All is Well / 都挺好

This was mentioned in an earlier journal, but I finally got hooked enough to continue to the 4th episode and beyond. It’s just plain old good TV. The pacing is good, the set design and camerawork is better than any other drama I’ve seen (especially the restaurant scenes), and the plot is compelling. There’s no English subs, so it’s a good way to keep up on Chinese. Luckily my proficiency is such that I can fully understand the plot and understand most of the words without any trouble.

All is Well is a Chinese drama about a family that loses a mother. The two brothers of the family are favored by the controlling mother and pushover father, and the only daughter is overlooked and not given as good of treatment. For example, they sold her room as she was in the middle of important studies, and would not allocate her money for study material.

The first major conflict is the relationship between the father and daughter, and then to where the elderly father would stay. At first he stays with the younger brother, but this causes household problems exhibited by him overboiling zhou and risking a fire, using the wife’s towel, having a bunch of friends over that make a mess and smell up the house with cigarettes, and not flushing the toilet. I’m finding the father cute and bumbling, but I’ve been told by other fans that I’ll probably find him more sinister.

The daughter, Su Mingyu, is my current Chinese Drama Waifu #1. I’ll live vicariously through the hunk cook that she’ll be developing a love interest with.

It takes place in Suzhou, which is the city I’ve visited most in China besides Nanjing and Shanghai. The opening theme is Suzhou folk music (苏州弹词) played with a Pipa, which is nostalgic to the time that I sat in at one of those performances with some friends from a hostel at a teahouse, eating sunflower seeds and drinking tea.

Overall, it feels like a Dream of Red Chamber for the 21st century in that it accurately and vividly portrays contemporary Chinese society in food, ritual, and family dynamics, and covers contemporary problems. It’s obviously not equivalent or even shining a light on that novel but is eliciting familiar feelings.

Introduction to Chinese Philosophy

I’m getting the equivalent of a “PHIL 300: Chinese Philosophy” class by reading this textbook, tracking down the source passages on ctext, and taking a look at the Classical Chinese original text. I’m on the 10th chapter out of 12, and I’ll need to find another textbook to keep me busy after it.

Chapter 10: Xunzi’s Confucian Naturalism

Xunzi is a Confucian philosopher that lived towards the end of the Warring States period and beginning of the Qin. His major thought is that human nature is by nature bad, and that goodness takes deliberate effort. Xunzi sees righteousness as an artificial construct, invented by the sages to meet the human need for society. Mengzi would see righteousness as an expression of our innate but developing virtuous inclinations.

He’s also a lover of music, opposed to the Mohists. Something interesting I found was this passage:

… music observes a single standard in order to fix its harmony, it brings together different instruments in order to ornament its rhythm, and it combines their playing in order to achieve a beautiful pattern. It is sufficient to lead people in a single, unified way, and is sufficient to bring order to the myriad changes within them.

This immediately brought to mind the role of music in public transportation: The kind of music that would play during busy periods in the subway station in Nanjing, how music would indicate the car was coming to the terminal station, or how Japanese subway stations have unique melodies.

Questions:

What is “naturalism”? Why would we say that Xunzi cannot be a naturalist? What is an important commitment that Xunzi shares with naturalism?

• It’s the metaphysical view that all that exists is reducible to entities studied by natural science.
• The author claims that Xunzi could not be a naturalist since he lived before the development of natural sciences.
• However, he does claim that nature is not goal oriented or that the universe has an intentional goal. There’s no use appealing to omens or spiritual entities to explain phenomena and rejects teleology, unlike Mengzi. (荀子天伦第十一章)

Consider a ritual in which we leave out offerings of food and drink for the spirits of our ancestors. How would Xunzi say a gentleman should understand this ritual?

• It gives things “proper form.”
• “When the feelings that come to him stir him greatly but are deprived of an outlet and stopped, then with regard to the refined expression of remembrance he will feel anguished and unsatisfied, and his practice of ritual and proper regulation will be lacking and incomplete. And so, the former kings accordingly established a proper form for it, and thereby was set what is righteous in venerating those esteemed and loving those intimate. Thus I say: The sacrificial rites are the refined expression of remembrance and longing.”" - 荀子礼论第三十二章

Explain how Xunzi uses a state-of-nature argument to justify rituals and standards of righteousness.

• Humans have desires, and when they do not reach their desires they will struggle and create chaos. The former kings would create rituals as a means of nurture. (荀子礼论第一章)

How does Xunzi disagree with the Mohist version of the state-of-nature argument? Specifically, how do the two versions make different assumptions about innate human motivations, and how does this lead them to different conclusions?

• The Mohist version is similar in that they believed primordial civilization to be chaotic due to a spectrum of morals and conceptions of righteousness.
• The disagreement is that the chaos comes from self-interest rather than varying conceptions of righteousness and morals. Because the objects of desire are limited, there will be conflict.
• Xunzi argues that since humans are innately self-interested, they must be shaped by ritual.

Xunzi compares the actions of the sages to those of craftspeople. How does this comparison suggest that there can be a “right” Way even though it is not part of human nature?

• Like Zhuangzi, Xunzi uses the analogy of a craftsman. In this case, the analogy is more focused on the tool. Much like the transition from flint to bronze helped hunt animals, rituals make it easier to order society.
• There is a reliance on “heavenly patterns” to order society like there is a pattern in the corpse of an ox being cut by a butcher. This knowledge accumulated over time and eventually found an “ideal form”

Xunzi writes, “By ritual, the stars move orderly across the skies.” Why does this seem to conflict with Xunzi’s craftperson metaphor? How might we reconcile the two?

• Xunzi rejected teleology in 荀子天伦, but suggests that ritual governs heavenly/cosmological elements in 荀子礼论.
• This could be reconciled in that rituals are invented and invented on the basis of these patterns.

Explain the difference between desire and approval. Why is approval important in self-cultivation?

• Desires are an innate craving, while approval is kind of evaluation based on the Dao.
• Because Xunzi (opposed to Mengzi) believes that human nature is innately not righteous, he argues we should cultivate goodnness to override those base desires.

According to Xunzi, what is it that distinguishes humans from other animals?

• The capacity to deliberate and have distinctions/divisions.

What is the difference between Xunzi’s view that human nature is bad and Augustine’s view that human nature is evil?

• Xunzi would not say that human nature is evil. Xunzi would say that following our base desires would lead to wrong, while Augustine would say that humans sometimes desire to do evil for evil’s sake.

What is the difference between Xunzi’s definition of human nature and that assumed by Mengzi? Why might this difference lead us to think that Xunzi and Mengzi do not really disagree? Why might we still think that they do disagree?

• He argues that if human nature were good, it would not be something we could cultivate or get better at. Mengzi however would state that humans have an active potential to be good, not that they are good already. It comes down to a difference in meaning in “human nature”
• However Xunzi says that we have tenancies towards virtue.

Use the example of wood to illustrate the difference between Xunzi’s conception of ethical cultivation and that of Mengzi.

• Xunzi says that being in accordance with the Dao is like bending wood into a wheel.
• Mengzi when arguing with Gaozi says that one shouldn’t do violence to warp our nature.

Paraphrase the ladder of souls passage.

• The ladder of souls is like Aristotle’s structure of souls and explains the progressive difference between fire, plants, animals, and humans. Only humans have standards of righteousness. 荀子王制第十九章

Xunzi notes that, of creatures “that have awareness, none does not love its kind.” Why does this seem to commit Xunzi to a position on human nature much like that of Mengzi? How might the passage be interpreted to preserve the disagreement between them?

• This would mean that it is a distinctive human feature to love ones own kind.
• It could be interpreted that humans have much more to learn and act upon about love before they can fit into society.

In the “Robber Zhi” dialogue the term wei is translated as “artificial,” while in the Xunzi it is rendered “deliberate effort.” How do these differing translations reflect the different attitudes of the two works toward transforming human nature?

• Xunzi would say that it takes effort to train oneself to find righteousness profitable.

Things I’m Liking

• Grassland: An open source mirror of the real world by turning video feeds into a public record of the world.

Misc

I would love to get a handle on Anki and use it for general purpose spaced repetition. I’ve been reading gwern’s article about it.