Empty and Full: The Language of Chinese Painting

Francios Cheng's wonderful study of Chinese painting marks the final book in my Taoist phase.  While Cheng doesn't explicitly argue that all Chinese painting is necessarily Taoist, it's clear that his conception of the art form is dominated by the interchangeability of opposites we already associate with that school of thought.  Hence the title.  He argues that Emptiness is not different than Fullness.  While this may suggest that they are "two sides of the same coin", that way of putting it misses the crucial point that the two are asymmetrical.  In fact, a fractal multilevel emptiness is the necessary precursor to the appearance of fullness.  In a sense then, this makes emptiness the deeper of the two concepts, or at least the one that applies to itself as an ongoing process rather than a product.  I think this may be the crucial insight into the paradoxes of non-duality -- it's not that supposed opposites are really identical, it's that they are not dual, not negations of one another, not balanced or equilibrated as conflicting poles, but yoked together in a productive symbiosis.  What I mean by this asymmetry may seem a little obscure now, but the beauty of this book is that it develops these highly abstract ideas by reference to the concrete techniques of Chinese landscape painting.  At the end of the book, Cheng even carries the analysis down to the level of the particularity of a single painter, Shih T'ao, a Qing dynasty master famous not only for his art but his theoretical writings as well.  Since I really enjoyed this book for the way it deepened my understanding of emptiness (perhaps analogously to the way Deleuze's cinema books deepened my understanding of time) I'll try to go through it in some detail.  

1 -- Emptiness in Chinese Philosophy

After a short introduction to the history of Chinese painting, Cheng's first task is to clear away the notion that emptiness refers to something vague or non-existent.  Emptiness is not lack.  Non-being is not the being of the negative.  Instead, emptiness is an animating principle that allows things to flow, transform, and act.  Cheng sketches out this theory of active emptiness by quoting extensively from Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, and Huai-nan-tzu.  While I'm still glad I read the originals, his short gloss on these texts probably taught me more about Taoism than all of them combined.  As I'm discovering, many of these older texts were really designed as compressed mnemonic devices for the student.  Philosophically, they depend on a teacher or commentator to flesh out the context and expand on their poetry.

One of Cheng's main contentions is that in Taoism, emptiness is both before and between things.  It serves not just as a point of ultimate origin, but also as a wellspring or reservoir of potential that constantly intervenes in the functioning of the world by allowing opposites to circulate.  Crucially, this gives it a kind of fractal quality.  The 'big' emptiness of the origin is reiterated at multiple levels by the 'little' emptinesses present throughout each level.  Later Cheng will elaborate this idea by reference to the way that emptiness is present at every level of a great painting -- from the brustroke, to the composition, to the meditative intention behind it.  For now, he's content to take this paradoxical self-similar structure on its most philosophical level.  Because emptiness itself is empty, or there's emptiness within emptiness itself, or something else of the sort, emptiness turns out to be within all things as the animating principle that allows them to achieve fullness.  In other words, emptiness and fullness are non-dual.  

In more concrete terms, he shows how the Taoists represent emptiness as the valley or ravine.  This gap in the mountains is the fertile ground from which the fullness of the "ten thousand things" spring up.  Though he doesn't mention the buddhist connection, the idea fits perfectly with the etymology of the Sanskrit term śūnyatā, which links emptiness to the hollowness of a pregnant belly.  I don't know if mahayana (or perhaps vajrayana) buddhists have a parallel framework that links emptiness to phenomenon via some process of mediation, but Cheng outlines a theory of this sort of Taoism.  For the Taoists, the primordial 0 of emptiness gives rise to the 1 breath, which divides into the 2 vital breaths of yin and yang, active and passive (presumably these are modeled on inhaling and exhaling).  In a final step, a "median emptiness" (the "little" emptiness between things) relates yin and yang and prevents them from becoming static and unproductive opposites.  Thus, the ten thousand things are modeled on, and produced by, the 3 part relationship of yin, yang, and median emptiness.  Cheng summarize this mediating scheme as:

A binary system that can be ternary and a ternary system that can be unitary: two equals three; three equals one.  This is the seemingly paradoxical but constant mainspring of Chinese thought. (pg. 51)

[And here I can't resist quoting the footnote (from Granet: La Pensée chinoise) that accompanies this passage because it is so close to Deleuze's description of Lacan's object a or the empty square of structuralism.

One is never anything other than the whole, and two is nothing but the pair.  Two is the pair characterized by the alternation of yin and yang.  The one, the whole, is the pivot that is neither the yin nor the yang but by which the alternation between yin and yang is coordinated.  It is the central square that does not count (like the hub, which the Taoist authors say is able to make the wheel turn because of its emptiness) ... Both together, unity and pair, the whole, if we want to give it numerical expression, is found in odd numbers, and first of all in the three (the one plus the two).  Three, as we shall see, amounts to a hardly attenuated expression of unanimity.       

The Western translation of the concept of emptiness would go in this direction I think.  It is the "paradoxical object" that is always missing from its place, always circulating through a series of transformations.  This ceaseless movement though, this constituent lack, is what allows it to stand in for the whole and create a symbolic order.]

The final theme Cheng tackles in his philosophical exposition of emptiness is also the most difficult  to understand.   What is the role of emptiness in human life?  The idea is that it's only through our own emptiness that we can become the model or mirror for the world.  It's only by a long process of emptying our self that we become capable of painting the emptiness/fullness of the natural world.  Though Cheng chooses terms like "mirror", "model", and "microcosm" here, it seems to me that this could easily convey the impression that the goal is an accurate representation of the world in the form of some sort of miniature recreation of it.  In fact, the goal of cultivating our internal emptiness is to stop representing the world, and start becoming it.  Since the universe is already empty, re-creating it in painted form is less a matter of capturing a particular scene than it is of continuing the process of unfolding emptiness that gave rise to it.  Human creation "mirrors' this process only by being swept up in it so that our little or median emptiness resonates with and develops the larger emptiness.  If, despite Rorty's objection, we want to stick with the mirror metaphor, we need to emphasize the surface of the mirror itself rather than the images that appear in it.  The mirror really adds nothing to the world.  Similarly, the surface of the mirror remains unchanged no matter what contents it happens to reflect.  So in a sense the mirror is nothing in itself but the simple passive act of reflection.  The mirror metaphor changes if you focus on the emptiness and superficiality of the 'act' of mirroring instead of the objects pictured in the depths.

Cheng adds a final twist to this now familiar mystical breeze-blowing-right-through-you moment by linking it to a transformation of time into space.  He observes that humans, after all, are finite, mortal, creatures.  How could we possibly expect to re-create the whole with our limited means?  Our only chance is to re-create a sort of infinite fractal depth within ourselves, to make each of our finite moments communicate with the whole.  Citing Lao-Tzu -- "... it flows on pushing ever further, and having gone far in its going, it ends up effecting the return" (25) -- Cheng interprets the concept of the return as something that doesn't happen at the end of time, but between any moment and its successor.  It's as if the whole universal sweep of the tao is reinserted into every gap within it.  But making each instant recapitulate the whole (which is composed of instants recapitulating the whole ...) has the effect of converting time into space.  An endless process of temporal unfolding is converted into a single space that can be apprehended at once.  Obviously, this idea is crucial if you want to capture the universe in a painting.  Later Cheng will analyze various concrete techniques for adding a temporal depth to the painted surface, all of which will depend on a lived emptiness on the part of the painter.

Thus, with regard to the manner in which man should live space-time, Confucius and Lao-Tzu both proposed emptiness of heart, which makes humans capable of interiorizing the entire process of qualitative change that I have been discussing.  Emptiness implies interiorization and totalization. (pg. 58)

2 -- Emptiness in Chinese Painting

After outlining his philosophical theory of emptiness, Cheng proceeds to apply all the concepts described above to Chinese painting.  By quoting extensively from various painters he shows us how they conceive of their discipline as the fruit of a long meditation, the flowering of a spiritual process that makes painting into a sort of "philosophy in action" designed to mirror the creative process of the cosmos.  In fact, many of them describe the ultimate goal of painting as the ability to create an image as real as the nature that inspired it.  Of course, this doesn't mean they want to produce a perfect objective representation of nature, but to capture its li, its inner pattern or principle. Our Western temptation to call this the essence of things is misplaced but instructive -- the whole point is that there aren't any essential things to begin with, but that everything is wrapped up in a process of becoming and creation that only reaches totalization with the (empty) act of painting itself.

Cheng outlines four nested levels that structure Chinese painting, each of which is composed of a duality whose terms are held together by emptiness.  Brush-Ink refers to the way the properly executed brustroke can create form, texture, and even dimension in painted objects.  Emptiness holds brush and ink together both through the way many specific types of stroke introduce un-inked areas within the stroke, but also in the rhythmic separation of one stroke from another can be made to produce the sense of volume.  Manipulation of the Brightness-Darkness (Yin-Yang) duality is responsible for the creation of color in both the literal and atmospheric sense.  The relationship to emptiness becomes clearer here when you know that most of Chinese painting has only black ink on a white page.  Any coloring is an illusion created by a variety of washes and other brush techniques.  Since most of these are landscape paintings, Mountain-Water is the most obvious dualistic pair.  When we observe mountains which pile up like waves and a roiling sea that has its peaks and valleys, it becomes clear that these opposites are often painted so as to unite them.  In between, holding them together, we find the emptiness of the clouds.  Finally, at the level of the overall composition, we immediately notice the heavy use of negative space.  Cheng identifies the opposition of painted and unpainted space with the Heaven-Earth duality.  These two are united by the emptiness in the painter himself as he tries to include the very process of making the painting within it.  It reminds me of Cezanne's description: "man absent from but entirely within the landscape".  The painter appears in his landscape in the way it expresses a mood, in its a-realistic use of perspective, and, in many later paintings, in the form of an original poem inscribed in the black space.  All of these techniques serve to transform a lived process of painting into a living space, one that reflects a spiritual journey that inherently involves time.  The end result is another non-dual paradox: a visual music.

3 -- The painting of Shih T'ao

The final section of the book doesn't really offer any new ideas, but simply particularizes what has been said to the case of Shih T'ao.  Cheng quotes extensively from his Enlightening Remarks on Painting and reproduces several of his paintings in the glossy plates section to bring all the abstractions down to concrete images.  Here is a nature that lives and breathes as we do, an emptiness mirroring emptiness.

 

 

Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea

I have no idea how this collection of short stories by Sara Pinsker ended up on my list, but it is easily some of the best sci-fi I've read and the best short fiction since discovering Ted Chiang a while back.  In my experience female authors seem to more frequently escape the boys-with-toys trap implicit in the genre and instead manage to write genuinely speculative fiction.  In this sense, Pinsker follows in the footsteps of Le Guin and Jeminsin in creating possible universes that address genuine human problems to characters we care about.  Of course, this is not meant to typecast her, and in other respects her writing is completely different from these other women.  In this collection at least, most of the stories eschew any of the world-building I associate with the other two, and instead just drop you without explanation into a twisted future that insightfully illuminates some emotional situation.  

So, for example, we find a woman who has lost her dream-child discovering a whole community of folks suffering from the same problem.  Or a soldier and mother whose memory of a horrific war has been neurologically blocked except during the annual "Remembery Day" parade.  And when we get to the inevitable dystopian stories about societal breakdown driving the wealthy to take a neverending cruise, or the utter hollowing out of rural America and the death of live music, the focus isn't on what happened or how it will all end, but on how people are coping, and what regular folks are like after the apocalypse.  Even in the brilliant finale And Then There Were (N-One) the focus is not on the dizzying metaphysics of the multiverse but on the clever crime story plot the setting generates, and the deep questions it asks about all the counterfactual divergence points that create our identity.

A highly recommended collection.

The Body Has a Mind of Its Own

Someone in one of my meditation groups recently recommended this The Body Has a Mind of Its Own.  Seems meditation kindles an interest in brain science for other folks as well.  This pop science book doesn't have anything to say about the science of meditation (though it seems that mentioning the subject is now necessary when discussing the brain -- Koch also felt the need).  Instead, it focuses on the various ways the body is represented in the brain.  While the idea that the brain represents anything at all is, I think, a philosophically bankrupt one, no one can deny that there are a number of cortical maps that appear to us, as third party investigators, to represent sensation or movement in various parts of the body.  That is to say that there are cortical areas that have a constant 1-to-1 correspondence between their activity and a stimulus.  Moreover, if a stimulus applied to, say, my left big toe, causes activity in a particular region of the brain, then a stimulus applied to my left index toe causes activity in a neighboring cortical region.  In other words, what we mean by "a map" in the brain is a topology preserving correspondence (I think this is a homeomorphism, but I ain't no mathematician) between a set of stimuli ordered according to some metric (often just regular cartesian space) and cortical activity (ordered, again, according to regular cartesian space, though perhaps accounting for the way the brain is basically a folded up surface.  Nearby stuff, as measured by one metric, maps to nearby stuff, as measured by the other metric.

Because this is a pop science book that trusts no reader as capable of looking at a footnote or understanding an analogy that does not involve either NASCAR or their family pet, their definition of "map" is limited to one sentence.  After all, everyone already knows what a map is.  At this point, everyone probably even already knows about the most salient maps in the brain, the sensory and motor homunculi.  These are indeed fascinating maps, and the first part of the book explores many of their interesting functions and dysfunctions (like perhaps surprisingly in anorexia).  Unfortunately, after the first couple of chapters that deal with genuine cortical maps, the authors then begin to serially abuse the concept.  The basic goal is to use the intuitive notion of maps to hold together an only loosely related collection of anecdotes about the latest in brain science.  So we get "maps" for higher order motor programs, and emotions, and all sorts of things with no obvious metric and no discussion of how this metric would be preserved in the cortex.  This all culminates in a discussion of the infamous mirror neurons, "the most hyped concept in neuroscience", in which each of these neurons is presented as in itself a "map" of various observed movements.  In other words, they push the word map to the point of meaninglessness, and then beyond.  Without a metric you simply can't talk about a "map".  At best you are describing a "circuit".  At worst you are saying things like, "this is the neuron for recognizing that a lefthanded jewish lesbian from Latin America is scratching the right side of their face with their toe".  

So while there are plenty of nice anecdotes about scientists and their research (and the research subjects and the serendipitous whatever that inspired the research and its feel good implications and blah blah blah) ultimately the book is just too light to get much out of either scientifically or philosophically.  However, the overarching point they make is a good one -- many of our "higher" cognitive functions are clearly related to our brain's relationship to our own body. 

The Bhagavad Gita

In my continuing effort to read more of the source material covered in David Loy's Nondualism book, I picked up the copy of the Bhagavad-Gita that I still had from freshman year.  It's amazing what a difference 25 years can make in one's thinking.  All the marginalia indicate that I was obsessed with comparing the Gita to Plato's Republic (which I'd just read for the first time as well).  Certainly, there are some comparable elements.  You can find support in both books for a division of society based on the varying "nature" of  individuals -- ie. support for a form of caste system.  In addition, both books definitely describe a sort of hero's journey where the philosopher begins in confusion and gradually journeys towards the true source of reality.  Plato narrates this journey in the cave allegory.  The Gita builds it directly into the structure of the dialog between Krishna and Arjuna.  The story begins with the great hero Arjuna's doubt on the eve of a momentous battle.  He's not sure he even wants to fight, given the senseless violence he sees in it.  Krishna gradually convinces him that he must fight by gradually unfolding a series of teachings which climax halfway through when Krishna's directly reveals the totality of his divine form.  The denouement fleshes out the intellectual understanding of this form and ultimately Arjuna decides to return to the field of battle (and presumably slaughter all his enemies, but, you know, now killing them with kindness, so to speak).  In other words, the similarities between The Republic and The Gita are pretty superficial.  If there's any book of philosophy that doesn't imply that society should be organized and that philosophy should reveal the truth, it was written pretty recently.  These are not very distinctive points of resonance.  

In fact, if you read the Gita with the concepts of nondual philosophy in mind, the books bear almost no resemblance to one another.  Yes, the Gita does have a few passages that could be read as supporting the Indian caste system.  But actually, these parts cut against the much larger theme that individual action should be looked at through a nondual lens.  Every action should be undertaken as a sacrifice to Krishna, and should not concern itself with its possible fruits for the actor.  This viewpoint substantially changes the interpretation of the idea that, "everyone in society does what they must, or what they are naturally suited for".  A nondual concept of action that divorces the individual's intention from their action, and emphasizes that emptiness of the actor, might be compatible with a caste system, but, properly understood, it's a long way from justifying that system.  And yes, our hero Arjuna moves from confusion to certainty, from doubt to the apodictic.  But in true nondual fashion, the knowledge he receives is not knowledge of the universe, but that he is the universe, that he and everything else arise inseparably within Krishna.  So in both cases, the proposed correspondence between the two books is actually closer to a contrast.  Makes you wonder how professors can stand to read the drivel that freshmen must invariably write.  R.I.P. Mark Mancall. I'm sorry for what I put you through.

In any event, The Gita is the most interesting follow up to Loy's book that I've read so far.  It's a much clearer work than any of the Taoist texts.  While there are some confusions and crosscurrents, you don't need to strain to see a nondual philosophy at its core.  It asks the fundamental question of why act at all in a particularly stark way.  And it answers it equally clearly -- "you" don't act at all, only Krishna acts, or better yet, simply is.  When you realize you aren't separate from the universe, the apparent individual choice involved in acting falls away.  The whole point of the dialog is clearly to bring Arjuna to this nondual realization rather than "convince" him to act in a conventional sense.  

In addition, unlike the Taoist fragments, The Gita is a fully constructed piece of literature.  And it's great.  It's short, dramatic, poetic, and climaxes in a really powerful scene where Krishna reveals the mind-boggling chaos of his totality.  I gave it 5 stars.  Or maybe that was Krishna's own review?

The Feeling of Life Itself

When I saw that Christof Koch, once my possible graduate advisor at CalTech and now the head of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, had written a new book about consciousness, I was pretty excited.  Not only has Koch done a lot of great work on the visual system over the years, but he also struck me as more broadminded than your average research scientist.  Indeed it seems that since the days when he worked on very specific neural systems, he has gone on to become a leading proponent of the Integrated Information Theory of consciousness -- a big picture mathematical theory that purports to calculate whether it feels like anything to be a given chunk of matter.  

Unfortunately, the book was pretty disappointing.  Koch does a good job of posing the question of consciousness by distinguishing it from intelligence, attention, linguistic ability, and information processing in the conventional sense.  All he's concerned with is the most vexing problem of what it means to have an experience at all, for a particular state to feel like something.  He also does a reasonable job of outlining what evidence there is that this particular theory (IIT) is the right one.  This isn't something one can prove of course, especially when we're talking about a phenomenon as slippery as consciousness.  But he at least does a good job of talking about what testable predictions have so far been made, and extrapolating what other surprising predictions the theory implies.  However, what he does not do is give you a decent explanation of the damn theory itself.  

Koch tries to pack his entire description of IIT into a single 12 page chapter.  After reading it 3 times and trying to work through the simple example system he shows (but does not explain) I still have only the vaguest notion of how the theory works.  As far as I can tell, the basic idea is that some parts of the universe are so densely and reciprocally connected by causal interactions that cutting them into pieces would produce some sort of qualitative change in how they behave.  Since the states of these parts of the universe "matter to themselves", in the sense that they form a sort of self-causing feedback loop, and since we look for loops that can't be made any smaller without breaking them in this sense, then these are the parts that are conscious.  This is an appealing idea to me, very reminiscent of Spinoza's conatus, but like I say, Koch's description of even the basic notion is so poor that I'm not confident of my interpretation.  

The actual theory is entirely mathematical, and meant to provide a precise calculus behind the basic intuition that consciousness is another name for the causal organization of matter.  I wish I could explain that theory to you.  The overall point is clearly to calculate one number Φ that measures consciousness.  However, even though I don't see any math in it above my pay grade, the explanation Koch gives for this calculation is so crummy that I'd have to carefully read another source to be able to tell you about it.  In an otherwise fairly readable book this seems like an abject failure to me.  I mean, in an unforgivable move, Koch doesn't even spend a page or two working through the simple example system he presents.  This part, "the heart of the book" as Koch himself calls it, is just a total and complete flop.    

It's hard to understate how disappointing this failed chapter is for the book as a whole.  If we don't come away with at least some genuine understanding of the theory, how can we evaluate whether it responds to the problems Koch outlined at the beginning or is useful in the applications (mostly thought experiments at this point) he mentions towards the end?  This is a shame because I think there is something really intriguing about the theory.  For one, it shares a flavor similar to the interpretation Manuel DeLanda gives of Deleuze's philosophical system -- the virtual is defined as the structure of the phase space of the actual.  And it also leads to several counterintuitive thought experiments.  For example, one of the most surprising claims of IIT is that even a perfect computational simulation of a conscious system will not be conscious.  This comes straight out of the basic premise that consciousness is not a property of the functional aspects of a chunk of matter, not about the input-output relations between the world and that chunk, but about the internal causal architecture of the given chunk.  As a result, Koch ends up claiming that a brain simulated with a Von Neumann architecture cannot be conscious, but one simulated on neuromorphic hardware could be.  In other words, some day Google may simulate me in such a way that it can predict all of my behavior and store all of my memories without this simulation being at all conscious.  Another intriguing example comes up at the end of the book in reference to something called "expander graphs" which are organized in a way similar to the topographic maps of visual, auditory, or somatic sensation that are so important to our brain (and phenomenology).  These systems are meant to illustrate the opposite kind of surprise to the first example.  While no one claims these systems are highly intelligent or have anything other than a simple function, IIT predicts that they have a surprisingly large amount of consciousness.  I'd love to be able to think more about these debates, but unfortunately Koch has not equipped us to do so.  Perhaps he's a zombie scientist?

Update: The physicist Scott Aaronson, a critic of IIT, manages to give an understandable technical definition of Φ in a blog post.  Which only makes Koch's failed attempt more mysterious to me.  

Cultivating Stillness

A friend of a friend recommended this updated translation and commentary on an old Taoist text several years ago.  Since it was on the shelf and I've been on a Taoism kick, I finally got around to trying it out.  I didn't read the whole works because it quickly became clear that I didn't have the background to understand it.  Everything useful (to me) was contained in the translator's introduction.  The book is composed of an original text attributed to Lao Tzu (though probably written a few hundred years after this already semi-legendary figure's death) and an accompanying commentary written some thousand years later by another Taoist sage.  The original text is cut from the same vaguely suggestive poetic cloth as the Tao te ching.  Actually, it's probably not even as clear as the classic.  As a result the commentary is ridiculous from a literary perspective.  There simply isn't enough information in every 3 lines of the original to adequately inform 5 pages of commentary.  It's clear that the later commentary is operating from within a fully developed Taoist system that he projects back on the original and pretends to elaborate from it.  The introduction provides a little bit of information about this system of "internal alchemy".  Whether fortunately or not, this is really just enough for the casual reader to see that the system is complicated and requires years of tutelage under a master to even begin to appreciate.  In essence, it's designed to be a meditation manual written in code to prevent it from falling into the hands of some dunce like myself.  And it worked.

Chuang Tzu Basic Writings

Continuing my exploration of Taoist book already on my shelf, I picked up the Burton Watson selection and translation of Chuang Tzu writings.  As we saw with Lao Tzu, the writing attributed to "Master Chuang" can only loosely be credited to the third century BCE sage of that name; in fact, what has come down to us is another collection of greatest hits along with a few B sides.  In this case, however, we have at least moved from the level of the telegraphically compressed to the merely obscure.  While there's not enough here to describe a Chuang Tzu system, we at least have more than the fragmented poetry of Lao Tzu.  The short but fully formed allegorical stories that comprise the bulk of this book let you sink your teeth into their interpretation a little more.

As with Lao Tzu, the defining feature of this philosophy seems to be the inversion of opposites.  Again and again we see that the things the ordinary man values are mere encumbrances, and the things he holds as useless or base are where true wisdom lies.  With Chuang Tzu though, this takes on an almost Nietzschean tone advocating the revaluation of all values, a dimension that wasn't obvious in the Tao Te Ching.  There's more humor here, more levity of style, more "free and easy wandering", to quote the title of one chapter, that matches the counter-cultural content.  There's also more signs that fit with interpreting the Way along the nondual lines that David Loy laid out.  A boundaryless vastness, a stillness, a silence beyond words and even conceptualization -- these are the core features of the emptiness that replaces the subject-object duality as the ground of things.  That said, to use the book as a meditation manual is still clearly impossible.  Which leads me to wonder just how Taoist meditation is taught.  These classic texts so far appear to be entirely philosophical in their outlook.