Read an interesting book on the topic. “Many practices which are considered traditional are in fact quite recent inventions, often deliberately constructed to serve particular ideological ends.”
August 20, 2009
August 18, 2006
L’existentialisme est un humanisme
Nous entendons par existentialisme une doctrine qui rend la vie humaine possible et qui, par ailleurs, déclare que toute vérité et toute action impliquent un milieu et une subjectivité humaine. Le reproche essentiel qu’on nous fait, on le sait, c’est de mettre l’accent sur le mauvais côté de la vie humaine.
Jean-Paul Sartre
August 8, 2006
Boris Vian, citations aléatoires (random citations)
Le plus clair de mon temps, je le passe à l’obscurcir. (I spend my clearest time blurring it away.)
J’ai le fâcheux travers de ne me satisfaire que de l’ultime. Aussi comprendrez-vous que je sois toujours mécontent. (I have the annoying characteristic of being satisfied only by the ultimate. You must understand how discontended I always am.)
Personellement dans mes classements, j’ai toujours un tiroir étiqueté “choses inclassables ailleurs”. Tiroir qui est extrêmement commode. Il y a beaucoup de choses dedans et c’est souvent parmi les choses les plus amusantes, justement parce que ce sont les choses exceptionnelles et, comme tout bon pataphysicien, ce qui m’intrésse c’est l’exception, le cas général pouvant être considéré comme une exception non exceptionnelle et par conséquent sans aucun intérêt. (In my categorization of things, I always have one drawer labeled “other inclassifiable things”. That drawer is very convenient. There are many things in that drawer, and they are often some of the most amusing things, exactly because they are exceptional things, and like any good pataphysician, what interests me is the exception, the general case being and unexceptional exception and therefore without any interest.)
Il est beaucoup moins indécent de coucher ensemble que de se regarder dans les yeux. (It is much less indecent to sleep together that to look each other in the eyes.)
Pour qu’il y ait passion, c’est-à-dire réaction explosive, il faut que l’union soit brutale, que l’un des corps soit très avide de ce dont il est privé et que l’autre possède en très grande quantité. (For there to be passion, that is to say explosive reaction, the union has to be brutal, that one of the bodies is very keen on that which is private and the other possesses is great quantities.)
Chez une femme, la beauté est signe de modestie. (In a woman, beauty is a sign of modesty.)
Pourquoi les chanteuses jolies sont-elles toujours mariées au saxo-ténor de l’orchestre? Et est-ce pour ca que tout le monde joue du saxo-ténor? (Why are the pretty singers always married with the sax-tenor of the orchestra? And is this the reason why everyone plays the sax-tenor?)
Les femmes compliquent la vie des hommes pour obliger ceux-ci à la simplifier et entretenir en eux la flamme créatrice. (Women complicate the lives of men in order to have them simplify it, and to maintain in themselves the creative flame.)
Quant à être galant… si on admet l’égalité de l’homme et de la femme, la politesse suffit et l’on n’a pas de raison de traiter une femme plus politement qu’un homme. (As of being gentlemanly… if we admit to equality of man and woman, politeness is enough and we have no reason to treat a woman more politely than a man.)
Ce qui compte, ce n’est pas le bonheur de tout le monde, c’est le bonheur de chacun. (What counts is not the happiness of everyone, it is be happiness of each one.)
On se rappelle beucoup mieux les bons moments; alors, à quoi servent les mauvais? (One recalls much better the good moments; so what are the bad ones for?)
On passe sa vie à romancer les motifs et à simplifier les faits. (One passes one’s life romanticizing the motives and simplifying the facts.)
March 14, 2006
Oldest extant philosophy
Text borrowed from Stanford University. Please pardon me for the moment. Planning to gather some relevant intercontinental philosophical texts here.
Plus links to Laozi resources
Chinese Ancient Texts Database http://www.chant.org
National Digital Library of China http://www.nlc.gov.cn
One version of Laozi Daodejing 唐 易 州 龍 興 觀 道 德 經 碑 本 http://ef.cdpa.nsysu.edu.tw/ccw/01/lg0.htm
Searchable database of Laozi and other ancient texts http://210.69.170.100/s25/index.htm
Impressive collection of Laozi originals and translations http://home.pages.at/onkellotus/TTK/_IndexTTK.html
A Laozi database project http://www.aai.uni-hamburg.de/MPC/datab.html
Very interesting Chinese text reading interface, not only for Laozi http://zhongwen.com/dao.htm
Another Laozi text online http://www.cnd.org/Classics/Philosophers/Lao_Zi/
Guodian bamboo slip Laozi online http://bamboo.lib.cuhk.edu.hk/
Guoxue http://www.guoxue.com/
www.chinaknowledge.de/Literature/Daoists/daojia.html
Until recently, the Mawangdui manuscripts have held the pride of place as the oldest extant manuscripts of the Laozi. In late 1993, the excavation of a tomb (identified as M1) in Guodian, Jingmen city, Hubei province, has yielded among other things some 800 bamboo slips, of which 730 are inscribed, containing over 13,000 characters. Some of these, amounting to about 2,000 characters, match the Laozi (see Allan and Williams 2000, and Henricks 2000). The tomb is located near the old capital of the state of Chu and is dated around 300 B.C.E. Robbers entered the tomb before it was excavated, although the extent of the damage is uncertain. The bamboo texts, written in a Chu script, have been transcribed into standard Chinese and published under the title Guodian Chumu zhujian (Beijing: Wenwu, 1998), which on the basis of the size and shape of the slips, calligraphy, and other factors divides the Laozi material into three groups. Group A contains thirty-nine bamboo slips, which correspond in whole or in part to the following chapters of the present text: 19, 66, 46, 30, 15, 64, 37, 63, 2, 32, 25, 5, 16, 64, 56, 57, 55, 44, 40 and 9. Groups B and C are smaller, with eighteen (chs. 59, 48, 20, 13, 41, 52, 45, 54) and fourteen slips (chs. 17, 18, 35, 31, 64), respectively.
On the whole, the Guodian “bamboo-slip Laozi” is consistent with the received text, although the placement or sequence of the chapters is different and there are numerous variant and/or archaic characters. Particularly, whereas chapter 19 of the current Laozi contains what appears to be a strong attack on Confucian ideals — “Cut off benevolence (ren), discard rightness (yi)” — the Guodian “A” text directs its readers to “cut off artificiality, discard deceit.” This has been taken to suggest that in the course of its transmission, the Laozi has taken on a more “polemical” outlook. However, the Guodian “C” text indicates that ren and yi arose only after the “Great Dao” had gone into decline, which agrees with chapter 18 of the current Laozi.
It is not clear whether the Guodian bamboo manuscripts were copied from one source and were meant to be read as one text divided into three parts, whether they were “selections” from a longer original, or whether they were three different texts copied from different sources at different times. The “A” and “C” texts give two different versions of what is now part of chapter 64 of the Laozi, which may suggest different sources. One scholar at least has suggested a chronology to the making of the Guodian Laozi bamboo slips, with the “A” group being the oldest of the three, copied around 400 B.C.E. (Ding 2000, 7-9). It is possible that the Guodian texts only furnished some of the textual “raw material” or “building blocks” that were used later to create the Laozi (Boltz 1999). In other words, they were independent writings and not versions of or excerpts from the Laozi, which in this scenario did not yet exist when the Guodian texts were made. Nevertheless, taking into account all the available evidence, it seems likely that a body or bodies of sayings attributed to Laozi gained currency during the fourth century B.C.E. They may have been derived from earlier, oral or written sources. By the mid-third century if not earlier, the Laozi probably reached more or less its final form and began to attract commentarial attention.
…
The Guodian and Mawangdui manuscripts are certainly older than the received text of the Laozi, but this does not necessarily mean that they are therefore closer to the “original,” if there was an original. As opposed to a linear evolutionary model, it is conceivable that there were several overlapping collections of sayings attributed to Laozi from the start, each inhabiting a particular interpretive context, from which different versions of the Laozi were derived. Although some key chapters in the current Laozi that deal with the nature of Dao (e.g., chs. 1, 14) are not found in the Guodian corpus, the idea that the Dao is “born before heaven and earth,” for example, which is found in chapter 25 of the received text is already present. The critical claim that “being [you] is born of nonbeing [wu]” in chapter 40 also figures in the Guodian “A” text. This seems to argue against any suggestion that the Laozi, and for that matter ancient Chinese philosophical works in general were not interested or lacked the ability to engage in abstract philosophic thought, an assumption that sometimes appears to underlie evolutionary approaches to the development of Chinese philosophy.
The Guodian and Mawangdui finds are extremely valuable. They are syntactically clearer than the received text in some instances, thanks to the larger number of grammatical particles they employ. However, they cannot resolve all the controversies and uncertainties surrounding the Laozi. Perhaps the two approaches identified above are not mutually exclusive. Different written collections of Laozi sayings, leaving open the time and the way in which they were first formed, circulated during the fourth century. Overlapping in some cases and with varying emphases in others, they address both the nature of Dao and Daoist government. These were then developed in several ways — e.g., some collections were combined; new sayings were added; and explanatory comments, illustrations, and elaboration on individual sayings were integrated into the text. The demand for textual uniformity rose when the Laozi gained recognition, and consequently the different textual traditions eventually gave way to the received text of the Laozi.
January 23, 2006
Tech news & sites
Created a long collection on links and then boom, web crash. Well, this was open source day so here a couple of links
