Dialectics and Farting

Introduction and Notes

This text could be regarded as one of my earliest attempts at translating Chinese. It was taken from the blog ‘Program Think’ 编程随想, created by Ruan Xiaohuan 阮晓寰 who is currently sitting a seven-year prison sentence for the charge of ‘inciting subversion of state power’[1]. Whether it’s helping others bypass firewall restrictions or publishing independent research on the hidden wealth of cadre elites, ‘Program Think’ is nothing if not subversive from the perspective of the Party.

I might be accused here of perpetuating the practice of fixating -as those outside China sometimes tend to do- on privileging the voice of ‘dissidents’ as somehow more authentic or worthy of our attention. I can only reply I’ll likely be redressing this in future translations, even if I still generally hold to the view that someone imprisoned for attempting to affect positive social change probably deserves some elevation or attention. My choice of the text was actually much more haphazard however, having stumbled across it as a repost on Reddit. Already familiar with the infamy around Program Think, and given the -relatively- short length of the text, it simply seemed like a good challenge in an area that holds personal philosophical interest. While I admit to a certain glee at its content on my first scan, criticizing an important pillar of Communist Party Ideology, it struck me in the process of going through the translation that this would be a limited framing. To elevate someone solely on the merits of their ‘dissent’ would risk -as it would in the case of Program Think- overlooking their intellectual contribution in itself, its cogency of argument, and the generosity in sharing it. So whether you agree with his views on dialectics or not (I admit I am on the fence), I hope at least in reading it what is being drawn attention to is not solely Ruan Xiaohuan ‘the dissident’, but Ruan Xiaohuan as an intellectual in his own right, to be celebrated for putting together a creative dialogue (not to mention hundreds of other posts) that attempts to raise political literacy and psychological resilience within China.

The main difficulty in the text, and what I’ve tried to give myself some leeway over is the aspect of humor. Famously something difficult to translate, I’ve taken some liberties in parts with wording in an attempt not to only make a heady topic like dialectics ‘readable’ but ‘humorous’ in the spirit I believe the text was intended. This required, for example, giving the professor at least in the first two dialogues, a slightly more exaggerated academic stuffiness in his wording that contrasts with the often more surreal threads of his argument as he follows through their implications. The student on the other hand, while fairly laconic, presents a seemingly more naïve voice. To this extent, I’ve chosen to imagine the text a little like a ‘cross talk’ 相声 dialogue, with a hierarchical inversion of a ‘sensible’ student and the ‘fall guy’ blundering teacher. This relationship is radically flipped however in the last and longest class however. This reflects likely the fact that these posts were simply written at quite different times, and even if it topic loosely centers on dialectics, they nevertheless cover quite different topics. In the last class, the teacher’s tone seems very different and begins to talk in earnest about exercising one’s judgmental rationality and reason. The original text consistently discusses dialecticians as male 他, which though I could have done otherwise, I’ve deigned to translate throughout in the masculine form as is.

Translation:

A few days ago, some netizens left comments on my blog discussing the Party’s[2] educational brainwashing and brought up the whole thing of ‘dialectics’ again. 

For this week’s reprint, I thought I’d share a few articles about ‘dialectics’ so that everyone can understand how this stuff is being used as sophistry and indoctrination.

Dialectics and Farting

This was a really funny web article written ten years ago satirizing dialectics. It’s well-written, and I highly recommend you read all of it.

After reading it, you’ll hopefully understand why the Party puts so much emphasis on indoctrination in its education, and why dialectics has become one of its magic weapons[3].

Class 1

During class, I let out a fart; a very ordinary one. It was neither very smelly, and certainly not very fragrant.

It just so happened that at that moment, the Professor was lecturing on dialectics.

‘Please be so kind as to make a judgement on your fart’ said the professor, ‘Was it good or bad?’

Embarrassed, I could only pronounce: ‘Not good.’

‘Wrong’ he replied, ‘any one thing is composed of contradictions. In order to have a bad side, something must also necessarily have a good side.’

‘So it would also have been wrong to say it was good?’ I asked.

‘Of course.’

‘So…it’s both good and bad.’

‘Wrong. You’re only seeing this from the perspective of the contradictory opposites struggling against each other, and not from the side of their unity as opposites.’

It was best to take this issue seriously, I realized, and after some careful consideration it clicked: ‘This fart was both good and bad, but perhaps we can say that it was mainly bad, so it’s in the dominant position.’

‘Wrong. You’re using a static viewpoint. The two contradictory positions will mutually transform one another, so that what’s in the dominant position today, will certainly be in the subordinate position tomorrow.’

‘Are you saying that tomorrow all of humanity will be jumping for joy at my fart?’

‘Not only that, but we cannot deny the inevitability of this trend’

I was dumbfounded for a while, but I persevered. I pressed on: ‘Right. So my fart is both good and not good, but then also not good and good at the same time. Perhaps today it’s bad, but tomorrow it will certainly be good, if today maybe it’s good, then tomorrow it might be bad again.’

The professor shook his head, dismayed it my conclusion: ‘That sounds like utter skepticism, and not like a dialectical viewpoint at all.’

And just like that, a fart had made me a skeptic.

The professor continued with the class: ‘The power of dialectics doesn’t only reside in the ease with which it can be used to refute any viewpoint, but the ease with which it can find the theoretical basis for any viewpoint.[4]’

‘But my farts do not have any basis.’ I protested.

‘That’s because you haven’t found it! It’s quite simple; consider that expelling it was the inevitable result of the unification of two contradictory opposites within your stomach.’ 

There was nothing I could say to this.

The professor continued: ‘Let’s stop talking about farts. Instead, let us address the more complicated issue: a watermelon and its seed. No matter which one you choose, they both have a theoretical basis we can argue from.’

I burst in: ‘I’ll pick up the watermelon.’

‘Very good’ the professor said, ‘You’ve grasped the primary contradiction, that’s to say, you’ve grasped the key to solving the problem.’

‘Okay, what then if I pick the seed?’

‘Very good. To arrive at a qualitative change, you first need a quantitative one. The order you have chosen to solve the problem is absolutely correct.’

‘Okay, but now I pick both, the watermelon and the seed.’

‘Very good. You’ve at once grasped the main contradiction, without letting go of the secondary one. You are now looking at the problem from a comprehensive perspective.’

‘What if, just supposing, I’d smash the watermelon and then trample the seeds to bits’

‘Very good! Now you’re looking at things from the perspective of growth. You see, new things are the negation of old things. All old things are bound to perish, so you could say that the perishing of old things is the prerequisite for the emergence of new things.’

There was no escape. ‘In that case, suppose I both eat the entire watermelon as well as smash it. As well as gathering up the seed, I also trample it to pieces. But there is only one watermelon or one seed, what then?’

‘At last, you can consider yourself as having entered into dialectics. The important thing to bear in mind is this: the two sides of a conflict are not only opposites, but taken together also constitutes a unity. You eating the watermelon out of frustration certainly has its reasonable side, but smashing it is also not not unreasonable either. Only by unifying the two, can you progress to a higher level of struggle.’

I felt speechless. ‘But…that still hasn’t solved my problem....’

The professor smiled: ‘Dialectics doesn’t solve problems, its use lies first and foremost in transforming people into idiots[5]  -if the people weren’t idiots already.’

‘Did you say “first and foremost …”?’

‘Yes! After that, the idiot will naturally make the leap into being a scholar.’

The professor began to organize his lecture sheets, clearing up for class: ‘On why dialectics doesn’t solve problems, and on how they turn people into idiots who then transform into scholars -that’s a topic for our next class.’

With a skip and a hop, he was gone.

Class 2

The professor started up: ‘In today’s class we’re going to discuss the use of dialectics through a more complicated example: how should we look at traditional Chinese culture?’

I speak up: ‘For this, you must use a dialectical point of view’

‘Correct. We have many big-name scholars of dialectics, they will make full use of the three big rules of dialectics; linking theory and practice, quoting copiously across the board allowing for maneuvering oneself politically[6], and writing thousands of irrelevant things around the subject[7]. Lastly, they offer the conclusion: “extract the essence and discard the dross”[8]. It’s all quite admirable isn’t it?’

‘Indeed. It seems very useful.’

‘I genuinely used to think so. That was until I happened upon a stray dog one day -it changed my mind’

‘A stray dog?’ I asked, unable to make any sense of it.

‘Yes. You see, behind my house is a garbage dump, and one day a stray dog came to visit it. Without looking at anything else, it zeroed in on a bone, and clamped down it on with a ‘ka-chink’.’[9]  

‘That’s not surprising, all dogs are like that.’ I said.

‘Correct. The problem was, for the dog, that bone was the “essence” of the dump. Apart from the bone though, there were also bricks, scraps of metal, a broken bucket and so on. Dross in other words. I now put it to you, how could it have possibly known to only take the bone, to seize the garbage’s essence, and to discard the dross? Could it really be that it already knew of the analysis of our greatest scholars?’

‘It doesn’t seem likely’

‘Absolutely not! It cannot be that the subtle conclusions reached by our finest scholars, through their precise expositions, is the exact same thing even a stray dog has already arrived at. If that was the case, why would we still continue applauding their efforts or worship them?’

‘Yeah! Why?’

‘The only conceivable explanation must be: the dialectic has successfully turned you into an idiot’

‘Makes sense’

‘After you’ve understood this, will you likely say to yourself: what you’re saying is obvious. Who doesn’t know to extract the essence and discard the dross? The question instead should be, what is essence, and what is dross?’

‘Right! Let’s see what the scholars have to say’

‘It wouldn’t pose a problem for them, since they can again just make full use of the three laws of dialectics already mentioned, in verbosely linking theory with practice and using excessive quotations from many sources that discuss anything and everything but the central topic. After all this, you’ll be given the conclusion: concrete problems require concrete analysis. Quite brilliant isn’t it?’

‘It’s sensible at least’

‘But I can’t help wonder: the problem isn’t just that doing this isn’t just senseless or useless, but that it actually borders on charlatanism’

‘How’s that?’

‘Is there anyone in the world who would really go in for an opposing idea that ‘concrete questions require abstract analysis’? Is the stray dog standing in front of the garbage heap like Aristotle, first needs to put everything into categories, making distinctions between their inner qualities and outer extensions, and through a process of induction and deduction, manages to finally determine whether it’s a brick eater or a bone eater? Is this possible?’

‘It’s impossible. If that were the case, then even Aristotle might have been a brick eater.’ I pause for a moment at the mental image.

‘Yes! There’s something between your ears after all![10] No one would go in for ‘concrete problems require abstract analysis’, and ‘concrete problems require concrete analysis’ is tantamount to saying nothing. Nevertheless, our best dialecticians do like to use abstract methods to analyze concrete problems. That’s because dialectics is a universal truth that applies to everything anywhere all the time, like a panacea. So if you ever see a brick-eating dog, under no circumstances underestimate it; it could be a famous scholar.’

The professor began clearing up his lecture notes, adding: ‘The root of dialectics lies in using a ‘holistic, developmental, and interconnected’ view of things. Like all lies and falsehoods, it sounds like an obvious truth. Next class, we’ll discuss the origins of dialectics, as well as its relationship to metaphysics.’

Class 3

‘So far, mankind has studied the world in three ways.’ The professor went straight for the jugular today. ‘The first type is the ‘butcher’s method’, used by most scientists. They’ll take the world and carve it up into extremely small parts to analyze and study. For example, those who study organisms don’t study all organisms,  but only animals; those who study animals don’t usually study all animals, but only mammals; those who study mammals, won’t study all mammals, but only some subset like monkeys; and those who study only monkeys, might only study one part, such as just the monkey’s tail. In this way, they come to only see the trees and not the forest, which is an extremely one-sided view.’

                  ‘It’s not dialectal’ I added.

                  ‘Yes,’ the professor acknowledged, ‘not only that, they try to isolate their object of study as much as possible from everything else, in a bid to see what that object is like when there is as little interference as possible. This is the main reason scientists spend such large sums of money on building laboratories for experiments, rather than say, doing them on the streets.  Some experiments now even need to be done in space, so as to remove the influence of the air’s gravitational pull on them. Scientists will go to any lengths to sever things from one another.’

                  ‘Completely contrary to dialectics’ I say.

                  ‘Right again. But it doesn’t stop there. They don’t pay attention to past or future either, to what the monkey was or what it will be, they’ll just bring it in and butcher it there and then to see what’s inside its stomach. They use a completely static view.’

                  ‘It’s barbaric and clumsy’

                  ‘Hence why I call it the ‘butcher’s method’. But it’s the basis and source of all our scientific knowledge. Without these people, there would be no science. They should get the respect they deserve -for their character, their wisdom, and their methods.’

                  ‘Are there people who don’t respect them?’

                  ‘Very many, and you may even be one of them.’

                  ‘What do you mean?’

                  ‘They use an isolated, static, one-sided method, and this type of method has a name, something I believe your high school teachers taught you.’

                  I think for a moment, then a distant light bulb: ‘“Metaphysics!” I exclaim ‘…but that’s usually used as a pejorative?[11]’

                  ‘Yes, we call it metaphysics; the method used by all scientists in the past, and most scientists now.’

                  ‘So why is it often used pejoratively?’

                  ‘Because it’s considered incompatible with dialectics, it’s the complete diametrical opposite. The strange thing is, that dialectics talks all day long about the unity of opposites, but when metaphysics comes to settle into this antagonistic role as its opposite, dialectics refuses to play ball. Instead of seeing itself relationally, it takes up arms against metaphysics and assumes it needs to be bludgeoned to death. Sometimes people don’t only think they are right, but from this, they necessarily conclude that others are wrong.’

                  ‘I understand.’

                  ‘The second method is also used by scientists, which I call ‘bandit’s method’. These kinds of scientists are the most important. They can’t do anything by themselves, and instead wait for the metaphysical scientists to work out their exact results, before taking their findings and synthesizing them into a higher level of understanding. Thousands upon thousands of scientists studied thousands upon thousands of animals, plants, and microorganisms before Darwin came along and synthesized these findings, coming up with the theory of evolution.’

                  ‘That’s an easy job’

                  ‘It’s not easy at all, it requires a higher level of intellect and ingenuity, combined with a broader perspective than most can muster. Einstein was one of the best. His vision was extremely broad, and on top of that, he even studied dialectics. He did say, however, that dialectics never helped his research in any way.’

                  ‘So what in the end, is the use of dialectics?’

                  ‘It’s our third method for studying the world, which I’ve taken to calling the ‘Godlike method’. It’s what we’ll cover in the next lesson.’

The Last Class

‘I’ve been fired’ said the professor, ‘today is our last class. Please ask the first question’

I ask: ‘Some students have said your views are a bit too radical’

‘They’re right, I’m not only too extreme, I’m also wrong. Last class, I made an elementary common-sense error on purpose, but none of you flagged it. Now, I have no choice but to teach you about the most important thing of all: no one is ever absolutely correct, at best one can only be partially correct. If the world is one big elephant, then we are a bunch of blind people feeling it[12]. We’d all like to know what the elephant looks like, but none of us can ever actually feel the whole thing. Nor for that matter, could an entire blind troupe put together know it. If for an entire lifetime you’ve only been able to rub the tail though, you better do it in earnest. If by the end you are firmly convinced you’ve fully understood this tail, then you should also stand firm in your opinions on it and what it’s like.

Don’t simply change your opinion as soon as you hear others feeling up the legs proclaiming the whole thing is a pillar, or don’t listen to some dunce who having only rubbed the ears all his life insists it’s a big fan. Extreme views in themselves are not terrible, what is terrible is being gullible[13], to have absolutely no definite ideas of your own. If what you’ve insisted on is wrong, it’s no big deal, eventually someone just as blind but smarter will come to point it out. Science is the study of extracting the truth out of thousands of errors. But if you’re initial assertion was in fact right but you never insisted on it, then the world has lost a chance to move forward.

The other thing you should always remember is no matter how right or wrong you think you are, you are only in possession of one small part of the whole elephant. Always listen to what the other blind folks are saying. Don’t be gullible but don’t mistrust others too much either. In this situation, you have no choice but to exercise your reason. It may have its shortcomings, but it is the only thing you can count on. The reason of a single person is extremely limited, but the reason of the many is enormous. If you don’t know where to find the accumulated reason of the many, I’ll tell you; it’s in science. Science has its own shortcomings, which will eventually need to be overcome. But that will take many, many more people smarter than Einstein to work out, and it’s certainly beyond you and me.

‘Rationality, criticism and tolerance, these are the things I’d say are the most important.[14]’

This time I didn’t ask a question, and nor did anyone else.

‘Anyway, getting back to the main topic, let’s continue discussing dialectics;  a dialectician is also a blind man, but he’s without an elephant to touch’

‘Doesn’t he want to understand elephants?’ I ask.

‘He obviously does, but he believes that there is no point in touching them, or that it wouldn’t be very useful. He believes instead that the elephant is always moving, on the run, changing from big to small, and is infinitely connected to the forests surrounding him, to the earth, and even the Milky Way. By isolating its object, fixing it in a moment in time and viewing things from a partial angle, the metaphysical viewpoint would be a futile effort to understand the elephant[15]. For the dialectician, the only way to understand an elephant is by thinking about it as a whole, in its continual process of becoming and development, and as fully interconnected with everything else.’

‘But if they’ve never even touched the elephant, how could they arrive at a sense of its whole, in perpetual development, and interconnected to everything else?’

‘I don’t know, but who the hell does? Probably God[16]. This is why I call it the ‘Godlike method’. In the earliest periods of Chinese history, dialectics was already popular. It’s in Fuxi’s eight trigrams[17], it’s in the five elements of the Yin-Yang[18], it’s in Confucius’ idiom that in one’s actions “going too far is just as bad as not going far enough”[19], it’s in Laozi’s ‘antithesis is the movement of the Dao’[20], it’s in the idea in the Yijing that ‘the movement of the yin into the yang is what’s known as the Dao’[21] or in the book of the Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine, where it’s stated that ‘if the internal and external are in harmony, evil cannot enter’[22], these are all examples of the dialectics. In early Western history, only Aristotle had put forward an elementary form of dialectics, which was neither comprehensive nor specific. Engels then said he had elaborated the basic principles of dialectics, which, I, well, I don’t even know where to begin with that. Nevertheless, that’s all immaterial, the modern sense of dialectics started with Hegel, this point I think neither Engels nor I, nor anyone else, would have a problem with.’

‘You just mentioned Engels, but why didn’t you mention Marx?’

‘Marx has little to do with dialectics’

‘But isn’t dialectical materialism the soul of Marxism?’

‘I wouldn’t agree with this; Marx in an early essay in ‘The Holy Family’, severely criticized Hegel’s ‘universal logic’[23], which included dialectics. After, I never saw him speak of dialectics again. It wasn’t until his last philosophical work Afterword to the Second Edition of Capital that he jokingly talked about how he’d used the dialectics of Hegel and “coquetted with the modes of expression peculiar to him”[24]. But what actually is dialectics? Marx, throughout his life, never really answered this.’

‘So how did dialectics enter into Marxism?’

‘It was entirely due to Engels. It was only from works like Anti-Dühring to the Dialectics of Nature -a work which he was unwilling to publish during his lifetime- that dialectics became the so-called soul of Marxism. I share Gu Zhun’s view on this[25]. Marx wouldn’t accept the term “dialectal materialism”. This was entirely something born out by later descendants. It is true that the Anti-Dühring was approved by Marx however.’

‘So what are the elements that go into dialectics?’

‘First there are three major laws: the first is the law of reciprocal change of mass, which came from the first part ‘Doctrine of Essence’ in Hegel’s Logic[26]. The second is the law of the unity of contradictions, from the second part in Hegel’s Logic in ‘Doctrine of Being’. The third law, the negation of negation, comes from the third section in Logic the ‘Doctrine of Concept’.

These are all fairly superficial things, what Marx critiqued in Hegel as the ‘mystified form’. It’s all about looking at problems from this comprehensive view, with things continually in development and inter-connected. Its essence is in concealing two major doctrines: monism (or what we might as well call absolutism), which sets itself up as opposing pluralism and relativism. These debates have already been consigned to the garbage can of history.  More important is the second, that truths are indivisible, that the truth of things are parts of the world as a whole, and can’t be discovered by studying them in isolation. Hegel thought that it was only within a forest that you can find the tree, that you cannot start with trees to study a forest. This isn’t only extremely absurd, it’s also totally unrealistic.’

‘Why is it unrealistic?’

‘There was a Western professor[27] who said it very well: facts are fully demonstrable, that within humanity’s current cognitive and epistemic circumstances, the best possible method for understanding the essence of things requires studying them in isolation, frozen in a moment in time, and viewed partially. Because things are inextricably linked in infinitesimal ways, if you attempt to take into account the connections between everything, it’s the equivalent of not being able to say anything, and you’d fall back on the same disease our early ancestors suffered from, adhering to lazy formulas like ‘the Great Ultimate produced heaven and earth, heaven and earth birthed the four images…’ and so on[28]. Instead I’d argue we need to wait until we have a relatively detailed grasp of the laws and characteristics of things first, before then putting them within a system for very careful study and observation. But our traditional Chinese way of thinking is to try and get fat with only one bite -to be too impatient[29], to put forward at the start the overall point of view of essences. This is a type of primitive traditional thought that simply happens to coincide with dialectics, or to put differently, dialectics is just a modern manifestation of an ancient Chinese way of thinking. We’ve never lacked this way of thinking, what instead needs to be learned is the study of things in isolation, statically, and from one particular angle.’

‘So where did dialectics come from?’

‘What did it say in your middle school textbooks?’

‘That it was the culmination of our objective world, of human society and our patterns of thinking’

‘That statement is utterly absurd and completely wrong, with no regard for the facts. Firstly, even today in the 21st Century, to say nothing of Hegel’s time, human beings only know little, very little, about the objective world. We only half understand our human society, and we know even less than that about the laws of the mind. In terms of the elephant, we only know the tail by a few joints, the legs by a few hairs, or the ears by the tiniest flap of skin. Under those conditions, how could you possibly talk about comprehensive or correct culminations? It’s pure daydreaming.

Secondly, you can look it up in the Selected Works of Marx and Engels on page 469 of Volume III, lines twelve through to fourteen: “Hegel’s work contains the broad outline of dialectics, although it develops from completely the wrong starting point.” Engels in more than twenty other places states that this false starting point was idealism. Everyone knows, that Engels’ so-called dialectic, copied in its original form from Hegel’s ‘Logic’, is, as he’s said it himself, nothing more than an attempt to break “the shell of Hegel’s idealism”, and to extract out the “the rational kernel of his dialectic.”

Do you believe this? Mankind has taken many, many detours from correct starting points or premises. Yet it was an imperial professor named Hegel who came along, and ‘completely and correctly’ summarized all of the correct laws of the objective world, human society and the mind -only he’d done it from completely the wrong starting points. Is this what we’re saying?

I definitely can’t believe it. If you tied me to a stake and burned me for over two hours before burning me to death, I still wouldn’t believe it!’   

                  ‘I don’t believe it either.’ I whisper.

                  ‘But there are quite a lot of people who do believe it. Since the breaking of the yoke of Christianity, dialectics has been the biggest obstacle standing in the way of scientific development. He[30] denounced modern science for being a mechanical and uninspired metaphysics. It caused science to stagnate in some places. In the 1920’s, a president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences lost his head because he wanted to crossbreed and improve crops.’

                  ‘Why?’

                  ‘Because doing so relied on the Mendel-Morgan theory, which is incompatible with dialectics.’

                  ‘Are you very familiar with the former Soviet Union?’     

                  ‘I’m most familiar with China, where I’ve lived for several decades. But it’s always easier to swat a fly on someone else’s head isn’t it?’

                   ‘So how does science fight back against the attack of dialectics?’

                  ‘Western philosophy fought back with positivism and logical empiricism. Modern science, however, has stayed silent. It just kept on developing, producing more grains, steel and machines, everything that mankind needs, except for the spirit. When all of it became an irreversible trend, something we couldn’t turn back time on, dialectics discovered to its surprise that while it was constantly scolding other people, all it was really doing was disgracing itself.’

                  ‘Does dialectics have any redeeming qualities?’ 

                  ‘It’s been said that dialectics was a kind of premature freak, and although it has no real application for our present stage of human understanding, the holism it offers is indeed a very attractive feature. Perhaps its time will come. The holistic, organic theory of modern science is already in its infancy. But this doesn’t signal a return to dialectics, rather, these are principles that have become faintly discernible, generalized from the development of science itself. Absolute monist truth is, after all, hard to accept. Science never lets go of any possibility for development, if there’s the slightest hope, there’ll be someone who commits to putting in the effort. In 1984, a large group of renowned scientists set up the Santa Fe Institute. The group included many Nobel Prize winners and scientists at the top of their field, all funded by an equally distinguished boss -the financial assassin Soros. Their goal was to research the probability of a ‘unified theory’ of the universe. Of course, none of those enlisted would have subscribed to any version of dialectics, so it’s there’s a chance that the study of a grand ‘unification’ here is also on shaky ground. They are currently using modern scientific methods to explore the general principles that control complex adaptive systems (CAS). Even though I am skeptical it will accomplish anything, it’s nevertheless one of the boldest attempts in the history of all of human science. I wish them success -even if it means smashing everything I thought I knew’.

 Footnotes

[1] Aside from the obvious Wikipedia page, interested readers for a broad overview can follow and find more translated works at: https://chinadigitaltimes.net/space/Program-think. For the discerning reader of Chinese (including the Chinese), you’re late, go straight to: https://program-think.blogspot.com/. The original texts on dialectics are here: https://program-think.blogspot.com/2012/06/weekly-share-8.html. For a highly recommended political commentary on his past, posts, significance and arrest, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThF92yKLcGY

[2] The actual word used is 天朝, the ‘Celestial Empire’ (a tributary title conferred on imperial China). The term was adapted in the early 2000’s as a means to circumvent censorship for discussing the Communist Party. Throughout the text, I’ve kept the translation of this word as ‘the Party’.

[3] 法宝 -a slangish and figurative term derived from Daoism. To many who are familiar with Chinese movies and novels of a certain age, a 法宝 was often a ‘magic weapon’ (or a special mastered technique) that can be conjured to defeat a particularly strong foe, or solve some seemingly intractable problem. Drawing on perhaps more familiar Western parallels, these might translated as ‘magic wands’ or even a ‘silver bullet’.

[4] The bold emphasis was added in the original. Any further emphasis of this type is retained within the text and translated without additional footnoting. 

[5] My sense is there’s supposed to be a certain light wordplay here, with the name for watermelon 西瓜and the colloquial term for an idiot 傻瓜 sharing the nominal 瓜

[6] 纵横捭阖 this can also have the connotation of manoeuvring one’s political position in a diplomatic context. Given the overall tone of the essay, the meaning here implies a cynical ‘amoral’ approach whereby figuring out how to align one’s ideas with current political headwinds or ideological shifts takes precedence over a scholarly integrity, or a commitment to truth.

[7] 下笔万言 this phrase is likely intended to evoke and playfully pun on the longer 下笔千言，离题万里 (‘to write a thousand words which are ten thousand li [traditional unit of measurement] off-topic’). Linked with the next part of the sentence, the end result can be taken as presenting an ironic paradox. 

[8] 取其精华，取其糟粕 a politically loaded slogan originally attributed to Lu Xun 鲁迅 [1881 – 1936] in his essay 《拿来主义》[variously translated as ‘Grab-ism’, or the ‘Give Me’ Doctrine]. While Lu Xun never used these exact words, the spirit of the essay reflects the notion that in the process of Chinese modernization, aside from simply ‘giving away’ or ‘selling out’ cultural relics abroad, to also ‘take’ or ‘borrow’ from sources outside of China, but to do so selectively and critically. Later elaborated with this exact wording by Ma Nancun 马南邨 [1912-1966] in his essay ‘The Secret of No Secrets’ 《不要秘诀的秘诀》, Ma used it to criticize ancient scholars: “We now advocate reading with a critical eye, to extract the essence and discard the dross, but ancient scholars didn’t have the courage to put forward this idea.’  “我们现在提倡读书要用批判的眼光，要取其精华，去其糟粕，这个主张古代读书人却没有胆量提出。” This became under Mao a political and educational slogan, along with the similar (and probably more familiar) ‘Make foreign things serve China, make the past serve the present’ “洋为中用，古为今用”.

[9] 喀哧

[10] 孺子可教 this phrase is from a specific chapter in The Annals of the Great Historian by Sima qian《史记·留侯世家》 recalls the story of Zhang Liang 张良, who went on to become an important advisor to the Emperor Liu Bang. A wise teacher, posing initially as a rather irritating old man, puts the young Zhang Liang through several tests and tribulations, and in the end is finally convinced that he has proved himself worthy of instruction. The wise teacher at one point exclaims the above phrase, which more literally would be ‘the child can be taught’. Its use here is likely intended to evoke a slightly pedantic tone by the teacher.

[11] This might be missed by a Western reader not versed in philosophical discussions and debates around Chinese philosophy or history. A highly abbreviated version is that metaphysics has in some circles often been associated with the ‘Western’ tradition, as contrasted by a more ‘immanent’ one in Eastern thought. Perhaps the most emblematically there was the early metaphysics of Platonic forms, which -in some readings- paved the way for Christianity’s conception of an ‘imperfect’ or degraded world, with additional implications in say believing things have essences beyond ‘mere’ form or our mere perceptions of them (hence also, the eventual birth of individualism, each with a unique soul to save). This has been contrasted with Daoist or early Chinese thought for example, which some would claim didn’t share this conception or worldview, or at least to a much more attenuated degree, and instead saw life, values, and morality as something to be lived relationally without recourse to some other realm beyond our mortal coil. I am somewhat loathe to promote this idea, but interested readers can indulge in these debates with Ames and Hall’s work Anticipating China: Thinking through the Narratives of Chinese and Western Culture

[12] This alludes to the well-known idiom 瞎子摸象 [alternately: 盲人摸象], believed to have originated from a Buddhist sutra that’s now been lost. The analogy (in some cases a parable) and its permutations are likely already familiar to some readers already, as it’s been retold thousands of times. The abbreviated version here as pertains to the discussion of dialectics is that several blind men were placed at different locations around an elephant (the ear, the trunk, the tusk etc.) to feel, and confined to these ‘parts’, all invariably made erroneous inductions about the ‘whole’. The idiom thus describes a situation in which caution or humility is required through the acknowledgement that no one has access to the ‘whole’ picture, or that one’s views on something are always necessarily limited or partial.

[13] The phrase, more awkward to translate here, is another idiom 听风就是雨 (i.e. to hear the wind and mistake it for the rain). This is often used to describe believing in rumors or being credulous, hence the more expansive translation here of ‘gullible’.

[14] These quotation marks are placed like this in the original and appear to be a slip –I believe this is supposed to be the professor saying this, but it’s unclear.

[15] The actual words used for this metaphysical approach are 孤立 (to be isolated)，静止 (to become stationary or static)片面 (to be one-sided). These nicely mirror the terms used in the latter half of the sentence to parallel the binominals of a dialectical approach, which favors 全面 (to be whole/comprehensive), 发展 (to be developing/in the process of becoming/immanent), 联系 (to be connected). This is one of those cases where the neat binominals perhaps don’t match so well with exact English syntax and phrasing, but I’ve tried to retain the parallels with slightly more words, matching them to the best of my knowledge, with the vocabulary for how dialectics are discussed in English speaking (or English translations of German) philosophy.

[16] Slightly unsatisfying translation of 我不知道，鬼也不知道，只有上帝知道. The use of 鬼 here is literally a ‘ghost’ and is close to something like ‘who the hell knows?!’ or ‘the devil knows’. The phrase in its ancient use would have been something like ‘even ghosts -with their ability to roam around invisibly and observe things- don’t know this’).

[17] Fuxi 伏羲 along with his sister and wife Nvwa 女娲 are mythical cultural heroes in China, and in most versions the creators of humanity, along with other goods and inventions like music, fishing, cooking and writing. What the professor is referring to here is Fuxi’s invention of the eight trigrams (used in methods of divination) that laid the foundation for the Yijing (I Ching), and thus later its incorporation into Yin-Yang cosmology and the five elements.

[18] Explaining the five elements 五行and 阴阳 Yin-Yang and their historical significance in Chinese thought and medicine would require much more than a footnote. Suffice to say, the ‘worldview’ both of subscribe to was one loosely subscribed to dialecticians (at least in some of it principles), namely that the universe has no ‘metaphysics’, rather, it is composed of a kind of vital essence/matter/energy (the notoriously hard to translate qi气), which is holistically integrated, continually in flux, and relationally interconnected, rather than ‘essential’.

[19] A well-known idiom 过犹不及 

[20] I am not confident in attempting to translation the Daodejing, but the above is my own stab at ‘反者道之动..’ in the first line of chapter forty. I’ve specifically translated this using jargon more commonly seen in discourse around dialectics (i.e. ‘antithesis’) where a contemporary translation might instead be ‘’The movement of the Dao is cyclical’ (a lot hangs on how 反 is understood here, as in ancient times it’s semantic ranges could have been from ‘opposite’ or ‘reversal’, to possibly ‘returning’). In any case, I defer to the experts -see  Chen’s The Annotated Critical Laozi: With Contemporary Explication and Traditional Commentary p. 249

[21] Same as the above, there could be many disagreements over how this gets translated. The term the professor uses is just the start of the line from the ‘Great Treatise I:5’ Xici I:5  (系辞上) which just reads  ‘一阴一阳谓之道…’ , but the full sentence has additionally  ’…继之者善也，成之者性也’.  I defer here in case to above translation isn’t satisfactory to the reader, to the ‘classic’ Legge translation: “The successive movement of the inactive [Yin] and active operations [Yang] constitutes what is called the course (of things) [the Dao]”, see: https://ctext.org/book-of-changes/xi-ci-shang

[22] The translation is perhaps simple enough, The Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine and I have done so without external reference. The line is: 内外调和，邪不能侵

[23] 泛逻辑论 might be rendered as ‘pan-logic’ or ‘pan-logism’, however here I follow the more conventional English translation to hopefully reduce the ambiguity.

[24] The actual phrase is simply: 他才开玩笑地说自己卖弄了辩证法 i.e. how he’d paraded or shown off his dialectics’. I have however simply substituted this with the actual translated quote from the Afterwordt, referenced here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/p3.htm

[25] 顾准 Gu Zhun (1915-1974) was a Chinese intellectual, economist, post-Marxist liberal.  A perennial victim of ‘anti-Rightist’ purges, and having personally witnessed the large-scale failures of Mao’s policies, Gu underwent a deep conversion from a Communist Party revolutionary to a disillusion ‘heretic’ who advocated socialism that incorporated market economics, espoused the rule of law, constitutionalism, and democracy.

[26]The full title of Hegel’s opus is The Science of Logic but the book title in China generally has been shortened simply to Logic ‘逻辑学‘. For the rest of the chapters and their terminology, I have followed the Cambridge University Press (2010) version translated by George Di Giovanni

[27] The direct wording here is 西方不败教授  [something like ‘an unbeatable/invincible Western professor’], which makes a coded pun on the phrase/name 东方不败, taken from Jin Yong’s 金庸 (1924-2018) Wuxia novel笑傲江湖 ‘The Smiling, Proud Wanderer’ (variously titled). Translated literally as ‘Unbeatable/Invincible East’, this is the name of one of the chief (but mostly distant) antagonists, who after mastering martial arts skills from the coveted Sunflower Manual [葵花宝典], becomes a formidable opponent. The mastery comes at a considerable cost (self-castration), and thus in addition to the phrase variously describing someone immensely powerful or eminent in a field, has also become a stand-in for popular culture for homosexuality, gender-bending, or transsexualism (as the character in the novel themselves becomes more effete and takes a male lover).

[28] This is my own translation of a quote from the ‘Great Treatise’ (Xici 系辞) of the Yijing / I Ching 《易经》. It’s actually part of a much longer passage the writer has omitted, as a Chinese reader will likely recognize the reference easily within the first few words. Too complex for a footnote, the basic point it describes is the cosmological composition of the universe (See also footnotes 18 and 21), including its development from a state of undifferentiated unity (the Taiji) into a multiplication of things (in the above short passage, from splitting heaven and earth, to the four images -associated with specific constellations and cardinal directions etc.). Below is the same, longer passage, by Legge:

“Therefore in (the system of) the Yi there is the Grand Terminus [Taiji], which produced the two elementary Forms [i.e. heaven and earth]. Those two Forms produced the Four emblematic Symbols [i.e. four images], which again produced the eight Trigrams [Bagua]. The eight trigrams served to determine the good and evil (issues of events), and from this determination was produced the (successful prosecution of the) great business (of life).”

[29] 一口吃成个大胖子

[30] The text simply reads 他 here, but is unclear who this ‘he’ is since there is no specified subject in the prior sentence. From context and what is described, it’s likely Hegel, since to my knowledge Engels never bemoaned science in the above manner. Happy to be corrected if anyone has views to the contrary.