Brook Ziporyn Bücher

Continues the author’s inquiry into the development of the Chinese philosophical concept Li, concluding in Song and Ming dynasty Neo-Confucianism. Beyond Oneness and Difference considers the development of one of the key concepts of Chinese intellectual history, Li. A grasp of the strange history of this term and its seemingly conflicting implications—as oneness and differentiation, as the knowable and as what transcends knowledge, as the good and as the transcendence of good and bad, as order and as omnipresence—raises questions about the most basic building blocks of our thinking. This exploration began in the book’s companion volume, Ironies of Oneness and Difference, which detailed how formative Confucian and Daoist thinkers approached and demarcated concepts of coherence, order, and value, identifying both ironic and non-ironic trends in the elaboration of these core ideas. In the present volume, Brook Ziporyn goes on to examine the implications of Li as they develop in Neo-Daoist metaphysics and in Chinese Buddhism, ultimately becoming foundational to Song and Ming dynasty Neo-Confucianism, the orthodox ideology of late imperial China. Ziporyn’s interrogation goes beyond analysis to reveal the unsuspected range of human thinking on these most fundamental categories of ontology, metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics.

Providing a bracing expansion of horizons, this book displays the unsuspected range of human thinking on the most basic categories of experience. The way in which early Chinese thinkers approached concepts such as one and many , sameness and difference , self and other , and internal and external stand in stark contrast to the way parallel concepts entrenched in much of modern thinking developed in Greek and European thought. Brook Ziporyn traces the distinctive and surprising philosophical journeys found in the works of the formative Confucian and Daoist thinkers back to a prevailing set of assumptions that tends to see questions of identity, value, and knowledge--the subject matter of ontology, ethics, and epistemology in other traditions--as all ultimately relating to questions about coherence in one form or another. Mere awareness of how many different ways human beings can think and have thought about these categories is itself a game changer for our own attitudes toward what is thinkable for us. The actual inhabitation and mastery of these alternative modes of thinking is an even greater adventure in intellectual and experiential expansion.

The Masochistic Playpen is a comedic work of serious fiction, albeit one with a lot of sarcastic violence and philosophy in it, set in a science fiction milieu, replete with clone networks, information conglomerates, wandering assassins, disintegration travel and so on. It has been described as a Schwarzenegger vehicle as written by Flaubert, in collaboration with Lewis Carroll, Johann Gottlieb Fichte and an irritable tenth-century Chinese monk, with some histrionic last-minute suggestions phoned in by Sabbatai Zevi and the Marquis de Sade. The story traces a young unfrozen assassin on a fools errand across the galaxy, slaughtering clones according to an obscure slightly Kafkaesque assignment, forced to assume a variety of undercover roles in different worlds and societies, adapting to their customs and ingratiating himself--as ambassador, as priest, as god, as gangster, as talk-show guest--to get close to his victims. His adventure takes him from earth to the Disneyesque world of Pleasure Land, where he finally meets his ultimate quarry and the thread on which he has been dangling is finally unraveled. On the way, the absurdly intersubsumptive omniverse which is his to navigate gets its kicks, reveling on both sides of his subjectivity in the maliciously jubilant mirrorings which, some may say, seem to dog the steps of every moment of sentient experience.