Zhang Rulun, ed.: The Philosophical History of Poetry — Annotated Notes on Zhang Dongsun’s Poems on Western Philosophy, Guangxi Normal University Press, June 2002
Introduction
Wanting to wash my tortoise-gut belly, I have not abandoned singing; the Xijiang has become a trickle under my feet.
Laughing at the splendor that flits before the eye, I claim only half a day’s shade beneath a awning window.
Thales
Though all things differ, if they share one source, they may all return to what came from water.
This man has turned back to the bottom of all processes, drawing a thousand men to draw again from the spring.
Anaximander
Only the boundless can give rise to myriad transformations; suspended in midair, it has not yet solved the symptoms of later generations.
The earth is like a cylinder—who today would believe it? That man came from fish may perhaps be corroborated.
Anaximenes
Breath condenses into water; breath is the root.
Life and death should be treated only as gathering and scattering.
The earth too is like a globe; why worry about that so early? Within it, what is lighter is the soul.
Pythagoras
All things are explained by number; four is justice, and two is a wedding bond.
The wheel of life may turn back; let us not feast on beans—critics suspect this came from India.
Heraclitus
Fire is the primal source, changing without cease, forming heaven and earth in mutual flow.
Many have, for good and evil, spoken of the same thing; opposites produce one another, and men blindly imitate it all.
Parmenides & Zeno
An arrow flies, yet does not move—hard to tell which proof should stand.
The same proof has the support of the four similes, not of many.
Why have vulgar truths become two doctrines? Monists and reasons, one after another, take one another as precedent.
Empedocles
The Way of Heaven is suddenly made clear through the art of medicine: what comes to be is due to love, and what is destroyed to hatred.
Necessary law can also include chance; the four great elements coexist without generating one another.
Anaxagoras
A craftsman’s ingenuity is set in order across the cosmos; from the one, all things may be sought.
The two poles of heaviness and lightness are especially in motion, yet they remain a riddle to this day.
Sophists
Rhetoric brings out the analysis of names; sophistry can aid one’s talent for politics.
After so much right and wrong has been turned upside down, the questions of life are opened anew.
Socrates
Virtue can be taught once wisdom is distinguished; even drinking poison or prison bars cannot make him flee.
Who can compare with one who confesses ignorance? To know people is no less than the nine-branched masterpiece of Chou-fang.
Plato
Taking Reason as form, he models all things; only when the wise hold the reins does the world awaken.
Common wives and communism—how could one ask about such things? The child-king on the island is not yet fit to prop up.
Aristotle
I
Pure form receives matter, and the two know each other in succession; scholarship need not mind borrowing the imperial teacher.
Today we speak only of the syllogism; who now knows the Golden Mean?
II
Teacher and disciple do not share the same taste in learning; nature divides transmission into two currents.
I have faith only in pursuing shadows, just as one seeks shadows in the cave.
Epicurus
Life should seek pleasure, death need not worry; among pleasures, motion is always inferior to stillness.
To unbind oneself is to remove the pain of the world; facing danger, these scraps of writing thankfully survive.
The Stoics
One should cultivate virtue and be one with Heaven; family, state, wealth, and fame are all swept clean away.
The practice of hardship and excessive severity differs before and after; emperor and slave alike open the same school.
The Skeptics
Hanging without cutting through is by no means laziness; all things are held in doubt, and enlightenment does not begin.
Neither number, nor name, nor any school—how pitiful that from here the declining wind begins.
Plotinus
The one, mixed and primordial, is hard to guess; the spirit dwells above the soul, harmoniously turning inward.
Who knows how many mysterious and dark stirrings there are? They can only become teaching materials for some later year.
The Nominalists and the Realists
The contest between common names and individual things is an endless struggle; just doctrines rise in a mass against the Church.
After tedious details have become a school, one can scarcely satisfy oneself later; the blade of division in one style alone is worthy of pride.
Aquinas
Why bother with the five proofs, endlessly talking? God gives no answer, and one suffers while seeking the way.
Who would have thought that today one could offer a new interpretation, thus allowing this man to become an ancestor in an age of decline?
Bacon
One must know that the drill of understanding is a conquest of Heaven; in the end, human effort can alter nature.
In the new creation of scholarship, the inductive method is key; the idols of the theater are most in need of being discarded.
Hobbes
As people seek self-preservation, each is like a wolf; only when strength matches strength do they know mutual concession is power.
Covenant maintains the common sovereign; even amid the crisscrossing ways, the giant spirit remains wild.
Descartes
If knowledge is not certain, all is fit to be doubted; only this doubt does not deceive me.
Truth reveals itself; argument is merely wasted effort. This fellow is after all a rooster at dawn.
Spinoza
The endowed can transform into the whole of existence; ability itself becomes the world of God.
There is a third measure that reaches to the heavens in wisdom; while nourishing life and polishing the mirror, joy ends in widowhood.
Leibniz
It is like a room filled with the light of ten thousand lamps; the small and great units have no windows.
Fortunately, harmony can be pre-established; in differentiation, it is hard to tell whose creation it is.
Locke
The mind is like a blank slate, upon which traces are left; only with property can there be freedom.
Legal human rights derive from innate endowment; the West takes this as if passing on a message.
Berkeley
All appearances of roundness and squareness do not leave the mind; much less fragrance, color, and sound.
Do not be surprised that he says God is unavoidable; as for solid external things, they are indeed hard to find.
Hume
Forms taken in through impressions are always a bit old; when images return to life, they are still unclear.
Causal connection depends on repeated seeing; the inward vision of no-self is especially subtle.
Kant
The empty forms of space and time limit the senses, and thus we know that external things have a different source.
One’s own legislation becomes a universal rule; a school opens a new epoch.
Fichte and Schelling
There must be both the I and the not-I; the I and the not-I develop into a third term.
So long as one can, on the lecture platform, extend the people’s spirit, a single formula that includes everything may not be too greedy.
Hegel
How can two contradictory terms become an argument? Pure being and no-being are merely different names.
Thesis, antithesis, and synthesis are all vague talk; what good soldier can they help forge in the heart?
Schopenhauer
Will drives people on, and it is always blind; he traffics in a small-Mahayana recipe for extinction.
He clearly knows that pessimism goes against Western custom, yet turns around and says that glimpsing truth can continue Kant.
Nietzsche
Seeking strength requires power alone to make authority; the weak and the common crowd are not worth a penny.
Yet the overman cannot be surpassed; he remains long on a sickbed, spouting madness.
Bentham and Mill
Personal happiness and the happiness of others are most worthy of reverence; the broader the benefit to others, the more public it becomes.
Do not abandon long-term gain because of near-term profit; by this measure, one can establish legislative achievement.
Spencer
One may know the division between the knowable and the unknowable; in scholarship, nothing is harder than the collective.
A single phrase burdens the strict translation by Yan Fu; all schools move from simple to complex in equal measure.
James
Only after subject and object originally cease to be things do they divide; nature has rigidity and softness, each setting up its own doctrine.
He also said that knowing and acting are originally one; the same craft, different tunes—like the Wang school.
Bradley
The categories one by one are hard to explain coherently; analysis all ends in contradiction.
What remains of reality is only the immediate feeling; if one compares it, Buddhism comes close to the school of emptiness.
Bergson
Like hail, the source of life generates endlessly, containing and hiding the past while always surging forward.
When the vertical ascends and the horizontal falls, mind and matter are divided; the brain serves as a mechanism, yet seals itself off.
Husserl
In the mind, self-contemplation makes everything perfectly so; in later years he reinterpreted Descartes’s book.
The single word phenomenology has different but equally broad senses; as for me and this school, I am only crudely familiar with it.
Dewey
Logic should only be used for inquiry; mind is shaped by the collective, and old disputes can be set aside.
Cultivating talent has left its lingering influence behind; who in this land regards it as an enemy?
Alexander and Morgan
Space, time, and life arise in layers; mist on the mind rises stage by stage.
Order in all its myriad forms emerges from the bottom; one layer suddenly creates another, each enclosing the next.
Whitehead
He once said his ideas came from the East, expanding relativity together with space and time.
All causes and conditions spread everywhere like waves; bowing to a white-haired elder, I too am an old man.
Carnap
When talking metaphysics, one inevitably slips into the blur of language; only when physics is turned into propositions does truth begin to be sorted out.
Metaphysical problems have no meaning; once the path is turned, a riot of color begins.
Russell
Heaven and earth are fabricated; things come first, and he once also offered advice to China.
A single journey northward was truly the gaze of a giant; for many years I have worshiped this man’s wisdom.
Sartre
Can being-for-itself also encompass being-for-others? He turns existence into nothingness.
To know how collectives transform one another, one need only use sophistic language and pair it with the Leftist theorist.
Conclusion
The losses and gains of the relation between Heaven and humanity always resemble the Pleiades and Antares; in vain I think of changing old prescriptions to cure my thirst.
Who is the child who abandons the shellfish and picks up the pearl? I, the old man, have long since ceased to have spring grain.
On the draft, the conclusion originally consisted of two poems:
After singing, I cherish the plain-hearted vow still; the losses and gains of Heaven and humanity always resemble the Pleiades and Antares. How often have orchids and weeds ever rotted together? Do not use a solitary grievance to confine China and the barbarian lands.
Planting elm trees in the heavens leaves only the Pleiades and Antares; in vain I think of changing old prescriptions to cure my thirst. Who is the child who abandons the shellfish and picks up the pearl? I, the old man, have long since ceased to have spring grain.
February 5, 2006
[German] U. Böhm, ed.: A Feast of Thought — Conversations with Western Renowned Thinkers such as Gadamer
Xingding posted on 2006-02-04 19:03:49
[German] U. Böhm, ed.: A Feast of Thought — Conversations with Western Renowned Thinkers such as Gadamer, translated by Wang Tong, Zhejiang People’s Publishing House, December 2001
This book is fairly good, consisting of transcribed television conversations on philosophy, knowledge, ethics, politics, and life. Gadamer took part in the “life” section, in the discussion “What Do Human Beings Lack?” Besides Gadamer, the interlocutors who interested me included the physicists Weizsäcker and Prigogine, and Rorty, in the discussion of “spirit and nature” and “on time” under the “knowledge” section, as well as Habermas and Dworkin’s dialogue in the theme “Politics Ruled by Law.” Of course, some of the other conversations are also very interesting.
However, although this kind of dialogue is easy to read and somewhat inspiring, after reading through the whole book I still did not especially remember much.
February 4, 2006
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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