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

The greatest geographical secret after the discovery of America

 Prologue

No unexplored region in our times, neither the heights of the Himalayas, the Antarctic wastes, nor even the hidden side of the moon, has excited quite the same fascination as the mystery of the sources of the Nile. For 2,000 years at least the problem was debated and remained unsolved; every expedition that was sent up the river from Egypt returned defeated. By the middle of the nineteenth century — barely a hundred years ago — this matter had become, in Harry Johnston’s phrase, ‘the greatest geographical secret after the discovery of America’.

The scope of this book is limited to the years between 1856 and 1900, and so we need do no more here than mention very briefly the early history of the river. Almost certainly the ancient Egyptians knew the Nile valley from the Mediterranean as far as the present city of Khartoum, where the Blue Nile comes in from the Ethiopian mountains. Probably they knew something of the Blue Nile as well. But the further course of the parent stream, the White Nile, south of Khartoum, remained a matter of endless speculation, and it interested every distinguished geographer of his age.

This was something more than an ordinary field of exploration. In these deserts the river was life itself. Had it failed to flow, even for one season, then all Egypt perished. Not to know where the stream came from, not to have any sort of guarantee that it would continue — this was to live in a state of insecurity where only fatalism of superstition could reassure the mind.

But there is no record of the river’s ever having failed. The great brown flood came pouring out of the desert for ever, and no one could explain why it was that it should rise and flow over its banks in the Nile Delta in September, the driest and hottest time of the year on the Mediterranean littoral; nor how it was possible for the river to continue in its lower reaches for well over 1,000 miles through one of the most frightful of all deserts without receiving a single tributary and hardly a drop of rain.

About 460 B.C. Herodotus ascended the Nile as far as the first cataract at Assuan before turning back, having found it quite impossible to obtain definite information about the source of the river. There existed merely a vague notion that it arose from ‘fountains’ somewhere in the interior of Africa. The Emperor Nero sent two centurions with an expedition into the wastes of Nubia, as the Sudan was then called, but they returned unsuccessful, saying that they had been blocked in the far interior by an unpenetrable swamp. Through the centuries that followed China became known to Europe, America and Australia were discovered, and the land masses and the oceans of the world were mapped and charted very much as they are today. But still, in 1856, the centre of Africa and its inner mystery, the source of the White Nile, remained almost as much an enigma as it was in the time of Herodotus.

James Bruce traced the course of the shorter Blue Nile from its source to Khartoum in the 1770s, but by 1856 even the most determined of explorers on the White Nile had not been able to get beyond the neighbourhood of the present township of Juba, on latitude 5 degrees north. At that point they were still nowhere near the source of the river. Cataracts, vast forests of papyrus reeds, malarial fever, the fierce tropical heat, the opposition of the pagan tribes — all these combined to prevent any further progress south. By now that impenetrable blank space in the centre of the continent had become filled in imagination with a thousand monstrosities, dwarf men and cannibals with tails, animals as strange as the fabulous griffin and the salamander, huge inland seas, and mountains so high they defied all nature by bearing on their crests, in this equatorial heat, a mantle of perpetual snow.

There was at least a little tenuous evidence to support some of these speculations. One of the most persistent legends about the source of the Nile concerned itself with a journey that had not been made upon the river at all, but overland, from the east coast of Africa a little to the north of Zanzibar. According to this legend a man named Diogenes, a Greek merchant, claimed that in the middle of the first century A.D. he was returning home from a visit to India and had landed on the African mainland at a place called Rhapta (which might have been the site of the present settlement of Pangani in Tanganyika). From Rhapta, Diogenes said, he had ‘travelled inland for a 25-days’ journey and arrived in the vicinity of two great lakes, and the snowy range of mountains whence the Nile draws its twin sources’.

This, at all events, is the story as it was recorded at the time by the Syrian geographer Marinus of Tyre, and it was from the records of Marinus that Ptolemy, the greatest of geographers and astronomers of his time, produced in the middle of the second century A.D. his celebrated map. It shows the course of the Nile reaching directly southward from the Mediterranean to the Equator, and the river is made to arise from two round lakes. The lakes in turn are watered from a high range of mountains, the Lunae Montes, the Mountains of the Moon.

For 1,700 years Ptolemy’s map remained a geographical curiosity, endlessly disputed yet seldom absolutely discredited. But then in 1848 Johann Rebmann, one of the earliest missionaries in East Africa, came forward with a sensational report that he himself, like the ancient Diogenes, had journeyed inland from the East African coast and had seen a vast mountain called Kilimanjaro with snow on its summit. This story was immediately ridiculed in London by a certain Desborough Cooley, a member of the Royal Geographical Society, who protested that it was impossible for snow to remain unmelted on the Equator; what Rebmann had seen was the sun shining on white rock. In the following year, however, another missionary, Johann Ludwig Krapf, claimed that he had seen from a distance a second snow-capped peak, Mount Kenya, somewhat to the north of Kilimanjaro. Still another missionary, J. J. Erhardt, produced a map which showed a large inland lake which he called the ‘Sea of Uniamesi’. By the early 1850s there was other evidence as well that led to a renewal of interest in Ptolemy’s map: the Arab slave and ivory traders, returning to Zanzibar from the far interior, spoke of two great lakes there, one the Ujiji and the other the Nyanza. In addition there were reports of a third lake, the Nyasa, farther to the south.

All this was extremely vague and confusing. Were all these lakes in reality one lake? Were Kilimanjaro and Kenya the legendary Mountains of the Moon, or was there another range farther inland? And how did both lakes and mountains fit into the supposed pattern of the Nile?

It was in order to find the answer to these questions that two explorers, Richard Francis Burton and John Hanning Speke, set off for Africa in 1856. They rejected the route that followed the Nile upstream from Egypt, and decided instead to strike westward from Zanzibar into the dark interior where no white men had ever been before.

With this new expedition the great age of Central African exploration began.

***

The Vales of Paradise

THERE ARE no written records of Uganda — the territory that Speke now proposed to enter — before the middle of the nineteenth century. Sir John Gray describes its history as being like ‘a crime to which there have been no eye-witnesses’. It seems certain, however, that at some point in the unrecorded past a superior race of cattle-owning men came south from the Ethiopian highlands, and these people set themselves up as a ruling aristocracy among the Negroes on the northern and western borders of Lake Victoria. By 1860 three separate kingdoms were established, Bunyoro in the north, Buganda in the centre, and Karagwe to the south, on the western shore of the lake. Many other tribal formations existed as well, but these three little states had a certain coherency in the midst of a wilderness of utter barbarity; they formed, as it were, a tiny capsule of semi-civilization in the centre of the continent, and the outside world knew hardly anything at all about them.

A single Arab trader named Ahmed bin Ibrahim had penetrated into Buganda in the 1840s, and a few others had reached Karagwe, but that was all: no white man had ever been there, no notion of other worlds and other ways of life disturbed the inhabitants. They could scarcely have been more isolated had they been living on the surface of the moon.

Normally in Central Africa it was the fate of such people to remain in a state of arrested development. In a mysterious way the light of human ambition was extinguished, the villages stayed chained to the Stone Age, and from century to century life revolved in an endless ant-like cycle of crude customs and traditions. There was no curiosity to explore, no desire for change or improvement. Every new generation gave way to the same passive fatalistic acceptance of things as they were, and reason was suffocated by habit and superstition.

But with these three puppet kingdoms it was not like this at all; they advanced marvellously. Without any precedent to guide them or any outside help they had achieved by the middle of the nineteenth century a native culture which was well in advance of any other south of the Sahara. And yet the extraordinary thing about these people is not that they should have got so far but that their progress should have been so irregular. They did well in one direction only to fail completely in another, they left enormous gaps behind them, and the most barbarous customs survived in the midst of an exceptional sophistication.

Their houses, for example, had nothing in common with the dull coffin-shaped contraptions of Tanganyika; they were large, beautifully made conical structures of tightly woven canes and reeds that often soared fifty feet into the air. These dwellings were dry and comfortable in the rain and cool in the hot seasons, and they were infinitely more attractive than any building that has been erected in Uganda in the twentieth century. The musical instruments of the tribesmen — their drums, harps, and trumpets — were equally remarkable, and they travelled on the lake in immense canoes, some of them seventy feet in length.

Their basketware was so finely woven it would hold water, and they had discovered the art of making a soft and durable cloth from the bark of trees. No man attended the court of his king unclothed: in fact, in Buganda it was a criminal offence to do so; he wore sandals on his feet, his body was completely covered by a long and graceful toga, and sometimes this was surmounted by a cape of antelope skins which had been pieced together with the skill of a Parisian seamstress.

Neither men nor women disfigured their bodies with scars or tattoos like the other Central African tribes, and when they sat down to eat they washed their hands, either by squeezing a wet napkin or by pouring water over them from a jug. Domestic slaves, who were treated as part of the household like Russian serfs, served the meal, and the food was distinctly civilized: a kind of gruel made from coarse bananas, fish and meat stews, chickens, sweet potatoes, maize, and wild sugarcane. Coffee beans were chewed as a digestive and they brewed their beer from bananas. Both men and women smoked.

In Buganda especially, the richest and most progressive of the three states, the power of the king was absolute, but he was advised by a group of counsellors who formed a kind of cabinet in which each man had some special duty. Thus there was the vizier or prime minister, the treasurer, the commander-in-chief of the army and the admiral of the fleet of war-canoes on the lake, the chief executioner, and others with more picturesque titles such as the chief brewer and the keeper of the drums. These men, together with the provincial chiefs, formed a hierarchy of nobles, and they were obliged to be in constant attendance on the king in his court. Here the etiquette was elaborate. No man could sit down in the king’s presence, be incorrectly dressed, or speak without permission. Whenever the king appeared it was customary for the courtiers to abase themselves on the ground before him, since he was considered to be almost divine, or at all events the personification of the spirit of the race.

And yet, with all this sophistication and refinement, these people had no method of writing or counting, no means of measuring the passage of time by weeks or months or years, no mechanical contrivances even as simple as the plough or the wheel, no religion that amounted to more than the most primitive kind of superstition and witchcraft. They gave way to their passions and their appetites like spoiled and delinquent children and they were unbelievably cruel. From time to time they seem to have been seized with a wild and frantic hysteria, and it was common practice for both men and women to drink themselves into a drunken stupor.

There were strong differences between the three kingdoms, and perhaps these differences were conditioned by the geographical nature of the country. Bunyoro, to the north, is drier and harsher than the land around the shores of Lake Victoria. For months at a time no rain falls and one travels for miles through a dry hard scrub which is not unlike Central Tanganyika. The people here have a reputation for toughness and resilience; they are less sophisticated than the lakeside inhabitants, but more warlike and aggressive. These qualities were certainly reflected in their King, Kamrasi. He was a man who was both harsh and suspicious, a chieftain with the instincts of a pirate, and the absorbing hatred of his life was directed partly against Buganda in the south, and partly against a rebellious brother called Rionga, who lived on an island in the Nile.

Karagwe, on the western side of the lake, is more open country, much of it 5,000 feet above sea-level, and there is a remarkable freshness and clarity in the landscape. A century ago large herds of cattle grazed across the sweeping grassy plains, and along the shores of the lake itself there are scenes that remind one of the downs in southern England: high, sharp cliffs fall sheer into the water, and except for the heat, the emptiness of land, and the tropical islands off-shore this might be Folkestone or Dover. At one time this was fine country for wild animals: thousands of elephants, giraffes, buffaloes, antelopes, and rhinoceroses roamed about, and even now, by night, one can watch the hippopotamuses come ashore from the lake to browse like dark lumbering ghosts on the water’s edge.

Here, at a place called Bweranyange, Rumanika, the King of Karagwe, kept his little provincial court. He was a large and friendly man who had the reputation of being hospitable to strangers. Being by some way the weakest of the three kings, Rumanika took care to remain on good terms with the rulers of Bunyoro and Buganda. He sent them gifts from time to time and even acknowledged himself to be a vassal or at any rate a dependant of Buganda. Yet Rumanika had his eccentricities. He kept an extraordinary harem of wives who were so fat they could not stand upright, and instead grovelled like seals about the floors of their huts. Their diet was an uninterrupted flow of milk that was sucked from a gourd through a straw, and if the young girls resisted this treatment they were force-fed like the pâté de foie gras ducks of Strasbourg: a man stood over them with a whip.

Buganda, on the northern shore of the lake, has neither the dryness of Bunyoro nor the horizons of Karagwe; it is a region of jungles and broken hills and it is as lush and exuberant as Zanzibar. The climate is hot, changeable, and damp, and all things spring from the earth in a blaze of exotic colour. The earth itself is red, the plantations of bananas make avenues that are filled with a warm greenish-yellowish light, and the surrounding jungle is a vast aviary filled with tropical birds and flowering shrubs. These conditions create an impression of intimacy, of quickness and liveliness, and of a kind of luxurious excitement, and that is the nature of the Baganda.

In 1860 Mutesa, the young king of Buganda, had only recently got his grip upon the throne and had established his capital a few miles inland from the lake on a hilltop which is not far from the modern city of Kampala. The traveller came into the town on a broad earthen road cut through the jungle and saw, scattered about the hillsides, a settlement of gracefully proportioned round huts with crowds of people moving about between them. The women for the most part went naked or wore a short cloth around their waists, but the men in their togas reminded one, Harry Johnston1 says, of saints — they ‘recalled irresistibly the conventional pictures of evangelical piety which represented the Blessed walking in the vales of Paradise’.Mutesa’s court was a compound of especially spacious huts in the centre of the town, and here he held his daily levées, sitting upon a platform of grass covered with a red blanket, and surrounded by his nobles, his pages, and his wives, who numbered a couple of hundred or so. At this time he was a slim, well-built young man in his early twenties with beautiful teeth and liquid, but rather striking eyes. His tonsured hair was built up like a cockscomb on his head, his toga was neatly knotted over one shoulder, and on his arms and legs he wore broad bands of coloured beads. At his feet were his symbols of royalty, a spear, a shield, and a white dog. When he went walking the whole court followed, and he affected an extraordinary stiff-legged strut which was meant to imitate the gait of a lion. In the manner of Queen Victoria he did not look round when he chose to sit down; a chair was automatically placed in readiness for him, except that in his case it was a page crouching on his hands and knees. When he chose to speak the courtiers listened in a strained and respectful silence and then, in a body, threw themselves on to the ground, uttering over and over again a curious cry that sounded like ‘n’yanzig’, and was meant to indicate both gratitude and the deepest humility. Mutesa, in short, was a very impressive figure, even at this early stage of his long career, and there might even have been a certain dignity about him had it not been for the fact that he was very far from being a saint in the vales of Paradise; he was a savage and bloodthirsty monster.

Hardly a day went by without some victim being executed at his command, and this was done wilfully, casually, almost as a kind of game. A girl would commit some breach of etiquette by talking too loudly, a page would neglect to close or open a door, and at once, at a sign from Mutesa, they would be taken away, screaming, to have their heads lopped off. A roll of drums obliterated the cries of the death-throes. Nothing that W. S. Gilbert was about to invent with his Lord High Executioner in The Mikado, nothing in the behaviour of the raving Red Queen in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, was more fantastic than the scenes that occurred whenever Mutesa held a court, the only difference being that here these scenes were hideously and monstrously real. Torture by burning alive, the mutilation of victims by cutting off their hands, ears, and feet, the burial of living wives with their dead husbands — all these things were taken as a matter of course. This was more than a simple blood-lust: Mutesa crushed out life in the same way as a child will step on an insect, never for an instant thinking of the consequences, or experiencing a moment’s pity for the pain he was inflicting. He felt no pain, except his own. He, and all the people about him at his court, give the impression of playing at life, of living with an air of mad make-believe.

To be fair, it has to be recorded that it was not Mutesa himself who had invented these practices; all his ancestors (and there is known to have been a line of at least a score of kings behind him) behaved in exactly the same way, and a similar law of the jungle prevailed in all the minor tribal groups. Unless the ruler surrounded himself with an atmosphere of dread and superstitious awe he did not stay very long on his throne. Mutesa, on becoming king, had instantly put to death some sixty of his brothers by burning them alive, and this was apparently regarded as a perfectly normal precaution against rebellion.

Then too, he had other attributes besides this inherited bloodthirstiness. He was very far from being stupid: once he had seized power he had very quickly learned the arts of playing one man off against another by the careful bestowal of gifts. He knew all about the value of keeping his petitioners waiting, and he seems to have had some skill in making political appointments. One can easily see him as a sort of pantomime figure — the tribal king surrounded by his drums, his naked wives, and his black warriors — but in fact, as events were shortly to show, he was a great deal more than this. In this savage world he had the appearance and the manner of royalty, and an instinctive knowledge of politics. His foreign policy, for example, was handled with a certain crude dexterity: he left Rumanika alone in Karagwe and made war on Kamrasi in Bunyoro. It was of course not very serious war — this was still a world in which there were no firearms and still no Arab slavers to set one tribe against another — but it was a useful means of obtaining cattle and women, and Kamrasi, at least, was kept at bay.

This, then, was the strange little island of native civilization that had been left undisturbed to work out its own destiny in the heart of Central Africa a hundred years ago. It would naturally be absurd to suggest that there was any real enlightenment here; the three puppet kingdoms were still bound to a primeval way of life, and fear was the dominant factor in every man’s mind. On the other hand, these people were still insulated from the abuses of civilization: there was no syphilis or small-pox, no rinderpest to kill their cattle. Mutesa’s cruelties did not touch the general run of the people; they had plenty to eat and drink, and it seems not impossible that they believed themselves to be happy, or at any rate involved in an existence which was inevitable and eternal, and which they did not want to change. Only the barest echoes of other things reached them from the outside world — of the slavers coming up the Nile from Egypt and the Arab caravans from Zanzibar. Perhaps it really was a Garden of Eden of a kind, savage but fatalistic; at all events, it was still intact when Speke and his new companion, Grant, marched into Karagwe at the end of 1861, and with this the capsule was destined to burst at last.

The two explorers had taken over a year to get inland from Zanzibar, and most of the experiences of the previous expedition had been faithfully repeated; all their men save a few like Bombay and Mabruki had deserted, the local chieftains on the way had ferociously demanded their hongo, their goats and cattle had been stolen, and Grant had gone down with malaria. They had even failed as yet to catch a glimpse of Lake Victoria. Burton, who was now leading a separate expedition in the Cameroons on the other side of Africa, must have smiled had he heard the news. But now at last in November 1861 Speke and Grant extracted themselves from the local tribal wars to the north of Tabora and marched on into the terra incognita of Karagwe.

In Grant Speke had found an ideal companion. The two men were of the same age and had been friends in India, where they had often gone on shooting excursions together. But Grant had another quality: he was the perfect lieutenant. He must surely be rated as the most modest and self-effacing man who ever entered the turmoil of African exploration; he never puts himself forward, he never complains, never questions any order of his leader. Burton would have found him a paragon. Grant’s devotion, however, was entirely fixed upon Speke, and it was almost doglike in its completeness. ‘Not a shade of jealousy or distrust or even ill-temper,’ he says, ‘ever came between us.’ Speke he describes as ‘above every littleness’. General Gordon, whose judgements about people were often rash, thought that Grant himself was something of a bore,2 and just possibly he was a little dull as a conversationalist. Dullness seems to be the last thing we ever hear about well-known people in the past. Yet it would be foolish to regard Grant as a colourless nonentity. He was a cool and very steady man, a soldier and a sportsman well out of the ordinary, and in his own private and modest way he was a competent artist and a genuine amateur of botany. He had fought in a number of engagements that led up to the Mutiny in India, and had taken part in the relief of Lucknow where he had been awarded a medal and a clasp for gallantry.Rumanika was delighted to meet the two white men, the first he had ever seen. He shook hands warmly, addressed them in good Swahili, and established them in his best huts with an abundant supply of provisions. Speke had a pleasant month at Bweranyange. He exchanged presents with Rumanika, drank his pombe, and with a tape measure ascertained the dimensions of his fat wives. He did great execution among the rhinoceroses with his gun, and made notes about even more formidable animals which, he was told, inhabited the jungles farther to the west: ‘monsters who could not converse with men and never showed themselves unless they saw women pass by; then, in voluptuous excitement, they squeezed them to death’. If this was meant to be a description of a gorilla, one of the most timid and gentle of animals, it is not accurate. But then hardly any of the things they were seeing and hearing in this new land were very credible. Rumanika, for example, warned Speke that he must not proceed into Buganda until Mutesa sent for him, and that it would be impossible for him to appear at Mutesa’s court wearing his unmentionables (Speke in his account uses this Victorian word for trousers); he would have to obtain a gown. And so messengers were sent off to warn Mutesa of the expedition’s approach and while they waited the month of December slipped by.

Grant meanwhile was having a very bad time. He was assailed by a dreadful sore in his leg, and presently the infection became so agonizingly painful he was unable to stir from his hut. Certainly he was in no condition to walk or even to be carried when, on 8 January 1862, a troop of messengers arrived from Mutesa bearing with them an invitation for the expedition to proceed. It was therefore decided that he should remain behind in Rumanika’s care while Speke went forward alone. For the next three months Grant remained a prisoner in his hut, unable to go out, often in agony and without news of any kind.

It took Speke six weeks to walk to Mutesa’s court, and in the course of the journey he at last came within sight of Lake Victoria opposite the Sesse Islands. More than ever now he felt that his original conjecture had been correct: the lake was a vast inland sea and somewhere on its northern shore he would find its outlet to the north — the fountains of the Nile. For the moment, however, he was forced to put his geographical work aside and prepare himself for his reception by Mutesa.

He tells us that on his arrival he unpacked his best suit, dressed his men in red blankets, and with a handsome collection of gifts got ready to present himself at the palace. But rain fell and in the best manner of royal garden parties the reception was put off until the following day. On 20 February 1862 he set forth again flanked by his red-blanketed bodyguard, with the Union Jack leading the way, only to find himself out-faced by a rival delegation which was given precedence; Speke was told to wait in the hot sun outside the palace. He stood it for five minutes and then in a fury turned round and walked back to his own hut a mile away. The courtiers who were conducting him to the King watched his retirement with consternation — evidently such a thing had never happened before — and presently they came running to say that it was all a mistake; the King would see him at once and he would be allowed to bring his own chair to sit on, an unheard-of privilege.

When Speke got back to the palace all was ready for his reception. A band playing five-stringed harps and trumpets ushered him through the outer courts where small pages were rushing around gathering their cloaks about them so as not to show their legs; and finally he came into the presence of the monarch himself. Speke set up his chair in front of the throne, erected his umbrella and waited events. Nothing happened. For an hour the two men sat gazing at one another, Mutesa occasionally turning to his courtiers to pass a remark on the umbrella, on the bodyguard, or on Speke himself. From time to time a draught of beer was handed to him. Speke simply sat and waited.

At length a man approached with a message: had he seen the King?

‘Yes,’ Speke answered, ‘for full one hour.’

When this was translated to Mutesa he rose and walked away into the interior of his palace on the tips of his toes in his imitation of a lion. There now ensued a long wait while the King ate his dinner: as an act of courtesy, it was explained to Speke, Mutesa had refrained from eating until the meeting had taken place. Finally, at the end of the day, when they met again by the light of torches, Speke offered his presents; several rifles and guns together with ammunition, a gold watch, a telescope, an iron chair, beads, silk cloths and knives, spoons and forks. Mutesa in return sent him a gift of cattle, goats, fish, fowls, porcupines, and rats, all of which apparently were regarded as suitable items of diet.

It was at a further interview that the notorious shooting incident took place. Speke was invited to display the magic of his pistols by taking a pot-shot at four cows, a feat he accomplished a little awkwardly: one of the cows, charging upon him, required a second bullet before it was dispatched.

The king [Speke says] now loaded one of the carbines I had given him with his own hands, and giving it full-cock to a page told him to go out and shoot a man in the outer court: which was no sooner accomplished than the little urchin returned to announce his success, with a look of glee such as one would see in the face of a boy who had robbed a bird’s nest, caught a trout, or done any other boyish trick. The king said to him, ‘And did you do it well?’ ‘Oh yes, capitally.’ He spoke the truth, no doubt, for he dared not have trifled with the king: but the affair created hardly any interest. I never heard, and there appeared no curiosity to know, what individual human being the urchin had deprived of life.

Nothing would keep Mutesa away from his new toys after this. On fine days he would march round his capital, gun in hand, his wives, pages, and courtiers following behind and the band playing; and if by luck he managed to hit a vulture on a tree he would be thunderstruck by his own magical powers, and would run forward to the fallen victim crying out ‘woh, woh, woh’ in infantile excitement. The court, grovelling and ‘n’yanizgging’, would fall upon the ground around him.

The women who followed Mutesa about in hordes wherever he went appeared to occupy a privileged position, but it was slavery none the less. ‘Young virgins . . .’ Speke wrote, ‘stark naked, and smeared with grease, but holding for decency’s sake a small square of mbugu (bark cloth) at the upper comers in both hands before them, are presented by their fathers in propitiation for some offence and to fill the harem.’ From time to time one of these girls would be sent to Speke as a gift, and he parcelled them out as wives among his followers.

The Queen-Mother, however, whom Speke describes as ‘fair, fat and forty-five’, was a figure of some power in the state and kept her separate court at a little distance from Mutesa’s palace. She was not often sober. Drinking, smoking, and dancing to the music of her personal band were the usual occupations of the Queen-Mother’s hut, and it was not surprising that she complained to Speke that she was suffering from bad dreams and illness of the stomach. He dosed her from his medicine chest and advised her to give up drinking. But she was not a good patient. Returning to her hut one day Speke found himself involved in an orgy which ended in the Queen-Mother and her attendants drinking like swine on all fours from a trough of beer.

After Speke had been for three months in the bizarre surroundings Grant finally arrived. He was still limping from the effects of the sore in his leg but otherwise restored to health, and now both men were eager to push on towards their goal. On their separate journeys from Karagwe they had crossed a considerable river, the Kagera, but since it flowed into Lake Victoria and not out of it they dismissed it as a possible source of the Nile. At Mutesa’s court, however, they heard very definite reports of another stream that emerged from the lake only a short distance to the east. The lake was said to pour itself out in a wide fall of water towards the north. Speke, who had never been permitted to leave Mutesa’s capital in all his three months’ stay, was now determined to make his way to this spot and then follow the river downstream wherever it might lead.

Mutesa was much opposed to their going. It amused him to have the two white men at his court and he was not altogether sure that he had extracted every possible gift from them. Then, too, they were bound to enter the territory of Kamrasi, the King of Bunyoro, when they went away, and with Kamrasi he was at war. For another six weeks he prevaricated and delayed, and then at last on 7 July 1862 he let them go. The two explorers with Bombay and their caravan and a Buganda bodyguard marched out to the east. They were on the eve of the climax of their tremendous journey.

And now occurred one of the strangest incidents of the whole adventure. Their guide had led them somewhat north of the lake, and in order to reach the Nile and trace it to its source it was necessary for the caravan to turn sharply south. A conference was held, and as a result it was decided that the expedition should split once more: Speke alone was to go to the source while Grant turned north and opened up the way to Kamrasi’s court in Bunyoro. One can only take the two men’s word for it that they were entirely agreed upon this arrangement. From Grant we have no hint of reproach or disappointment. He had staked his life on getting to this goal, and now at the last minute, when it was within his reach, he quietly turned away from it in order to please his companion. Grant merely says that he was invited by Speke to make a flying march to the source and was forced to decline since his bad leg made it quite impossible to manage twenty miles a day. In any case, he goes on, this was not a great issue; they had seen the lake and they knew that the Nile issued from it. Just why it was necessary for Speke to dash off at the rate of twenty miles a day is not explained; but then there is so much between these two that cannot be understood unless one constantly remembers Grant’s utter devotion to his leader. As with a marriage, a veil falls down between this partnership and the outside world, and no one can presume to know the intricacies of their relationship. Behaviour that might seem to us to be unfair and heartless is to them, apparently, perfectly natural. Speke, of course, was a man with an idée fixe; his whole being was centred upon proving that his theory of the Nile was the right one, and no doubt he was now in a state of intense impatience to get to his objective. To have hung about waiting for Grant to keep up with him — and this at a time when some accident or mischance could still wreck the expedition — was intolerable. Grant presumably felt this strongly, and with an almost feminine resignation gave way; better to stand in the reflection of Speke’s glory than to strain their friendship too much.

At all events, Speke went off with his flying column and reached the Nile on 21 July 1862 at a place called Urondogani about forty miles downstream from the lake: ‘Here at last I stood on the brink of the Nile; most beautiful was the scene, nothing could surpass it! It was the very perfection of the kind of effect aimed at in a highly developed park: with a magnificent stream, 600 to 700 yards wide, dotted with islets and rocks. . . .’ The crocodiles, the high grassy banks, the hippopotamuses, the herds of hartebeest — it was everything they had imagined, and Speke in his exaltation told his men that ‘they ought to shave their heads and bathe in the holy river, the cradle of Moses. . . .’ Bombay soberly replied that, being Mohammedans, ‘we don’t look on these things in the same fanciful manner as you do: we are contented with the commonplaces of life. . . .’

They were keen enough, however, when they marched upstream and came within sight of their goal at last on 28 July; all forgot their fatigue and rushed forward along the river bank. A hill blocked their view of the lake but there, at their feet, the great stream poured itself like a breaking tidal wave over a waterfall. ‘It was a sight that attracted one for hours,’ Speke says, ‘ — the roar of the waters, the thousands of passenger-fish leaping at the falls with all their might; the Wasoga and Waganda fishermen coming out in boats and taking post on all the rocks with rod and hook, hippopotami and crocodiles lying sleepily on the water. . . .’

He named the place the Ripon Falls ‘after the nobleman who presided over the Royal Geographical Society when my expedition was got up’.

It now remained for the explorers to keep themselves alive until they could get back to civilization to tell the story, and there was still no guarantee whatever that they would succeed. (...)

THE WHITE NILE

Alan Moorehead