartleby sick is not excessive positivity or possibility. He is not burdened by the late-modern imperative of letting his self flourish [das Ich selbst beginnen zu lassen]. The activity of copying, in particular, does not admit initiative. Bartleby, who still lives in a society of conventions and institutions, does not know the wearing-out of the ego that leads to depressive I-tiredness.

Agamben’s ontotheological interpretation of “Bartleby,” which pays no attention to pathological elements, already founders on the facts of the narrative. It also fails to take note of the change of mental structure [psychischer Strukturwandel] in the present day.  Problematically, Agamben elevates Bartleby to a metaphysical position of the highest potency:

This is the philosophical constellation to which Bartleby the scrivener belongs. As a scribe who has stopped writing, Bartleby is the extreme figure of the Nothing from which all creation derives; and at the same time, he constitutes the most implacable vindication of this Nothing as pure, absolute potentiality. The scrivener has become the writing tablet; he is now nothing other than his white sheet.4By this logic, Bartleby embodies the “mind”—a “being of pure potentiality”—as signified by the empty tablet (on which nothing yet stands).5

Bartleby exhibits neither self-reference nor reference to anything else. He exists without a world and is absent and apathic. If he counts as a “white sheet” at all, this is because he has been voided of any and all relation to the world or meaning. Bartleby’s “dim eyes” (45) already speak against the purity of divine potentiality he is supposed to embody. It is just as unconvincing when Agamben claims that Bartleby’s stubborn refusal to write announces the potency of being able to do so—that his radical renunciation of willing [das Wollen] betokens potentia absoluta. As Agamben views things, Bartleby’s refusal is kerygmatic. He embodies “pure being without any predicate.” Agamben makes Bartleby into an angelic messenger, the Angel of Annunciation, who, for all that, “predicates nothing of nothing.”6 Thereby, he disregards the fact that Bartleby refuses every “errand.” He steadfastly refuses to send the mail: “‘Bartleby,’ said I, ‘Ginger Nut is away; just step round to the Post Office, won’t you?’ . . . ‘I would prefer not to’” (19). As is well known, the tale ends with the curious addendum that Bartleby formerly worked as an employee of the Dead Letter Office:

Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men? Conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness, can any business seem more fitted to heighten it than that of continually handling these dead letters and assorting them for the flames? (46)

 Racked by doubt, the attorney-narrator exclaims: “On errands of life, these letters speed to death.” Bartleby’s Dasein is a negative being-unto-death. This negativity contradicts Agamben’s ontotheological interpretation, which makes Bartleby the herald of a second Creation—of de-creation [Ent-Schöpfung] that undoes the border between what has been and what has not, between Being and Nothingness.

Melville allows for a tiny sprout of life to appear in the Tombs. However, given the utter hopelessness, the massive presence of death, this small, “imprisoned turf” (45) only underscores the negativity of the realm of the dead. The words of comfort the attorney addresses to the incarcerated Bartleby also offer no help: “Nothing reproachful attaches to you by being here. And see, it is not so sad a place as one might think. Look, there is the sky and here is the grass.” Unimpressed, Bartleby responds, “I know where I am” (43). Agamben interprets both the sky and the grass as messianic signs. The small patch of lawn—the only sign of life in the midst of the realm of the dead—only augments the hopeless emptiness. “On errands of life, these letters speed to death”; this is the central message of the tale. All efforts to live [Bemühungen ums Leben] lead to death.

Kafka’s “Hunger Artist” harbors fewer illusions. His death, which no one remarks, provides a great relief to onlookers—“even the most insensitive felt it refreshing.”7 His death makes room for a young panther, which embodies the joy of living free of desire:

The food he liked was brought him without hesitation by the attendants; he seemed not even to miss his freedom; his noble body, furnished almost to bursting with all that it needed, seemed to carry freedom around with it too; it seemed to lurk somewhere in his jaws; and the joy of living streamed with such ardent passion from his throat that for the onlookers it was not easy to stand the shock of it. But they braced themselves, crowded around the cage, and would not move on.8

In contrast, the hunger artist derives a feeling of freedom only from the negativity of refusal; this feeling is just as insubstantial [ scheinhaft] as the freedom that the panther guards “in his jaws.” Likewise, Bartleby is joined by “Mr. Cutlets,” who looks like a piece of meat. He extols the establishment and attempts to induce his companion to eat:

Hope you find it pleasant here, sir;—spacious grounds—cool apartments, sir—hope you’ll stay with us some time—try to make it agreeable. May Mrs. Cutlets and I have the pleasure of your company to dinner, sir, in Mrs. Cutlets’ private room? (44)

What the lawyer says in response to Mr. Cutlets after Bartleby’s death sounds almost ironic: “‘Eh!—He’s asleep, ain’t he?’ ‘With kings and counsellors,’ murmured I” (45). The narrative does not open onto messianic hope. When Bartleby dies, the “last column of some ruined temple” falls. He goes under like a “wreck in the mid Atlantic.” Bartleby’s phrase, “I would prefer not to,” defies any Christological-messianic interpretation. This “Story of Wall-Street” is not a tale of de-creation [Ent-Schöpfung], but rather a story of exhaustion [Erschöpfung]. The exclamation that ends the tale is both a lament and an indictment: “Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!”

Byung-Chul Han

Collected Works

How Gaza Has Changed Everything

Text of a speech given by Warren Balogh to a live audience in September 2024

Let me start off with a disclaimer.  I’m going to be speaking today very highly of the Palestinian people and the Palestinian cause.  And I’m aware that I’m addressing a gathering of nationalists who are strongly opposed to mass Muslim migration into Europe.  We all saw what happened in the UK a few months ago, and we all saw how the Palestinian flag was being used by the Muslims there—mostly by Pakistanis—as a symbol rallying against the St George’s Cross carried by the native English people.

We’re all sick of Muslims in Europe.  And we all support the struggle of the English people, and all our European kinsmen, against the occupation of their cities and towns by invaders from the Muslim world.  But none of this has anything to do with the struggle of the Palestinians in Gaza.

The Gazans are not all Muslim, for one thing:  Israel treats Palestinian Christians just as harshly, and Israel has blown up churches—some of the oldest on Earth—just as indiscriminately as it has destroyed hundreds of mosques.  The Palestinians also are obviously not the same people as British Pakistanis, for example, or Turks living in Germany, or North Africans living in France.

The Palestinians are mostly Levantine Arabs, and far from wanting to invade Europe, they are people who have endured the worst atrocities for decades precisely because they don’t want to leave their ancient homeland.  They don’t want to go to Europe, or even to Egypt, because they love the native soil of their forefathers—and in fact their entire national consciousness is founded on this blood-and-soil connection.

Now before I talk about what happened on October 7th of last year, let’s talk about what didn’t happen.  In the first place, October 7th wasn’t a terrorist attack.  Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is fond of comparing October 7th to 9/11.  In fact, he likes to say that Oct. 7th is the equivalent of twenty 9/11s. (I’ve never been sure whether he means the number of people killed relative to the total population, or that one Israeli life is worth 20 American lives).

But regardless, Oct. 7th was not a terrorist act—that is to say, an indiscriminate mass attack meant to kill as many civilians as possible.  Forty babies weren’t, in fact, beheaded by Hamas.  In fact, only two infants died on Oct. 7th, and it seems both of these were killed by Israel under its so-called Hannibal Directive.  There also were no mass rapes, in fact there were no rapes at all.  This lie has been debunked over and over again, so often that the New York Times actually had to issue a rare retraction, but it continues to be repeated.

October 7th was, strictly speaking, a raid—to use military terminology.  The target was a dozen or so Israeli military bases outside the fortified wall bordering Gaza.  The objective was to capture Israeli military personnel and take them, as prisoners, back to the territory controlled by Hamas, to be exchanged for the release of some of the thousands of Palestinians being held in Israeli prisons.  A large percentage of these Palestinian prisoners are held as  “administrative detainees,” which means indefinitely incarcerated without charge, but nobody ever calls them “hostages.”

The political background on this raid, why it was launched, has to do with the condition of the people living in Gaza, their status under international law, and a very specific chain of events leading up to October 7th.

The Gaza Strip is an area of about 140 square miles populated by about 2 ½ million Palestinians, mostly refugees who were ethnically cleansed from the territory carved out to form the State of Israel in 1948.  Gaza was under direct Israeli military occupation for decades after the 1967 Six-Day-War, and the Gaza Strip is still considered to be occupied by Israel under international law.  In 2005 Israel withdrew from Gaza, and in the last free election held in Gaza, the people there elected Hamas over the corrupt Palestinian Authority.

It’s important to note that Hamas, although designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. government, is no more a terrorist organization than the Nordic Resistance Movement in Sweden, a pro-White political party which runs candidates in elections and was also recently declared a terrorist organization by Antony Blinken’s State Department.  Hamas has been running the Gaza Strip as their elected government for almost 20 years:  not only governing but providing social services such as food banks, quality schools and clinics.  Hamas has a military wing, just like the United States government—and the only reason they aren’t a uniformed regular army like any other country is because the Palestinians are not allowed their own military under Israeli occupation.

When Hamas was elected, the Jews—as they are wont to do—decided they didn’t like the result of a democratic election and imposed a blockade on Gaza.  This blockade has strangled Gaza for nearly 20 years, with Israel completely controlling the free movement of people, food, clothing, medicine into and out of the territory.  This is the real reason for October 7th:  the Palestinians there have been subjected by Israel to two decades of crushing collective punishment—and after the Abraham Accords normalized relations between Israel and some of its Arab neighbors—the fate of the Palestinians in Gaza appeared to be sealed.  Their last peaceful spasm of protest was at the border during 2018-19, when thousands of Palestinian men, women and children non-violently demonstrated outside the wall surrounding Gaza in what was called the March of Return.

These protests went on for 18 months, but the world turned a blind eye as Israel not only completely ignored their pleas, but slowly and methodically subjected the protestors to terror and murder.  223 protestors were killed by Israel—including 46 children—and over 9,000 wounded in these peaceful, non-violent protests.  Israeli snipers even made a game out of shooting Palestinians in the knees, crippling them for life.  One Israeli sniper bragged that he broke the standing record for knee-shots in a single day, scoring 42 hits. …

On August 7th, after horrific new revelations of mass rape and torture at Israel’s Sde Teiman prison camp, Israeli lawmakers and TV anchors responded by publicly making arguments in favor of the systematic mass sexual abuse of prisoners.  And this week, Israeli Mossad took their diabolical ingenuity to a new level of grotesque horror, detonating thousands of personal electronic devices all over Lebanon, blowing off the fingers, faces and hands of thousands of people in civilian life.

Jews and Court Historians of World War 2 often describe the Holocaust as “the most documented genocide in history.”  These same individuals, such as Deborah Lipstadt—who was confirmed by the US Senate on March 30, 2022 as the “Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism,” with the rank of Ambassador—deny a genocide in Gaza is even taking place, even though social media such as Twitter and Telegram are awash with thousands of pictures and videos of little children blown to bits, their limbs missing, their skulls blown out, their mangled bodies dangling from their parents’ arms like rag dolls.

There is more evidence of the abominable snowman than the gas chambers at Auschwitz—Gaza is CERTAINLY the most documented genocide in all of human history—but the position of these Jews is that calling Gaza a genocide amounts to antisemitism, and that we need laws banning it.  No joke:  the U.S. government is working to adopt the IHRA so-called “Working Definition of Antisemitism,” which includes anti-Zionism, as part of American Civil Rights law, meaning that anyone who expresses or allows anti-Zionism to be expressed in schools or workplaces could be sued or criminally penalized by the Justice Department for violation of Title 6 of the Civil Rights Act.

Israel is a rogue state, flagrantly committing genocide and war crimes as a matter of course.  They’ve been able to get away with this because they enjoy the total, blanket protection of the United States and some European puppet regimes.  Carl Schmitt wrote that the Exception to the Rule is the ultimate test of political power and reveals in whom that power is vested—the Exception reveals who is truly sovereign in a given state.

…

But with even all the lies, obfuscations, denials, victim-blaming and intelligence ops, Israel and world Jewry have lost the battle of public opinion.  Even in the United States, for the first time ever, majorities of young people—including right-wing Whites—are rejecting U.S. support for Israel and, more importantly, are aware of the evil effects of Jewish power.

You see, this isn’t like the Iraq War, when the Jewish neocons were able to hide behind the Bush administration and drag America into a war against one of Israel’s regional enemies without most Americans knowing how or why.  In 2003, the great Prime Minister of Malaysia, Mahathir, said:  “the Jews rule the world by proxy, they get others to fight and die for them.”  He was right on the money, but most Americans didn’t realize it at the time.  This time, the Jews are having to rely more and more on themselves.

They’re right in the spotlight, and the whole world is seeing them for what they are:  a people without honor, a race of gangsters and murderers, an international criminal syndicate who control the hated puppet regimes of the West through bribery, blackmail, threats and extortion.  AIPAC recently spent $100 million buying off American elections, a drop in the bucket compared with the total amount in spending and earned media by Jewish billionaires and their stooges in U.S. politics, but such naked buying-off of American politicians was noted by all.  Election interference?  Add that to the list of Israel’s Great Exceptions.

Facts about the attack on the U.S.S. Liberty are becoming widely known.  The connection between Jewish billionaire donors and top politicians in the Democrat and Republican parties, including both presidential nominees, are all out in the open.  It’s very likely that President Biden’s entire re-election campaign was a casualty of the Gaza war.  Young people saw the same President who campaigned on fighting racism and hate eagerly endorsing, shielding, protecting, defending and funding the worst war crimes ever captured on video.  Scranton Joe became Genocide Joe—this will be his legacy.

His cabinet is a veritable junta of anti-White Hebrews:  Alejandro Mayorkas with his Great Replacement policies; Merrick Garland, the former Janet Reno disciple who brought Cheka-style secret police tactics and ideology to the Justice Department and the FBI; Antony Blinken as America’s top diplomat, with his open allegiance—“as a Jew”—to Israel.  Yet his Jewish advisors and allies were the first ones to toss him in the gutter when he outlived his usefulness, and this self-styled champion of “democracy” was undemocratically replaced on the ticket in what was effectively a Jewish coup.

U.S. military priorities, which were supposedly focused on Putin first, and China second, have shifted strategically in a way that also exposes the Great Exception to the world.  Zelensky, formerly the darling of Washington’s ruling elite, was left high and dry with a munitions shortage against Russia as the U.S. redirected everything to Israel so Netanyahu could keep pounding high-rises and civilian infrastructure.  In the last few months, the U.S. redirected so much support to shield Israel from possible retaliation for its terrorist attacks on its neighbors, that the South China Sea was actually left without a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier group:  both the USS Theodore Roosevelt and USS Abraham Lincoln were moved to the Middle East.

Apparently protecting Taiwan is not as important as making sure Netanyahu can keep dismembering babies.  And speaking of Netanyahu, did any of you see his recent address to the Joint Session of Congress?  After seeing that, I realized “ZOG” isn’t an epithet—it’s a descriptive term.  The worst war criminal of the 21st century got such an overwhelmingly gushing response from the bought-and-paid-for representatives of the regime, it was almost cartoonish.  Nearly five minutes of rapturous applause as he entered.  Almost 50 standing ovations in the course of his speech.  I cannot overemphasize how this kind of spectacle has undermined U.S. soft power and moral credibility in the world.  The reverberations of this will be felt for decades to come. The whole system of Western democracy is being discredited by the extreme double standard of America’s Great Exception.

Jewish power in the West is being lit up like a Christmas tree.  The nepotistic, tribalistic networks of Jewish power are being seen clearly by everyone, and they can’t be unseen.  This growing realization is being piled onto the increasing malaise throughout the West, the ever-increasing gap between what “we the people” want—and what we get after every election. In the past few years more and more people have noticed that no matter who they vote for, their lives just keep getting worse.  But now, more and more people are also noticing that no matter who they vote for, Jews stay in power.

Young people are seeing that the same Jews pushing mass non-White migration in the West in the name of tolerance and diversity, invoke the genocidal precedent of “Amalek” to justify killing the women and children of all their enemies.  Repeatedly, Jews like Alan Derschowitz have cited the Allied war crimes in World War 2, such as the firebombing of Dresden and Hamburg or the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as examples for why Israel is morally right to bomb civilians in Gaza—but all this does is draw focus to the moral illegitimacy of the Allies—and with it, of the entire postwar order.  And as outrageous Jewish lies have been repeatedly debunked about atrocity stories on October 7th… more and more people are starting to wonder what other atrocities they’ve been lying about. …

Continue reading here →

Protestors Jailed, Paedophiles Walk Free

[In this video Mark Collett, leader of the pro-White British nationalist movement, Patriotic Alternative, says:

“Anti-immigration protestors and those who posted their opinions on social media are currently being dragged from their homes and given the harshest possible sentences. Yet over the past two decades, over ten thousand paedophiles, rapists and sex offenders have walked free from court or escaped justice with a caution.”

– KATANA]

It has been a long-held belief in dissident circles that there is a conspiracy within the establishment to protect paedophiles. Well, actually it goes further; it is stated that there is a “conspiracy” to not only protect paedophiles, but to promote them, to allow them to operate in plain sight at the highest levels of state and media influence, and to ensure that the highest organs of the state provide shelter for these predators.

And this “conspiracy theory” is becoming harder and harder for the media and the government to dismiss. Mounting evidence which is now being collated on social media and even leaking out in the press all points to the fact that there is a genuine conspiracy afoot – a conspiracy to allow those who prey on the youngest and most vulnerable to walk free. But even worse, those in the very highest offices of the land, have been implicated in playing a central role in this conspiracy.

Over the last week this issue has become even more noticeable than ever before. The media has been enthusiastically reporting on the mass arrests of both those involved in anti-migrant protests, and those who have made statements on social media that go against the official state narrative on multiculturalism and mass immigration.

This draconian crackdown has led to the establishment of Soviet-style 24-hour courts where some of the harshest sentences I have ever seen are being handed down to people who merely shouted at police officers, or in some cases, were just present when others committed acts of disorder.

Those arrested have been immediately remanded in custody, and Judges have refused bail for nearly all of those accused. What’s more, even when suspects have entered guilty pleas and shown contrition, they have still been jailed immediately with sentences of 24 months or more.

A glaring example of this is the case of Steven Mailen from Hartlepool. Steven is a 54-year-old man who has no criminal record and previously served as a school governor. He is clearly a man of good character. He was sentenced to 26 months for “shouting” and “gesticulating” at police.

Now I want to make this clear, I don’t think anyone should be shouting at the police, but 26 months for someone who has never been in trouble with the law, for simply shouting and gesturing, is incredibly harsh!

And the case of Steven Mailen isn’t an outlier. Lee Joseph Dunn was jailed for eight weeks for sharing a picture of what the court described as “Asian men” with the caption, “coming to a town near you”. Memes like this have been shared far and wide by millions of people, but apparently, this is now a crime – and one that can only be dealt with by means of a custodial sentence.

Alongside these two cases, the media has enthusiastically reported that children as young as 12-years-of-age would face potential jail sentences for merely being present when disorder took place. Ask yourself this: When have you seen this response before?

How many young ethnic minority offenders have been given chance after chance when committing far more serious offences?

But whilst the press and the media were revelling in these harsh sentences, a Twitter user by the name Pagliacci the Hated was looking into the judges presiding over these hearings. And what she found was illuminating to say the least.

Many of the judges who have been enthusiastically handing down the maximum punishments possible, have previously allowed some of the most heinous sex offenders to walk free from court.

JUDGE ANDREW MENARY recently sentenced William Nelson Morgan, a 69-year-old pensioner, to 32 months in prison for refusing to move out of the way of police officers. However, Judge Menary previously let a paedophile, who collected baby rape videos, walk free from court with no jail time, because of what he cited as evidence of “good character”.

JUDGE NEIL RAFFERTY denied bail to those merely arrested for “viewing the riots remotely” – whatever that means. However, Judge Rafferty previously let a man convicted of raping his “vulnerable” niece walk free from court because the rapist was apparently “remorseful”.

JUDGE JEREMY RICHARDSON sentenced Kenzie Roughley, just 18-years-old, to 2 years in jail for kicking a CCTV van and goading police. Richardson had previously let a paedophile walk free from his court after he was found guilty of targeting a vulnerable 13-year-old girl for sexual abuse – the reason for this leniency was because Judge Richardson worried that the paedophile would “suffer comprehensibly in prison”.

This isn’t the whole thread; but I will put a link in the description below so you can see the thread in its entirety and follow the account.

But despite the great work done exposing these judges and their crooked rulings, I would wager that this is just the tip of the iceberg, and there are far more cases like this. In fact, if I made that wager, it would be the safest bet I could ever make – because it is now essentially government policy to let paedophiles walk free. And NO, this isn’t an over exaggeration.

I read this from the Daily Express, and I quote:

“Thousands of child molesters have been left roaming the streets after effectively being given a slap on the wrist for their heinous crimes. Analysis of Ministry of Justice figures shows that almost 4, 500 sex offenders have received either a community, or a suspended sentence since 2010.”

“New analysis, by Labour, shows 2,026 adults convicted were let off with community sentences and, 2,474 with suspended sentences.”

“This includes dozens who were convicted for sexual activity with a child under the age of 13.”

“Alarmingly, 291 suspended sentences were issued to sex offenders convicted of sexual assault on a child under the age of 16, or sexual activity with a child under the age of 16, in the first six months of last year.”

End quote. Sex offenders and paedophiles walking free from court in Britain is NOT an outlying oddity, it is the NORM!

And this has not only been going on for years, but there has also been an even more worrying trend of the government and the police covering up examples of serious sexual offences.

There is obviously and most notably the case of the grooming gangs. Gangs composed of largely Pakistani Muslim men who preyed mainly on young teenage White girls, many of whom were underage, and both the media, the government and the police covered up these crimes for decades, leading to over 100,000 British girls being groomed, sexually assaulted, raped, trafficked and even murdered.

I have covered this scandal numerous times before, however I will say this: In some cases, police officers were literally told to investigate other ethnic groups rather than pursue these sexual predators, in other cases, fathers of the victims were arrested when trying to free their daughters from the gangs that were abusing them.

But the cover-ups don’t stop at street level with migrant gangs – the state’s protection of paedophiles goes to the very top of our society. There are numerous examples of those in positions of influence in both the government and media, who have committed the most heinous of offences, yet the Crown Prosecution Service has refused to press charges against them.

A perfect example of this is former MP, member of the House of Lords and the founder of the Holocaust Educational Trust; Greville Janner. Janner was a prolific sex offender who sexually abused young boys in care homes over a period of five decades. 

The police and the Crown Prosecution Service repeatedly let Janner walk free and failed to prosecute him. In 2007 the CPS refused to press charges against Janner on the basis that he was suffering from “dementia”, when at the time he was still making official visits to both Parliament and the House of Lords.

And it would be impossible to discuss an issue such as this without mentioning the case of arguably Britain’s most famous and prolific sex offender; “SIR” Jimmy Savile. A man who sexually abused hundreds of people throughout his life, mostly children but some as old as 75, with most of his victims being female. Savile spent decades in the media spotlight, was a presenter of numerous BBC children’s television shows, was lauded for his charitable work and had unprecedented access to both politicians and the Monarchy.

The CPS repeatedly refused to press charges against Savile, despite mounting evidence presented by thirteen police forces which documented crimes against 450 victims. And who was the man in charge of the CPS when they refused to press charges? Well, it was none-other than our Prime Minister, “SIR” Keir Starmer, a man who earned a knight Hood from the Queen for his role as Director of Public Prosecutions.

Yes, Keir Starmer, the man now directing judges to hand down the harshest possible sentences to those who shouted at police officers, posted memes and in some cases, simply stood and watched disorder take place, is the same man who was in charge of the CPS when they refused to charge Britain’s most prolific sex offender.

Now I can’t prove that Starmer personally allowed “SIR” Jimmy Savile to escape justice, but equally, I find it hard to believe that the man in charge of the CPS would not have personally had knowledge of a case involving one of Britain’s most famous men, a case that involved thirteen separate police forces, and one where the victims numbered in the hundreds. OF COURSE HE KNEW! And I will go further, his involvement in covering up crimes like this is exactly why he received his knighthood, because he is central to the establishment’s conspiracy to protect sex offenders.

Justice in Britain no longer exists!

We live in a time when speaking out against mass immigration and multiculturalism is officially a greater crime than sexually abusing children – and this approach to so-called “justice” goes right the way up through the police force, the judiciary, the Crown Prosecution Service and reaches to the very highest tiers of government – right the way to the Prime Minister himself.

This is not a conspiracy theory! It’s a conspiracy to silence normal people, whilst at the same time ensuring protection for paedophiles.

***
Comments

All Govs are Zionist Occupied
1 month ago(edited)

Its impossible to fight an enemy who you don't even know is your enemy which is what is happening in all White nations by design. White homelands have been zionist (jewish supremacist) occupied nations for generations and 99% of the populations is clueless to this fact.

The brown invaders forced into White homelands are merely a tool for White genocide used by anti White jews. Frighteningly, a large portion of Whites dont even see the brown invaders as a threat due to the “diversity” propaganda propagated by the jews. Whites must become fiercely tribal and jew wise very soon in order to survive.

(...)

Source

Katana

Asians and Westerners Think Differently …

(...)

 In Korean, the sentence “Could you come to dinner?” requires different words for “you,” which is common in many languages, but also for “dinner,” depending on whether one was inviting a student or a professor. Such practices reflect not mere politeness or self-effacement, but rather the Eastern conviction that one is a different person when interacting with different people.

“Tell me about yourself” seems a straightforward enough question to ask of someone, but the kind of answer you get very much depends on what society you ask it in. North Americans will tell you about their personality traits (“friendly, hard-working”), role categories (“teacher,” “I work for a company that makes microchips”), and activities (“I go camping a lot”). Americans don’t condition their self-descriptions much on context. The Chinese, Japanese, and Korean self, on the other hand, very much depends on context (“I am serious at work”; “I am fun-loving with my friends”). A study asking Japanese and Americans to describe themselves either in particular contexts or without specifying a particular kind of situation showed that Japanese found it very difficult to describe themselves without specifying a particular kind of situation—at work, at home, with friends, etc. Americans, in contrast, tended to be stumped when the investigator specified a context—“I am what I am.” When describing themselves, Asians make reference to social roles (“I am Joan’s friend”) to a much greater extent than Americans do. Another study found that twice as many Japanese as American self-descriptions referred to other people (“I cook dinner with my sister”).

When North Americans are surveyed about their attributes and preferences, they characteristically overestimate their distinctiveness. On question after question, North Americans report themselves to be more unique than they really are, whereas Asians are much less likely to make this error. Westerners also prefer uniqueness in the environment and in their possessions. Social psychologists Heejung Kim and Hazel Markus asked Koreans and Americans to choose which object in a pictured array of objects they preferred. Americans chose the rarest object, whereas Koreans chose the most common object. Asked to choose a pen as a gift, Americans chose the least common color offered and East Asians the most common.

It’s revealing that the word for self-esteem in Japanese is serufu esutiimu. There is no indigenous term that captures the concept of feeling good about oneself. Westerners are more concerned with enhancing themselves in their own and others’ eyes than are Easterners. Americans are much more likely to make spontaneous favorable comments about themselves than are Japanese. When self-appraisal measures are administered to Americans and Canadians, it turns out that, like the children of Lake Wobegon, they are pretty much all above average. Asians rate themselves much lower on most dimensions, not only endorsing fewer positive statements but being more likely to insist that they have negative qualities. It’s not likely that the Asian ratings merely reflect a requirement for greater modesty than exists for North Americans. Asians are in fact under greater compunction to appear modest, but the difference in self-ratings exists even when participants think their answers are completely anonymous.

It isn’t that Asians feel badly about their own attributes. Rather, there is no strong cultural obligation to feel that they are special or unusually talented. The goal for the self in relation to society is not so much to establish superiority or uniqueness, but to achieve harmony within a network of supportive social relationships and to play one’s part in achieving collective ends. These goals require a certain amount of self-criticism—the opposite of tooting one’s own horn. If I am to fit in with the group, I must root out those aspects of myself that annoy others or make their tasks more difficult. In contrast to the Asian practice of teaching children to blend harmoniously with others, some American children go to schools in which each child gets to be a “VIP” for a day. (In my hometown a few years ago the school board actually debated whether the chief goal of the schools should be to impart knowledge or to inculcate self-esteem. I appreciated a cartoon that appeared at about the same time showing a door with the label “Esteem Room.”)

Japanese schoolchildren are taught how to practice self-criticism both in order to improve their relations with others and to become more skilled in solving problems. This stance of perfectionism through self-criticism continues throughout life. Sushi chefs and math teachers are not regarded as coming into their own until they’ve been at their jobs for a decade. Throughout their careers, in fact, Japanese teachers are observed and helped by their peers to become better at their jobs. Contrast this with the American practice of putting teachers’ college graduates into the classroom after a few months of training and then leaving them alone to succeed or not, to the good or ill fortune of a generation of students.

An experiment by Steven Heine and his colleagues captures the difference between the Western push to feel good about the self and the Asian drive for self-improvement. The experimenters asked Canadian and Japanese students to take a bogus “creativity” test and then gave the students “feedback” indicating that they had done very well or very badly. The experimenters then secretly observed how long the participants worked on a similar task. The Canadians worked longer on the task if they had succeeded; the Japanese worked longer if they failed. The Japanese weren’t being masochistic. They simply saw an opportunity for self-improvement and took it. The study has intriguing implications for skill development in both the East and West. Westerners are likely to get very good at a few things they start out doing well to begin with. Easterners seem more likely to become Jacks and Jills of all trades. 

***

IS IT LANGUAGE THAT DOES THE JOB?

Given the substantial differences in language usage between Easterners and Westerners, is it possible that it is merely language that is driving the differences in tendency to organize the world in terms of verbs vs. nouns? Are the findings about knowledge organization simply due to the fact that Western languages encourage the use of nouns, which results in categorization of objects, and Eastern languages encourage the use of verbs, with the consequence that it is relationships that are emphasized? More generally, how many of the cognitive differences documented in this book are produced by language?

There are in fact a remarkable number of parallels between the sorts of cognitive differences discussed in this book and differences between Indo-European languages and East Asian languages. The parallels are particularly striking because East Asian languages, notably Chinese and Japanese, are themselves so different in many respects, yet nevertheless share many qualities with one another that differentiate them from Indo-European languages.

In addition to the practices already discussed—pointing and naming, location of verbs in sentences, marking of nouns as generic, and so on—there are several ways in which language usage maps onto differences in category usage.

The Western concern with categories is reflected in language. “Generic” noun phrases are more common for English speakers than for Chinese speakers, perhaps because Western languages mark in a more explicit way whether a generic interpretation of an utterance is the correct one. In fact, in Chinese there is no way to tell the difference between the sentence “squirrels eat nuts” and “this squirrel is eating the nut.” Only context can provide this information. English speakers know from linguistic markers whether it is a category or an individual that is being talked about.

Greek and other Indo-European languages encourage making properties of objects into real objects in their own right—simply adding the suffix “ness” or its equivalent. The philosopher David Moser has noted that this practice may foster thinking about properties as abstract entities that can then function as theoretical explanations. Plato actually thought that these abstractions had a greater reality than the properties of objects in the physical world. This degree of theorizing about abstractions was never characteristic of Chinese philosophy.

East Asian languages are highly “contextual.” Words (or phonemes) typically have multiple meanings, so to be understood they require the context of sentences. English words are relatively distinctive and English speakers in addition are concerned to make sure that words and utterances require as little context as possible. The linguistic anthropologist Shirley Brice Heath has shown that middle-class American parents quite deliberately attempt to decontextualize language as much as possible for their children. They try to make words understandable independent of verbal context and to make utterances understandable independent of situational context. When reading to a child about a dog, the parent might ask the child what the animal is (“A doggie, that’s right”) and who has a dog (“Yes, Heather has a dog”). The word is detached from its naturally occurring context and linked to other contexts where the word has a similar meaning.

Western languages force a preoccupation with focal objects as opposed to context. English is a “subject-prominent” language. There must be a subject even in the sentence “It is raining.” Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, in contrast, are “topic-prominent” languages. Sentences have a position, typically the first position, that should be filled by the current topic: “This place, skiing is good.” This fact places an alternative interpretation on our finding that, after viewing underwater scenes, Americans start with describing an object (“There was a big fish, maybe a trout, moving off to the left”) whereas Japanese start by establishing the context (“It looked like a pond”). While not obligatory from a grammatical standpoint, an idiomatic Japanese sentence starts with context and topic rather than jumping immediately to a subject as is frequently the case in English.

For Westerners, it is the self who does the acting; for Easterners, action is something that is undertaken in concert with others or that is the consequence of the self operating in a field of forces. Languages capture this different sort of agency. Recall that there are many different words for “I” in Japanese and (formerly, at any rate) in Chinese, reflecting the relationship between self and other. So there is “I” in relation to my colleague, “I” in relation to my spouse, etc. It is difficult for Japanese to think of properties that apply to “me.” It is much easier for them to think of properties that apply to themselves in certain settings and in relation to particular people. Grammar also reflects a different sense of how action comes about. Most Western languages are “agentic” in the sense that the language conveys that the self has operated on the world: “He dropped it.” (An exception is Spanish.) Eastern languages are in general relatively nonagentic: “It fell from him,” or just “fell.”

A difference in language practice that startles both Chinese speakers and English speakers when they hear how the other group handles it concerns the proper way to ask someone whether they would like more tea to drink. In Chinese one asks “Drink more?” In English, one asks “More tea?” To Chinese speakers, it’s perfectly obvious that it’s tea that one is talking about drinking more of, so to mention tea would be redundant. To English speakers, it’s perfectly obvious that one is talking about drinking the tea, as opposed to any other activity that might be carried out with it, so it would be rather bizarre for the question to refer to drinking.

According to linguistic anthropologists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf, the differences in linguistic structure between languages are reflected in people’s habitual thinking processes. This hypothesis has moved in and out of favor among linguists and psychologists over the decades, but it is currently undergoing one of its periods of greater acceptance. Some of our evidence about language and reasoning speaks directly to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

Recall that Li-jun Ji, Zhiyong Zhang, and I examined whether language per se affects the way people categorize objects. We gave word triplets (for example, panda, monkey, banana) to Chinese and American college students and asked them to indicate which two of the three were most closely related. The Chinese students were either living in the U.S. or in China and they were tested either in English or in Chinese.

If the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is correct, then it ought to make a difference which language the bilingual Chinese are tested in. They should be more likely to prefer relationships (monkey, banana) as the basis for grouping when tested in Chinese and more likely to prefer taxonomic category (panda, monkey) when tested in English. But there are different ways of being bilingual. Psycholinguists make a distinction between what they call “coordinate” bilinguals and “compound” bilinguals. Coordinate bilinguals are people who learn a second language relatively late in life and for whom its use is confined to a limited number of contexts. Mental representations of the world supposedly can be different in one language than in the other for such people. Compound bilinguals are people for whom the second language is learned early and is used in many contexts. Mental representations for such people should be fused, since the languages are not used for different functions or used exclusively in different settings. We tested both types of bilinguals. People from China and Taiwan could be expected to be coordinate bilinguals because they typically learn English relatively late and its use is confined mostly to formal school contexts. People from Hong Kong and Singapore would be more likely to be compound bilinguals because they learn English relatively early and use it in more contexts. In addition, these societies, especially Hong Kong, are highly Westernized.

If language makes a difference to understanding of the world because different languages underlie different mental representations, we would expect to find the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis supported: The coordinate bilinguals, at least, should group words differently when tested in Chinese than when tested in English. If language makes a difference because structural features of the language compel different thinking processes, then we might expect even the compound bilinguals to group words differently when tested in Chinese than when tested in English. And, of course, if language is not important to cognitive tasks such as our grouping one, then we would expect no effect of language for either group.

The results could not have been more unequivocal. First, there were marked differences between European Americans tested in English and coordinate Chinese speakers tested in Chinese, whether in China or in the U.S. Americans were twice as likely to group on the basis of taxonomic category as on the basis of relationships. Mainland and Taiwanese Chinese tested in their native language were twice as likely to group on the basis of relationships as on the basis of taxonomic category and this was true whether they were tested in their home countries or in the U.S. Second, the language of testing did make a big difference for the mainland and Taiwanese Chinese. When tested in English, they were much less likely to group on the basis of relationships. It thus appears that English subserves a different way of representing the world than Chinese for these participants.

But matters were quite different for compound bilinguals from Hong Kong and Singapore. First, their groupings were shifted in a substantially Western direction: They were still based on relationships more than on taxonomic category, but the preference was much weaker for them than for the coordinate Chinese and Taiwanese speakers. More importantly, it made precisely no difference for the compound speakers whether they were tested in Chinese or in English.

The results are clear in their implications. There is an effect of culture on thought independent of language. We know this because both the coordinate Chinese speakers and the compound Chinese speakers group words differently from Americans regardless of language of testing. The differences between coordinate and compound speakers also indicate a culture difference independent of language. The compound speakers from Westernized regions are shifted in a Western direction—and to the same extent regardless of language of testing. There is also clearly an effect of language independent of culture—but only for the coordinate speakers from China and Taiwan. They respond very differently depending on whether they are tested in Chinese or in English.

A tentative answer to the Sapir-Whorf question as it relates to our work—and it must be very tentative because we have just been discussing a couple of studies dealing with a single kind of mental process—is that language does indeed influence thought so long as different languages are plausibly associated with different systems of representation.

So there is good evidence that for East Asians the world is seen much more in terms of relationships than it is for Westerners, who are more inclined to see the world in terms of static objects that can be grouped into categories. Child-rearing practices undoubtedly play a role in producing these very different visions. East Asian children have their attention directed toward relationships and Western children toward objects and the categories to which they belong. Language probably plays a role, at least in helping to focus attention, but probably also in stabilizing the different orientations throughout life. There appears to be nothing about the structure of language, though, that actually forces description in terms of categories versus relationships.

As we will see next, the very different approaches to understanding the world don’t stop with the organization of knowledge. The decontextualization and object emphasis favored by Westerners, and the integration and focus on relationships by Easterners, result in very different ways of making inferences.

The Geography Of Thoughth How Asians and Westerners Think Differently … and Why

RICHARD E. NISBETT

Essencing and Absencing – Living Nowhere

A good wanderer leaves no trace.1 Laozi, Daodejing

The original meanings of the German word ‘Wesen’ (Old High German wesan) [essence], interestingly, were ‘to linger in one place’, ‘stay’, ‘household matters’, ‘dwelling’ and ‘duration’. Vesta, the Roman goddess of the hearth, home and family, has the same etymological root. Essence refers to house and household, to ownership and property, to what endures and is solid. Essence is abode. The house shelters possessions and belongings. The inwardness of the house is inherent in essence. The Greek word ‘ousia’, which Aristotle uses for ‘essence’, also originally means property, estate [Anwesen] and land holdings. The concept of ‘essence’, which unites identity, duration and inwardness, dwelling, lingering and possessing, dominates occidental metaphysics. For Plato, the beautiful is the identical, the unchanging, the enduring. It is ‘itself by itself with itself, it is always one in form’.2 Plato’s Eros, who strives for divine beauty, is the son of Poros. The plural form of Poros also means intake and money. Poros, literally ‘the way’, is meant to lead to possession. This goal- directed way is fully absorbed by the intention to possess. When it does not lead to unambiguous possession, the situa-tion becomes a-poretic. Because of his father, Plato says, Eros is himself an ‘awesome hunter’.3 Power and possession animate him. Being, to him, means desire.

Essence is substance. It subsists. It is the unchanging that withstands change by persisting in itself as itself and thereby differs from everything else. The Latin verb substare, from which ‘substance’ is derived, means among other things ‘withstand’. And stare is also used in the sense of ‘to assert one-self’. On the strength of its substantiveness, on the strength of its essentiality, the one withstands the other, asserts itself. Substantiveness is steadfastness, a determination to be oneself.

Only the one who has a secure, solid foothold, who solidly stands by him- or herself, can also withstand the other. Essence is the self- same, which dwells in itself and thus delimits itself from the other. Essence or substance is characterized by a striving towards itself. The Greek notion of hypostasis means not only essence and foundation but also withstanding and steadfastness. And stasis, apart from standing, stand or stand-ing place, also means revolt, discord and strife. According to its origins, essence is therefore anything but friendly. Only what is fully determined to be itself, what solidly stands by itself, what permanently dwells in itself – that is, what has the inwardness of essence – can enter into a conf l ict, into strife with the other. Without the determination to be oneself, which is the fundamental trait of essence, no strife is possible.
Only the one who is able fully to stay within him- or herself even inside the other can have power. The figure of essence prefigures power. Because of this prefiguration, a culture, or thinking, that takes its cue from essence must necessarily develop a determination to be oneself that finds expression in the desire for power and possession.

In his Monadology, Leibniz rigorously draws out the ultimate consequences of the concept of substance.4 The ‘monad’ represents this rigorous coming to a head and completion of essence. The monad dwells wholly in itself. There is no exchange with the outside. Thus, monads ‘have no windows through which something can enter or leave’.5 This total closure corresponds to the absolute inwardness of the windowless house. The monad’s only impulse is its striving towards itself, self- affection, the affect towards itself, namely ‘appetition’. The inner life of the monad is guided simply by ‘appetite’, that is, ‘perception’.6 The monad is a ‘mirror of the universe’,7 but it does not mirror the universe by abandoning itself to the things. Rather, the monad represents or expresses the universe. The monad is not passive but active or expres-sive, that is, ex- pressing. Leibniz’s soul, as a ‘living mirror’, is a place of desiring.8 The universe is simply an object of its ‘appetition’. The monad perceives the universe because it has an appetite for it. It is this appetite alone that gives the world an independent being. Existence [Dasein] is desire. Without desire there is nothing. Thus, ‘nothing is simpler and easier than something’, than existence.9 In order to exist, a striving, an effort, is required: ‘Itaque dici potest Omne possibile Existiturire.’ [‘Thus every possible can be said to strive to exist.’]10 The verbum desiderativum ‘Existiturire’ (wanting to be) signif i es the ‘conatus ad Existentiam’ [striving towards existence]. What is present is characterized by exigency in its presencing; that is, it wants. It is the soul that animates existence to exigency. The ground of existence is exigency. The ground of being is wanting, which then, in particular in the modern age, takes the form of wanting oneself. Wanting, or even liking, itself, everything present must accomplish [erwirken] itself.

Heidegger, despite his efforts at leaving metaphysical thinking behind, and despite always seeking to get closer to Far Eastern thinking, remained a philosopher of essence, of the house and of dwelling. Although he retreated from quite a few of the intellectual patterns of metaphysics, the figure of ‘essence’ still dominated his thinking. Heidegger uses the term ‘essence’ almost excessively. The fundamental traits of essence, such as having a solid foothold, steadfast-ness, selfhood and duration, appear in various guises in his writings. Expressions like ‘steadfastness’, ‘resoluteness of self’ [Entschlossenheit zu sich], ‘constancy of self’ or ‘self- constancy’ dominate the vocabulary of his analysis of Dasein. He also connects strife and essence: ‘In essential strife . . . the opponents raise each other into the self- assertion [Selbstbehauptung] of their essences.’11

As pointed out above, the dimension of strife (stasis) inheres in particular in the Greek idea of essence as hypostasis. Both the figure of strife and that of dialogue, frequently used by Heidegger, presuppose a bearer of essence, someone who presences [einen Anwesenden], that is, a person or individual who has a stand or standpoint, who is identical with him- or herself and stays the same. Those involved must properly be presencing [eigens an- wesend sein]. According to Heidegger, love consists in helping the other achieve his or her ‘essence’: ‘Found the love! Probably the deepest interpretation of love is expressed in Augustine’s word that says “amo volo ut sis”, I love, that is, I want what I love to be what it is. Love is letting be in the deep sense in which it calls forth the essence.’12

Etymologically, the Chinese sign for being (you, 有) represents a hand that holds a piece of meat. You also means ‘having’ and ‘possessing’. However, being as exigency, as appetition, does not dominate Chinese thinking. Quite the  opposite – it is enthusiastically devoted to fasting. Daoist thinking makes use of a number of negations in order to express that, fundamentally, existence is not an exigency, not an insistence, not a dwelling. The wise man ‘wanders where there is nothing at all’ (you yu wu you, 遊於無有).13 Zhuangzi also speaks of wandering ‘in simplicity’ (you yu dan, 遊於淡).14 Laozi also uses the ‘not’ (wu, 無) for negating ‘essence’ (wu, 物). The ‘not a thing’, the non-essence (wu wu, 無物) – we can say the absencing [Abwesen] – evades all substantive determination.15 It is consistent with this fact that non-essence is associated with wandering, with not-dwelling. The wise man wanders where there is ‘no door and no house’ (wu men wu fang, 無門無房).16 He is compared to a quail that has no nest, that is, no home. He is ‘a bird in flight that leaves no trail behind’ (niao xing er wu ji, 鳥行而無跡).17 

The Daoist wandering is certainly not fully identical with the Buddhist ‘non-dwelling’ (wu zhu, 無住), but the negativity of absencing connects the two.18 The Japanese Zen master Dōgen also teaches nowhere-dwelling: ‘A Zen monk should be without fixed abode, like the clouds, and without fixed support, like water.’19 The good wanderer leaves no trace (shan xing wu zhe ji, 善行無轍跡). A trace points in a particular direction, and it points to an actor and his intention. Laozi’s wanderer, by contrast, does not pursue any intention, and he does not go to any place. He walks in the ‘directionless’ (wu fang, 無方).20 He completely fuses with the way, which does not lead to anywhere. Traces are created only in being. The fundamental topos of Far Eastern thinking is not being but the way (dao, 道). The way lacks the solidity of being and essence, which is what leads to the emergence of traces. There is no teleol-ogy to force it to follow a linear path. The dao is not a poros.

Thus, it is freed of the possibility of possession and of the impossibility of the aporetic. This difference between being and path, between dwelling and wandering, between essence [Wesen] and absencing [Abwesen], is critical, and all of its consequences must be spelled out. As opposed to being, the way does not permit any substantive closure. As it is endlessly processual, it does not allow anything to subsist, insist or persist. It therefore does not allow any fixed essences to come about. A soul insists. It consists of traces, so to speak. Absencing effaces it. In this effacing consists emptiness. Zhuangzi describes the wandering in absencing as follows:
‘Already my will is vacant and blank. I go nowhere and don’t know how far I’ve gotten. I go and come and don’t know where to stop. I’ve already been there and back, and I don’t know when the journey is done.’21

The wanderer dwells nowhere. The figure who recommends to Tian Gen – ‘Heaven’s Ground’ – who is seeking his advice, to wander in non-being, is called ‘Wu Ming’ (無 名, literally the ‘nameless’).22 A name turns you into a someone in the strong sense. The wise man, by contrast, is nameless (sheng ren wu ming, 聖人無名).23 He has ‘no self’ (wu ji, 無 己, or wu wo 無我).24 This topos of absence is to be found not only in Daoism but also in Confucius. In Lunyu it says: ‘The master was without self.’ The way the negation of the self is expressed in this case is unusual: the particle for negation, wu (毋), which always precedes a verb, here precedes the self and thereby negates it. Confucius did not self. He made nothing the content of his self.

From a certain perspective, in Chinese, being, that is, you, the hand that holds a piece of meat, is something quite prosaic. In order to exist, it seems to say, all that is needed is a piece of meat. Nurturing oneself is a prosaic act. As such, it has no exigency. It lacks the insistence of desiring. Zhuangzi even counts clothing oneself and eating among the natural virtues that human beings need to practice.25 The belly (fu, 腹) does not desire. Desiring is based on the drawing of distinctions.26 What desires is not the belly but the discriminating taste that strives for something specific (wei, 味). Laozi demands: ‘Empty the heart (xu qi xin, 虛其心), and fill the belly (shi qi fu, 實其腹). Weaken the will (ruo qi zhi, 弱其志), and strengthen the bones (qiang qi gu, 強其骨).’27

Merely to be sated and strong is certainly not a Daoist ideal. 'Belly’ and ‘bones’ are here being used in figurative senses. They are organs of indifference. Daoism does not pursue an ascetic ideal; having an empty heart does not categorically exclude having a full belly. With its determination and doggedness, asceticism is based to a large extent on desire. For this reason, Zhuangzi distances himself from ascetics and hermits. Bones are given another figurative sense in section 55 of the Daodejing, where the wise man is compared to a newborn child whose bones are ‘supple’ (ruo, 弱) and whose sinews are ‘soft’ (rou, 柔).28 The weakness of the bones and softness of the sinews are opposed to the steadfastness of the essence that withstands and resists the other. Laozi might even have said: the wise man is without bones, like water.

In section 12 of the Daodejing the belly also figures as a non-desiring, non-distinguishing organ:

The five colours turn a man’s eyes blind;
The five notes turn a man’s ears deaf;
The five tastes turn a man’s palate dull;
. . .
For this reason, The ruling of the Sage is by the belly not by the eyes.29

This statement by Laozi is reminiscent of a provocative saying of the Zen master Linji: ‘When you get hungry, eat your rice; / when you get sleepy, close your eyes. / Fools may laugh at me, / but wise men will know what I mean.’30 And in Dōgen’s Shobogenzo it says: ‘In general, in the house of the Buddhist patriarchs, [drinking] tea and [eating] meals are everyday life itself.’31

Being – and on this point, at least, Laozi would agree with Leibniz – is more exhausting than non- being. Someone who exhausts himself, who struggles, remains in the realm of being. Non-being, the subtle and wondrous (miao, 妙), reveals itself only in ‘non-struggling’ (bu qin, 不勤). Emptiness, xu (虛), absencing, turns a someone into a no one. No one is conspicuous by their absence. Zhuangzi uses not only xu but also kong (空) to signify the emptying absencing:

Bright Dazzlement [Guang Yau, literally ‘glowing light’] asked Nonexistence, ‘Sir, do you exist, or do you not exist?’ Unable to obtain any answer, Bright Dazzlement stared intently at the other’s face and form – all was vacuity and blankness [kong]. He stared all day but could see nothing, listened but could hear no sound, stretched out his hand but grasped nothing. ‘Perfect!’ exclaimed Bright Dazzlement. 'Who can reach such perfection?’32

Desire, appetition, is what makes you a someone. A someone in the strong sense has no access to wandering. A someone dwells. Only someone who empties himself and becomes a no one is able to wander. A wanderer is without an I, without a self, without a name. He forgets himself (wang ji, 忘己). He does not desire anything (wu yu, 無欲) and does not hold on to anything (wu zhi, 無執). He therefore does not leave a trace. Traces, the imprints left by holding on and desiring, form only in being. The wise man, however, does not touch being.

The Daoist teaching of xu, absencing, cannot be given a purely functional interpretation. It also elevates thinking above functional calculation. In section 15, Zhuangzi remarks: ‘Emptiness, stillness, limpidity, silence, inaction – these are the level of Heaven and earth’ (tian dan ji mo, xu wu wu wei, ci tian di zhi ping, 恬淡寂漠 虛無無為 此天地之平).33 The term ‘emptiness’, xu, in the expression xu wu (虛無) bears no functional meaning. When illustrating emptiness, the nothing and inaction, Laozi and Zhuangzi may use examples that permit a functional interpretation of emptiness or the nothing.34 But the idea of effectiveness does not represent the essence of emptiness. François Jullien nevertheless interprets it almost exclusively from a functional perspective:

This return to emptiness is stripped of all mysticism (given that nothing metaphysical is at stake). The Laozi recommends it in order to dissolve the blockages that threaten all reality as soon as no gaps remain in it and it becomes saturated. For if everything is filled, there is no room in which to operate. If emptiness is eliminated, the interplay that made it possible for the effect to be freely exercised is destroyed.35

At first sight, the story about the ghastly-looking cripple whose disability saves him from going to war, and who is instead amply supported by the state, seems to confirm the idea of efficacy. And there is certainly also a functional aspect to the anecdote about the cook who cuts up his meat so effortlessly because he follows the spaces in the joints of the cut rather than using blunt force, the meat falling apart with minimal effort. According to the functional interpretation, inaction increases the efficiency of an action. The story of the gnarled tree that grows to a ripe old age because of its uselessness also admits of a utilitarian interpretation: the absence of usefulness can be useful. However, the fact that so many cripples and so many useless things populate Zhuangzi’s stories leads functionality itself into emptiness. The role of Zhuangzi’s one-legged, hump-backed, misshaped, toeless and footless characters is to demonstrate that all worries about usefulness and efficiency are superfluous. Laozi and Zhuangzi vehemently oppose all desire to bring about effects. At first sight, sections 68 and 69 of Laozi also seem to talk about the efficacy of inaction. In section 68, for instance, he says: ‘Those good at overcoming enemies do not fight them.’36 François Jullien interprets this remark purely in terms of strategy. Instead of deploying a large amount of energy in order to bring about an effect, the wise simply let it happen. They can ‘effortlessly use the energy of others’.37 Jullien also gives section 69 a purely functional interpretation:

The Laozi then applies this principle to military strategy. A good leader in war is not ‘bellicose,’ that is – as the commentator Wang Bi understands it – he does not try to take the initiative and be aggressive. In other words, ‘he who is capable of defeating the enemy does not engage in battle with him.’38

A good military leader simply ensures that the enemy is unable to find a line of attack. Pressure is exerted on the opponent, but this pressure ‘does not manifest itself at all in a localized fashion’.39 A wise strategist sees to it that the opponent is not offered anything tangible:

The Laozi explains the situation using a set of paradoxical expressions . . . ‘marching on an expedition without there being any expedition’ or ‘rolling up one’s sleeves without there being any arms there’ or ‘pressing forward to battle without there being any enemy’ or ‘holding absent weapons fi rmly in hand’ (section 69).40

Interestingly, Jullien’s interpretation does not mention the last, decisive passage of section 69: ‘the one that grieves will win’ (ai zhe sheng, 哀者勝). Laozi’s conclusion here is very surprising. It almost compels us to interpret this paragraph in a completely different way. For ‘grief’ (ai, 哀) is not a part of any military strategy, including that of Sun Tzu, who believes in the efficacy of detours, of indirect means. The victory the passage talks about is not a real victory that would be owed to a particular military strategy. Rather, it is a victory that stands above the distinction between ‘victory’ and ‘defeat’. Laozi uses the sign for ‘grief’, ‘ai’, exactly two times. The other occurrence is in section 31.

Interestingly, this paragraph also treats of war. Jullien, however, does not mention this paragraph.
The reason he doesn’t is simple: in it, Laozi condemns all use of weapons, and not because the wise military leader must be able to defeat his enemies without weapons, but simply out of benevolence. On ‘festive occasions’, the place of honour is on the left, but at ‘funerals’ it is the right. Those who have been victorious in battle must stand on the right side. The victor has to take his place according to the customary grieving ritual (ai li, 哀禮). He has to ‘lament’ (bei, 悲), ‘grieve’ (ai, 哀) and ‘cry’ (qi, 泣).41 Both Daoist and Buddhist thought distrust any substantive closedness that subsists, closes itself off and perseveres.

With regard to absencing, understood in an active sense, the Buddhist teaching of kong (空) is certainly related to Daoist emptiness, xu (虛). Both bring about an absencing heart, empty the self into a non-self, into a no one, into someone ‘nameless’. This xu of the heart resists functional interpretation. With xu, Zhuangzi expresses primarily non- exigent being, absencing. Zhuangzi’s empty mirror differs radically from Leibniz’s mirror with a soul, because it does not possess any exigential inwardness, any ‘appetition’. It does not desire anything, does not hold on to anything. It is empty and absencing. In this way, it lets the things it mirrors come and go. It goes along, not ahead. Thus, it does not lose its way, does not violate anything:

The Perfect Man uses his mind like a mirror – going after nothing, welcoming nothing, responding but not storing . . . He is not a master (zhu, 主) of insights. He takes note of the minutest things, and yet is inexhaustible and dwells beyond the I. Down to the last thing, he receives what Heaven provides, and yet he holds it as if he held nothing.42

In section 13, Zhuangzi also uses the metaphor of the mirror:

The ten thousand things are insufficient to distract his mind – that is the reason he is still. Water that is still gives back a clear image of beard and eyebrows . . . And if water in stillness possesses such clarity, how much more must pure spirit. The sage’s mind in stillness is the mirror of Heaven and earth.43

Zen Buddhism also likes to draw on the rhetorical figure of the mirror in order to illustrate the not-holding-on of the ‘empty heart’ (wu xin, 無心):

The mirror . . . remains as it is: empty in itself . . . This is Hui-neng’s mirror; this is also Hsua-feng’s mirror . . . But what a mirroring! And what is it that is mirrored in it? There is the earth and sky; there are mountains rising and waters streaming; there is grass greening and trees growing. And in springtime, hundreds of flowers blossom . . . Is there an intention behind all this, a meaning that one could conceive? Isn’t all this simply there? . . . But only a clear mirror that is empty in itself, only someone who has realized the nullity of the world and of himself, also sees the eternal beauty in it.44

The empty mirror is based on the absence of the desiring self, on a heart that is fasting. By contrast, Fichte, the philosopher of the I and of action, scorns the empty heart:

The system of freedom satisfies my heart; the opposite system destroys and annihilates it. To stand, cold and unmoved, amid the current of events, a passive mirror of fugitive and passing phenomena, this existence is insupportable to me; I scorn and detest it. I will love: I will lose myself in sympathy; I will know the joy and the grief of life. I myself am the highest object of this sympathy.45

Originally, the German word ‘Sinn’ (sense; Middle High German: sin) also meant ‘walk’, ‘journey’ and ‘path’. But it is associated with a particular direction, a particular destination. The expression ‘Uhrzeigersinn’ (clockwise), for instance, points towards the direction in which the clock’s hand moves. The French ‘sens’ still carries the meaning of ‘direction’ or ‘side’. Wandering in non-being, by contrast, is ‘without direction’, hence ‘sense-less’ [sinn- los] or ‘empty of sense’ [sinn-entleert]. It is just this freedom from meaning, from a direction, a destination, this specific kind of emptiness of sense that makes a higher freedom, even being, possible in the first place. Being in harmony with the directionless and unlimited totality before any distinction is posited brings ‘heavenly joy’ (tian le, 天樂), ‘supreme happiness’ (zhi le, 至樂).46 Fortune (fu, 福), by contrast, rests on a distinction or preference, on a partial perception. Someone who wants to be lucky thereby exposes himself to misfortune. The aim is not to be the ‘bearer of good fortune or the initiator of bad fortune’ (bu wei fu xian, bu wei huo shi, 不為福先 不為禍始).47 The absence of sense leads not to nihilism but to a heavenly joy about being, a being without direction or trace.

Zhuangzi’s teaching of supreme happiness is the exact opposite of Kant’s theory of happiness. In his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, Kant remarks that ‘filling our time by means of methodical, progressive occupations that lead to an important and intended end . . . is the only sure means of becoming happy with one’s life and, at the same time satiated with life’.48 He compares life to a journey on which ‘the abundance of objects seen . . . produces in our memory the . . . conclusion that a vast amount of space has been covered and, consequently, that a longer period of time necessary for this purpose has also passed’, while ‘emptiness’, that is, the absence of objects to be perceived, in hindsight produces the feeling that a shorter period of time has passed.49 Thus, subjectively, emptiness shortens life. In order to become satiated with life, in order to enjoy it, no period of one’s life should be ‘empty’. Only a life that is fi lled with goal-directed actions is a happy and satisfying life. Sense is goal. Being is doing. Laozi and Zhuangzi, on the contrary, are convinced that a completely different project of Dasein, a completely different world, is possible. They juxtapose a directionless, a-teleological wandering with that linear, teleological, even vectorial design for life. Their project for Dasein does without sense and goal, without teleology and narration, without transcendence and God. In it, the absence of sense and goal is not a deprivation; rather, it means greater freedom, a more coming from less. Only through dropping the walking-towards does walking actually become possible. The world whose natural course [Gang] human beings need to follow has no narrative structure. It is therefore also resistant to the crisis of meaning [Sinnkrise], which is always a narrative crisis. The world tells neither ‘grand’ nor ‘small’ narratives. It is not a myth but nature in a particular sense. For that very reason, it is grand. All narrations are small in comparison, because every narration is based on a distinction that excludes one thing in favour of another. Narration that founds meaning is the result of a massive operation of selection and exclusion, even of a shrinking of the world. The world is pushed on to a narrow narrative path and reduced. Zhuangzi therefore teaches that one should associate oneself with the whole world, even to be as large as the world, to elevate oneself to a wide world, instead of clinging on to a small narrative, a small distinction. For that reason, his wondrous stories are often populated by gigantic figures. In fact, the very first anecdote he presents tells of a giant fish named Kun and a giant bird by the name of Peng:  

In the bald and barren north, there is a dark sea, the Lake of Heaven. In it is a fish that is several thousand li across, and no one knows how long . . . There is also a bird there . . . with a back like Mount Tai and wings like clouds fi lling the sky. He beats the whirlwind, leaps into the air, and rises up ninety thousand li, cutting through the clouds and mist, shouldering the blue sky, and then he turns his eyes south and prepares to journey to the southern darkness.50

Kun and Peng are too gigantic to fit small things; they elevate themselves above all, excluding selection and distinction. They do not care about small things; they are simply too big for that. Zhuangzi purposefully uses excessive dimensions and exaggeration in order to suspend distinctions, to achieve a de-differentiation and unbounding.

Someone who is not tied to a particular thing or place, who wanders and dwells nowhere, is beyond the possibility of loss. Someone who does not possess anything specific cannot lose anything:

You hide your boat in the ravine and your fish net in the swamp and tell yourself that they will be safe. But in the middle of the night, a strong man shoulders them and carries them off, and in your stupidity, you don’t know why it happened. You think you do right to hide little things in big ones, and yet they get away from you. But if you were to hide the world in the world, so that nothing could get away, this would be the final reality of the constancy of things.51

In this passage, Zhuangzi talks about a special relationship to the world. The demand is to un-bound and de-differentiate the being-in-the-world into a being-world. As long as it is smaller than the world, as long as it draws distinctions within the world, the human being, or, to speak with Heidegger, Dasein, will be affected by care. To free itself of care, it must be the entire world, must de-differentiate itself into the world, instead of clinging on to a particular element of the world or distinction. Being-in-the-world is being afflicted by care. Being-world, by contrast, is free of care.

Of course, postmodern thinkers also oppose ideas of substance and identity. Derrida’s ‘différance’ and Deleuze’s ‘rhizome’ radically question substantive closure and closedness, exposing them as imagined constructions. The negativity of these thinkers brings them close to absencing and emptiness, but the idea, typical of Far Eastern thinking, of a world-like totality, of the weight of the world, is alien to them, as it is to all postmodern thought. In Far Eastern thinking, emptiness or absencing ultimately has a collecting or gathering effect, whereas ‘différance’ or ‘rhizome’ cause an intense form of dispersal. They disperse identity, push diversity. Their care is not a care for the totality, for its harmony and accord. The Far Eastern thinking of emptiness leaves deconstruction behind in order to achieve a special kind of reconstruction.

Far Eastern thinking turns completely towards immanence. The dao, for instance, does not represent some monumental, supernatural or super- sensual entity that can only be talked about in negative terms, as in negative theol-ogy; it does not flee from immanence in favour of something transcendent. The dao merges fully with worldly immanence, with the ‘this- is- how- it- is’ of things, with the here and now. In the Far Eastern imagination, there is nothing outside the immanence of the world. It is not because it is too high that the dao escapes definition or direct naming; it is because it flows, because it meanders, so to speak. It signifies the permanent transformation of things, the procedural nature of the world. The wanderer leaves no trace behind because he remains in step with the wandering of things. The dao is also not a ‘lord’ over things, not a subject (zhu, 主).52 It does not retreat into secrecy. It is characterized by immanence and the natural evidence of the ‘this- is- how- it- is’. Laozi therefore emphasizes that his words are ‘most easy to understand’ (shen yi zhi, 甚易 知) and ‘most easy to practice’ (shen yi xing, 甚易行).53

The fact that the wanderer leaves no trace behind also has a temporal significance. He does not insist or persist. Rather, he exists in the actual. As he ‘moves in the directionless’, he does not walk along a linear, historical time that stretches into past and future.54 The care that Heidegger gives the status of being the fundamental trait of human existence is tied to this stretched-out, historical time. The wanderer does not exist historically. Thus, he is ‘without care’ (bu si lu, 不 思盧) and ‘does not ponder or scheme, does not plot for the future’ (bu yu mou, 不豫謀).55 The sage exists neither looking backwards nor forwards. Rather, he lives in the present. He dwells in every present, but the present does not have the sharpness or determinacy of the momentous. The moment is tied to the vigour and determination of doing. The sage exists situationally. This situationality, however, differs from Heidegger’s ‘situation’, which is based on the determination inherent in actions and on the moment. In Heidegger’s situation, Dasein resolutely takes hold of itself. This situation is the supreme moment of presence. The wanderer dwells in every instant, but he does not linger, because in lingering the focus is too much on objects. The wanderer leaves no trace because he dwells without lingering.

Zhuangzi’s famous story of the ‘butterfly dream’ is therefore suffused with an atmosphere of absence. He imagines a form of Dasein that lacks all solidity, definiteness, all exigential determinacy and finality. The story illustrates a Dasein without ‘care’:

Once Zhuang Zhou dreamed he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn’t know he was Zhuang Zhou. Suddenly he woke up, and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuang Zhou. But he didn’t know if he were Zhuang Zhou who had dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuang Zhou.56

Oblivious to his self, Zhuangzi hovers between himself and all else. He abandons himself to a specific kind of indifference. This hovering is opposed to that steadfastness that represents the fundamental trait of essencing. Steadfastness makes it possible for someone to dwell within himself, cling on to himself, and thus to withstand the other and distinguish himself from the other. Absencing, by contrast, spreads across Dasein something dream-like and hovering, because it makes it impossible to give an unambiguous, final, that is, substantial, contour to things. Zhuangzi would respond to the concept of the individual, that is, the indivisible, by saying that he is infinitely dividable, infinitely transformable. Zhuangzi’s dream is a dream without soul, a dream that is not made up of traces. No one dreams. His dream is an absolute dream, because the world is itself a dream. The dream is therefore beyond the reach of theories of the soul, psychology or psychoanalysis. The dreaming subject is neither ‘ego’ nor ‘id’. The world itself dreams. The world is a dream. Absencing maintains everything in a dream-like hovering.

It is only with the influence of Buddhism that Chinese culture begins to develop a deep sensitivity for the transience and fleetingness of being. Buddhism is ultimately a religion of absence, of fading out and blowing away, a religion of ‘dwelling nowhere’.57 The Chinese culture and art of blandness would be inconceivable without Buddhism.58 The Chinese aesthetics of blandness is animated in particular by a sensitivity for the painful charm of transience. The poets of blandness mainly sing of the tender shine of the transient. The Japanese wandering monk Bashō begins the diary of his travels with words from the Chinese poet Li Bo:59

Heaven and earth – the whole cosmos – is just a guest house;
it hosts all beings together.
Sun and moon are also just guests in it, passing guests in eternal times.
Life in this fl eeting world is like a dream.
Who knows how many more times we are going to laugh?
Our ancestors therefore lit candles in praise of the night.60

Absencing does not allow for the taking of sides. Any preference for one side would disadvantage the other. Any inclination implies disinclination. Instead, the aim is to ‘embrace the ten thousand things universally’ (jian huai wan wu, 兼懷萬物).61 Love and friendship presuppose making distinctions and taking sides. They rest on appetition. For these reasons, the sage ‘has no love for men’ (bu wei ai ren, 不為愛人) and has ‘no more likes’ (qin, 親), that is, does not cultivate friendships.62 Love is something insisting, and friendship creates ties. The sage is not, however, completely detached. Disinterestedness presupposes a coherent subject who could have interests but for whom the world has become unimportant. Absencing does not empty love and friendship and make them irrelevant. It turns them into bound-less friendliness. This friendliness consists in embracing everything with complete impartiality.

Kafka’s story ‘The Cares of a Family Man’ reads like one of Zhuangzi’s wondrous tales. The ‘creature called Odradek’.is really an absencing.63 This strange creature, whose shape is that of a ‘flat star-shaped spool for thread’, is so multi-form that it evades any unambiguous definition of an essence. The name already deflies unambiguity: ‘Some say the word Odradek is of Slavonian origin, and try to account for it on that basis. Others again believe it to be of German origin, only influenced by Slavonic. The uncertainty of both inter-pretations allows one to assume with justice that neither is accurate, especially as neither of them provides an intelligent meaning of the word.’ In addition, Odradek is a motley combination of parts that appear to differ in their essence. Leibniz’s monads, as ‘simple substances’ (substance simple), by contrast, have ‘no parts’ (sans parties).64 Like Plato’s beauty, a monad is ‘always one in form’ (monoeides).65 Odradek is an absencing, even a non-essence [Ab-, ja ein Un- Wesen], in the sense that he is composed of the most heterogeneous parts. His appearance is hybrid, as if he wanted to mock the unambiguity of essences:

At first glance it looks like a flat star-shaped spool for thread, and indeed it does seem to have thread wound upon it; to be sure, they are only old, broken-off bits of thread, knotted and tangled together, of the most varied sorts and colors. But it is not only a spool, for a small wooden crossbar sticks out of the middle of the star, and another small rod is joined to that at a right angle. By means of this latter rod on one side and one of the points of the star on the other, the whole thing can stand upright as if on two legs.

His ‘diminutive’ figure also evokes the impression of an absencing. Because of his diminutiveness, it is impossible to get hold of him. He is ‘extraordinarily nimble and can never be laid hold of’. He lacks any of the solidity of an essence. His extreme nimbleness is opposed to the tenacity of essences. He also seems to be absent because he often retreats into muteness. Occasionally, he laughs, but his laughter sounds oddly bodyless and empty. This strengthens the impression of absencing: ‘it is only the kind of laughter that has no lungs behind it. It sounds rather like the rustling of fallen leaves.’

Odradek could easily join the circle of hump-backed, one-legged, footless or toeless figures and other strange, useless creatures that populate Zhuangzi’s anecdotes. Zhuangzi’s gnarled tree reaches a ripe old age because it is useless. Similarly, Odradek appears to transcend usefulness: ‘Can he possibly die? Anything that dies has had some kind of aim in life, some kind of activity, which has worn out; but that does not apply to Odradek.’ Odradek is also absencing because he never lingers in one place. He lives nowhere. He is a counter-figure to the inwardness of the home. Asked ‘And where do you live?’ his habitual answer is ‘No fixed abode’. Even when he is inside a house, he can usually be found only in places that are devoid of inwardness, such as ‘the garret, the stairway, the lobbies, the entrance hall’. He is thus not fully at home, not fully with himself. He seems to avoid closed rooms. Often he is simply absent: ‘Often for months on end he is not to be seen.’ This absence, this non-dwelling, unsettles the ‘family man’ who takes care of the house. The ‘care of the family man’ is about the absence of Odradek. We may even say that the family man is care itself. Odradek, who is free of any cares, is his opposite. It is clear, however, that Odradek is ultimately not one of Zhuangzi’s creations, because despite his long absences, which trouble the family man so much, Odradek, as Kafka writes, ‘always comes faithfully back to our house again’.

1 Transl. note: There are several translations of this sentence. I follow the suggestion by Stefan Stenudd on https://www.taois tic.com/fake- laotzu-quotes/fake-laotzu- quote- A_good_travel er.htm. Alternative translations include: ‘The good traveller leaves no cart rut’, in Laozi, Daodejing (chapter 27), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 57.
2 Plato, Symposium (211b), in Complete Works, Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1997, pp. 457–505; here: p. 493.
3 Ibid., p. 486 (203d).
4 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, The Principles of Philosophy, or, Monadology, in Philosophical Essays, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989, pp. 213–25.
5 Ibid., § 7, p. 214.
6 Ibid., § 15, p. 215.
7 Ibid., § 63, p. 221.
8 Ibid., § 56, p. 220.
9 Ibid., § 7, p. 210.

10 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Die philosophischen Schriften, Vol. 7, Berlin: Weidmann, 1890, p. 289. [The English translation follows Martin Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003, p. 50.] 11 Martin Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, in Off the Beaten Track, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 26.
12 Martin Heidegger, ‘Ansprache zum 80. Geburtstag Ludwig von Fickers’, in Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 16, Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2000, pp. 563–4; here: p. 563.
13 Zhuangzi, The Complete Works of Zhuangzi, New York: Columbia University Press, 2013, p. 57.
14 As well as meaning ‘simple’, the Chinese sign ‘dan’ can mean ‘non- desiring’ or ‘indifferent’. It could thus also be translated as ‘absent’. Then the translation of ‘you xin yu dan [遊心於淡]’ would be ‘let the heart wander in absence’. Zhuangzi, Complete Works, p. 56.
15 Laozi, Daodejing, p.  31: ‘She is called “the shape without a shape”, “the image of what is not a thing”.’ 16 Zhuangzi, Complete Works, p. 182: ‘I go nowhere and don’t know how far I’ve gotten.’ 17 Ibid., p. 87.
18 François Jullien mostly excludes Buddhism from his view of China. According to him, Indian thinking, out of which Buddhism developed, is ‘metaphysical’, and thus follows his controversial claim that it is fundamentally different from Chinese thinking. Buddhist emptiness, ‘kong’, he holds, is the ‘non- existence’ that is part of the ‘metaphysics’ of ‘being and non- being’, whereas Daoist emptiness, ‘xu’, is that functional openness that allows the full development of an effect. Jullien’s views on Buddhism are surprisingly sweeping and one-sided. His talk about an ‘Indo- European’ metaphysics in connection with Buddhist emptiness is dubious. The ‘philosophy of emptiness’ of the Indian philosopher Nagarjuna, who was influenced by Mahayana Buddhism, certainly is anti-metaphysical. It turns any metaphysical assumption into emptiness. As is well known, Buddha himself refused to engage with genuinely metaphysical questions such as those about the creation of the world or the immortality of the soul. In this regard, he resembles Confucius, who is said to have refused to undertake any investigation into what is hidden. Interestingly, Jullien, while keeping Buddhist thinking out of his China, draws on European thinkers such as Plotinus, Augustine and Kant – all of whom were inf l uenced by Christianity – and uses them as the antagonists of his Chinese thinkers. But the origins of Christianity, after all, are not ‘Greek’ or ‘Indo- European’. How, then, are we to understand Europe without Christianity?
19 Dōgen, Shōbōgenzō zuimonki: Unterweisungen zum wahren Buddha-Weg, Heidelberg: Werner Kristkeitz, 1997, p.  168. [The English edition does not contain this exact wording. But see e.g. Dōgen, Shōbōgenzō zuimonki, Vol. 1, Moraga, CA: BDK, 2007: ‘We have already left our families and left our hometowns; we rely on clouds and rely on waters’ (pp. 59f.) The annotation to this sentence says: ‘In China and Japan monks are commonly referred to as unsui, which means “clouds and water”’ (p. 63).] 20 Zhuangzi, Complete Works, p. 82.
21 Ibid., pp. 182f.
22 Ibid., pp. 56f. [The English translation uses the term ‘Nameless Man’.] 23 Ibid., p. 3. [The English edition translates this as ‘no self’.] 24 Ibid.
25 See ibid., pp.  65f.: ‘The people have their constant inborn nature. To weave for their clothing, to till for their food – that is the Virtue they share.’
26 In section 55 of the Daodejing, Laozi uses a rather explicit image to illustrate pure vitality without desire. He talks about the penis (zu) being aroused without any knowledge of the difference between the sexes. A direct translation of this image has often been avoided. Richard Wilhelm, a Christian missionary, translates the passage thus: ‘It [i.e. the child] does not yet know anything about man and woman, and yet its blood moves.’ (Laozi, Tao te king: Das Buch vom Sinn und Leben, Munich: Anaconda, p. 67.) [The edition used here has a straightforward translation: ‘He does not yet know the har-mony of female and male yet his penis is aroused’ (p. 115). It adds the following explanatory note: ‘most versions have yang and some interpretations read this as the male infant’s penis. In the Mawangdui version the character used clearly refers to the male sexual organ. It should be noted that the Chinese term specif i cally refers to the sexual organ of an infant’ (p. 180).]
27 Laozi, Daodejing, p. 9: ‘The government of the Sage is thus: He empties his mind, fills his belly; / Weakens his will, strengthens his bones.’
28 Ibid., p. 115.
29 Ibid., p. 27.
30 Lin-Chi, The Teachings of Zen Master Lin-Chi, Boston:
Shambala, 1993, p. 77.
31 Dōgen, Shōbōgenzō zuimonki, Vol. 3, Moraga, CA: BDK, 2008, p. 293.
32 Zhuangzi, Complete Works, p. 185.
33 Ibid., p. 98. [The German version begins ‘Ruhe, Gelassenheit, Abwesenheit, Leere und Nicht- Tun’, literally: ‘Calmness, serenity, absence, emptiness and inaction’.] 34 Famous examples are the wheel and vessels:

Thirty spokes held in one hub;
– In beingless [Nichts] (wu, not xu) lies the cartwheel’s usefulness;
Moulding clay into pots;
– In beingless lies the pot’s usefulness;
Chiselling doors and windows to make a room;
– In beingless lies the room’s usefulness;
Therefore, Possess something to make it prof i t you;
Take it as nothing to make it useful for you. (Laozi, Daodejing, p. 25)

35 François Jullien, Treatise on Eff i cacy: Between Western and Chinese Thinking, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004, p. 112.
36 Laozi, Daodejing, p. 141.
37 Jullien, Treatise on Eff i cacy, p. 116.
38 Ibid., p. 174.
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid.
41 See Laozi, Daodejing, p. 65. Jullien’s strong focus on effects and eff i cacy may itself be of ‘European’ origin.
42 Zhuangzi, Complete Works, p. 59. [The passage following the ellipsis is not part of the English edition.] 43 Ibid., p. 98.
44 Bi-yan-lu, Meister Yuän-wu’s Niederschrift von der Smaragdenen Felswand, Munich: Hanser, 1964, p. 145. [The passage is not contained in the English edition: The Blue Cliff Record [Bi-yan-lu], compiled by Ch’ung- hsien and commented upon by K’o- ch’in, trans. Thomas Cleary, Berkeley: Numata Center for Buddhist Translation and Research, 1998.] In this context, too, François Jullien tries to keep Buddhism away from Chinese thought. In Zhuangzi, he says, the mirror escapes ‘mystical employment and is understood in an entirely different way’: ‘The virtue of the mirror is that it accepts but does not hold; it ref l ects everything it encounters but allows things to pass by without clinging to them. It does not reject or retain. It allows things to appear and disappear without clinging to them.’ (François Jullien, Vital Nourishment: Departing from Happiness, New York: Zone Books, 2007, pp. 117f.) This description of the Daoist mirror is a good characterization of the mirror used in Zen Buddhism to illustrate the ‘empty heart’ (wu xin). Jullien does not explain the sense in which Zen Buddhism is ‘mystical’, the sense in which it is closer to Western mysticism than to Daoism. Let us remind ourselves of the famous words of the Zen Master Linji, quoted above (see note 30): ‘When you get hungry, eat your rice; / when you get sleepy, close your eyes. / Fools may laugh at me, / but wise men will know what I mean.’ In other words, the Zen Buddhist sage also takes care of the ‘belly’, and the ‘belly’ is probably not an organ of ‘mysticism’.

45 Johann Gottlieb Fichte, The Vocation of Man, Chicago: The Open Court Publishing Company, 1931, p. 32.
46 Zhuangzi, Complete Works, p. 99 and p. 139.
47 Ibid., p. 120.
48 Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, p. 130 (transl. mod.).
49 Ibid.
50 Zhuangzi, Complete Works, p. 2.
51 Ibid., p. 45.
52 Laozi, Daodejing, p. 71.
53 Ibid., p. 145.
54 Zhuangzi, Complete Works, p. 82.
55 Ibid., p. 120.
56 Ibid., p. 18.

57 See Byung- Chul Han, The Philosophy of Zen Buddhism, Cambridge: Polity, 2022, Chapter 4: ‘Dwelling Nowhere’, pp. 58–68.

58 François Jullien may want to keep Buddhism away from his China, but his description of Chinese blandness is deeply Buddhist: ‘Its [i.e. blandness’s] season is late autumn, when chrysanthemum petals are falling, touched by frost: the last colors of the year are fading, an erasing that happens on its own, in simpler withdrawal.’ (François Jullien, In Praise of Blandness: Proceeding from Chinese Thought and Aesthetics, New York: Zone Books, 2004, p.  94.) The painful charm of the falling chrysanthemum petals, the grace of disappearance, is not really typical of Daoism. Jullien even uses terms such as ‘l’absence’ and ‘l’abondon’, which, according to his image of China, are not ‘indigenous’ to its culture: ‘As usual, it is autumn. The atmosphere, introduced with this evocation of  purity . . . swells with the feeling of absence. All tangible signs gesture toward their own relinquishing.’ Ibid., p. 114.
59 Like many poets of blandness, Li Bo lived in the time of the Tang Dynasty, during which Buddhism fl ourished.
60 Transl. note: Translated from the German version in Matsuo Bashō, Auf schmalen Pfaden durchs Hinterland, Mainz: Dieterich’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 2011, p. 42.
61 Zhuangzi, Complete Works, p. 132.
62 Ibid., p. 53.
63 All quotations from Kafka’s story: Franz Kafka, ‘The Cares of a Family Man’, in Collected Stories, London: Everyman, 1993, pp. 183–5.
64 Leibniz, The Principles of Philosophy, or, Monadology, in Philosophical Essays, pp. 213–25; here: p. 213.
65 Plato, Symposium, in Complete Works, pp.  457–505; here: p. 493 (211b).

Byung-Chul Han Absence On the Culture and Philosophy of the Far East Translated by Daniel Steuer