Mountains as states of affairs

Trying to make sense of the deep work of Jan Christoph Westerhoff about ontological categories, reality and everything, along with a slow but steady learning of Chinese language and ancient philosophy, leads you to consider as ontological primitive the states of affairs, instead of good old semantic web things and properties, the latter being derived artefacts of the former, not the other way round. Let's try to illustrate this as simply as possible.

Consider a mountain. On the semantic web you represent a mountain as an instance of owl:Thing or one of its specific subclasses such as schema:Mountain. You claim to have defined a non-ambiguous individual identified by a URI and described by an open set of property-value pairs, such as http://dbpedia.org/resource/Mount_Everest.

But in the view of the world proposed by both Westerhoff philosophy and the Chinese language (insofar as I understand them properly), the above are just abstractions derived from some state of affairs. The chinese 山(shān) we translate in English as mountain(s) is a sign associated with certain aspects of things, or states of the world. We have to be very cautious on terms here, and not take for granted that existence of "things" and "the world" are preconditions to the states of affairs we associate with the sign 山. In ancient Chinese culture where this sign first emerged about three thousands years ago, the world is not divided into things before we name them. Certain states of affairs, patterns we recognize again and again, lead us to associate a sign to them. 山 is just an abstract visual representation of those states of affairs presenting peaks rising upward, a main central one and another one of each side, slightly asymmetrical. A mountain is indeed generally mountains, bearing in mind "three" has to be understood as a shortcut for "many".

The difference between considering there are such things in the world as individual mountains and we just give them individual names and put them in a category, and considering mountains as states of affairs we associate using a common sign or name, might appear subtle or moot. But it is indeed a fundamental shift of our view of the world. States of affairs are not neat individuals defined by properties, they are not separated from each other, they have neither precise limits in space and time, nor definite components and properties. Of course we can try to agree and generally agree to disagree upon such limits and components, and argue forever on what is or is not a mountain in general or this mountain in particular. And we actually argue upon what is a human being, or a book, or a Web resource, or democracy ... This kind of argument is interestingly called in Chinese 是非 (shì fēi), literally meaning "being - not being", hence "right - wrong" and in common language dispute, argument. There is much food for thought in this word. Dispute arises when the language gets out of its original role of simply putting signs on state of affairs, going down to argue on what there is and is not behind signs, in other words, when the language mingles into ontology and meaning instead of sticking to what it's really made for - poetry.

I wish you to stay away from dispute, walk up and listen to the mountain songs.

It is so because it is so

I've been through a few mountain paths and Chinese ancient texts this summer, both demanding fitness and attention of body and mind, and quite interesting to put together. 

道行之而成
物謂之而然

The above image I captured yesterday, the caption is extracted from one of the most challenging pages of Zhuangzi, quite close in spirit to another taoist piece we've been through in a previous post. We have here also a symmetrical sentence conveying the idea of a parallel ontogenesis for paths and things. The following is my synthesis of various translations.

Walk the path and it is completed

Name the thing and it is like this

The second part is indeed close to Laozi (having a name is the mother of all things). The implicit assumption, in a taoist context, is that there are adequate ways for both walking and naming. Even if, like in the above image, the path is barely visible and seems to vanish at some point. Such unsteady tracks quickly disappear if not regularly trodden, but they are not as contingent as they could seem. Even without any visible track, any (good) walker would make its way through the scree towards the background pass following a more or less similar path. From a taoist viewpoint, the (good) walker's path would fit the lines of the landscape, his path in harmony with the general way of things, both being called 道 (dào). The (wise) man will do the same in naming things, following the natural lines of his current cultural landscape. Bearing in mind that this landscape is bound to change, hence neither path or thing have any absolute and definitive existence.
And Zhuangzi in the following sentence pounds the point that there is no need for further explanation or dispute about it, through the insisting use of the word 然, meaning here "so" or "like this". The (adequate) path is so because it is so, the (adequate) thing is so because it is so. 

The translation at Chinese Text Project is adding an extra layer of interpretation.

A path is formed by (constant) treading on the ground. 
A thing is called by its name through the (constant) application of the name to it. 

This "constant" is not explicit in the original text, but it makes sense in the cultural context of Zhuangzi writing. For the track to become a path, it has to be trodden again an again by many people, and the name gets its meaning by usage. Paths and things are polished cultural artefacts. 

You need names on the Web, it's dark in there.

The chinese character 名 (name) which we have seen in the previous post as the mother of all things, has an interesting origin. It's composed from the characters 夕 (night, symbolized by a crescent moon) and 口 (an open mouth). The clue of such a mysterious association is that you need a name either to call someone, or to identify yourself, in the dark of night. In daylight, you don't really need to know the name of your interlocutor to recognize each other and engage into conversation. You don't need names of things to find and handle them.

Interaction through information systems, and singularly on the Web, is a conversation in the darkest of nights. You can't see your interlocutors, you can't wave or bow at them, and you don't see either what you are looking for, and the system does not see you. So you need names everywhere. You need names to enter the system, to login, to send messages. You need to know names to connect to people on the social web. You need to know a name of what you search to ask a search engine. One can argue that all of this is rapidly changing, with identification using your finger or eyeprint, connecting to stuff or people using icons and various fancy non-textual interfaces. But under the hood, the system will still exchange ids, keys, adresses, all those avatars of names used by machines. If our online experience gets closer and closer to daylight conversation, poor machines will keep  for a long time shouting names to each other across the dark of Web.

名可名，非常名

My conversation with good old 老子 is a neverending story, and I had to revisit him with the untranslatables paradigm in mind. I discovered long ago the extreme difficulty of translating the chinese characters and singularly in ancient writings through the excellent introduction I already mentioned here some years ago, this "Idiot chinois" by Kyril Ryjik. This book had sold out long ago, my exemplar was lost in a former life, fortunately a few years ago on some obscure blog I stumbled on a PDF copy I was preciously keeping safe ... but I can now forget about all those. After thirty years of dark ages, L'Idiot Chinois is now republished, and this new edition should land on my bookshelves anytime soon ...

The infamous and cryptic first chapter of the 道德經 would certainly be easily short listed in any challenge of the best untranslatables ever. It is an example Ryjik is presenting, because it's both too well known and too much translated, and certainly deeply misunderstood by most western translators.

Here goes the first part, which even if you don't read Chinese will strike you by the rhythm and sheer graphical refinement of its 24 characters. Note that the character 名 (míng, "name") is repeated five times, a hint at this story being about names and naming, mainly. 

道可道，非常道

名可名，非常名

無名天地之始

有名萬物之母

Ryjik holds that all but a few western translations and interpretations project a transcendental interpretation of 道 which does not make sense in the historical/political/cultural context where this text was produced. This is still the case of many available translations, for which the Dao has too much the look and feel of our western monotheist God. If nothing else, the initial caps everywhere are suspicious, there is no upper-case in Chinese. 道 should certainly be taken with a more mundane meaning : the way the world is going, and that human beings should try to follow, individually and collectively, in order to live in harmony with the general flow. Only physics, no metaphysics.

With this in mind, Ryjik posits that the negative 非 in the first sentence should be certainly read as a determinant of 常 (constant, unchanging, regular, in one word steady), rather of the whole group 常道. 

In other words, where most translators read 非(常道) not (steady way) one should rather read (非常)道 (not steady) way. Which makes the whole sentence read  something like (a) way really way is not a steady way. In other words : if you want to conform your way to the way (of the world at large) you have to adapt and change (as the world does). In the historical context, Ryjik holds that this is a moral and political recommandation not to stick to a rigid application of ancient rules despite the situation is everchanging. But this is a general consideration, just put there to introduce the main point of the story : the role of names.

Reading in the same spirit 名可名，非常名 yields name really name is not a steady name. Since things as the world flows are everchanging, the names you give to things are also bound to change to keep their accuracy. And in this spirit I just changed the title of this blog ...

As for the following two sentences which seem more mysterious, I've not been fully convinced by any translation so far, even the one by Ryjik. I'm pushed towards proposing my own translation by a beautiful edition entitled "La Danse de l'Encre", illustrated by Lassaâd Metoui, a tunisian calligraph. Thomas Golsenne writes in the introduction (in French, my translation)

"To read the Tao Te King against the grain, out of context is not only a right granted to the reader, it's a sort of duty  ... Understanding or translating [it] "faithfully" does not make any sense, because there is nothing to be faithful to, nothing but emptiness"

So be it, here goes my own unfaithful version of the two following sentences

無名天地之始  : there is no name at the origin of the universe

有名萬物之母  : having a name is the mother of all things

Which I read : the world as a whole 天地 (sky and earth) exists before and beyond any name, and does not need any name to exist, but with names come the separation in things, this and not-this, one, two and the ten thousand beings like said further on in chapter 42. 道生一，一生二，二生三，三生萬物. Dao is father of one, one is father of two, two is father of three, three is father of the multitude of beings.

I'm not sure we need another subject than 無名 and 有名 in those two sentences, a subject which would be implicitly 道, as most translations have it, like "Without name the Dao is the origin of the Universe" etc ... here comes the Holy Ghost, the Logos and the heavy monotheist capitalization. But the dao has nothing to do with the Holy Ghost. There is no metaphysics in the dao, only physics. 

This is actually somehow akin to the (too noisy) recent thesis of Markus Gabriel "Warum es die Welt nicht gibt". Things exist insofar as they are named, but the world cannot be named as a separate entity because there is nothing from which it could be separated from.

Amazingly enough, there is no entry for name in the Dictionary of Untranslatables. Not even a small entry in the index. This is certainly food for thought to expand in a future post.