Greetings from Asia - 4 September 2010 (ES)

Why There Are No Existentialists in Taiwan
I had promised my colleagues in a study group back in the U.S. to use this blog to discuss some ideas related to the group's work. That group, based in Bryn Mawr College, is called the Evolving Systems (ES) group, and can be found at http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/evolsys/home. What's the group about? To quote from the group's "Overview" page (http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/evolsys/overview):

An inquiry into emergent relationships among randomness and form, meaning, and aesthetics... with particular attention to

• What would be the implications for scientific method and the various sciences of recognizing emergent interdependent relationships among randomness, form, meaning, and aesthetics?

• What would be the implications for cultural studies and the human sciences of recognizing emergent interdependent relationships among randomness, form, meaning, and aesthetics?

• What would be the implications for intellectual activity generally of recognizing emergent interdependent relationships among randomness, form, meaning, and aesthetics?

• What would be the implications for artistic activity of recognizing emergent interdependent relationships among randomness, form, meaning, and aesthetics?

• What would be the implications for religious and spiritual activity of recognizing emergent interdependent relationships among randomness, form, meaning, and aesthetics?

• What would be the implications for day to day practical life of recognizing emergent interdependent relationships among randomness, form, meaning, and aesthetics?

In the group, we've discussed everything from deep time and earth history to object-oriented ontology. Now that I am ex-officio, living overseas here in Asia, the group's Project Organizer, Dr. Paul Grobstein, asked me to participate via a blog.

So, here is my initial post for the ES group, and it concerns an observation I had the other day. To begin, let's look at the title of today's entry, the rather hyperbolic, "Why there are no existentialists in Taiwan". Taiwan has grown from a primarily agrarian society to a highly-industrial society within the space of one generation. As can be seen in my earlier entries in this blog, in fact, the old and new co-exist in very interesting ways here. But my concerns here are not the fact that I can buy the latest computer hardware in a certain neighborhood in Taipei and then in the same neighborhood walk around the corner and buy roast squid from a street vendor who only speaks Taiwanese and who grew up on a farm somewhere in the south of Taiwan. My concern here, rather, is that in any agrarian society, be it in Asia or elsewhere, the people tend to be pragmatists.

As I have commented before, even in this blog, the Chinese are paramount pragmatists. Pragmatism and existentialism don't go well together. Pragmatists just "get on with it", while existentialists reflect on the fact of our existence. Of course, pragmatists and existentialists do share one important quality: that in the end, one must just live. But the Taiwanese do that without the torturous reasoning beforehand. No Taiwanese would ever have written No Exit. Of course, the Taiwanese struggle with the vagaries of existence all the time, going to the various temples scattered everywhere here, praying for good health, for prosperity, and so on.

But even that "spiritual" side is profoundly practical, focused on potential pragmatic benefits to one's life. As I have also noted before, this is one reason that the Taiwanese do not worry so much about work as we do. Naturally, parents here would rather have their child become a doctor or some similar profession, but even the "lowest" (note quote marks) forms of work, such as street vendor are considered perfectly fine here; the only criterion in judging one's work, in fact, is whether one can provide for one's family. Work is a necessary evil, a means to earning money to provide a comfortable life. Work is virtually never a vehicle for some kind of abstract fulfillment as it is in the U.S.

In short, the Taiwanese do not suffer from the existential "angst" one finds so often in the West.

But I want to end with a caveat, because in another way, one could say that Chinese culture actually founded a kind a existentialism, since an important strand in Chinese philosophy looks at the very question of the meaning of existence. The Dao De Jing and the Zhuangzi, which as some readers here know are two of my favorite works, look directly into the mysterious question of the existence of the universe. I will talk about this further in a later post; the point I wish to make here in my conclusion here is that this kind of "Chinese existentialism" does not seem to have entered the popular consciousness. In the West, by contrast, particularly through the work of Jung and Freud, the "larger questions of life" became part of personal therapy, not to mention part of popular culture. More to come...