I am merely an unclaimed street performer, roaming the noisy, clamorous streets of the city, using the crudest props I happened to pick up to ply the cheapest tricks before passersby hurrying past, only hoping that busy modern people might stop for a moment now and then.
—— Gu Cha
He is neither arrogant nor deferential to others; he is simply striving to pursue true wisdom. A true joker is very different from the other cards.
—— Sophie
So, Sophie, now you must make a choice. Are you a child whose curiosity has not yet been worn away by the world? Or a philosopher who can never be such a child?
—— Sophie’s World
At the end of the previous piece, “The Structure of the Pirate Ship,” I left an “entertainer/magician” section unwritten, partly because it would have been a long story, and partly because I wanted to keep a little suspense. Of course, it turned out I was unable to keep any suspense at all, because the readers would not care one way or another, while I myself would be the first to be unable to bear it; if I don’t write it out, I feel terrible… After all, I am always my own number-one fan.
When I haven’t actually written the article, I can never guess what it might end up looking like; this article is now completely different from what I had imagined yesterday.
Late last night, unable to sleep, I saw on xiaonei a post by some little kid listing the books he planned to read during winter break. I glanced over and saw among them The Secret of Cards, and suddenly a chain of associations unfolded. With a snap, everything clicked, and a glittering word appeared in my mind—JOKER!
The words I have been using—“entertainer,” “magician,” and so on—are nowhere near as evocative as this “JOKER.”
Unfortunately, the word is not easy to translate. Both Sophie’s World and The Secret of Cards render it as “clown,” which is fairly apt. The figures I mean—entertainer, magician, and the like—are all contained within the word “JOKER,” and it also contains my notion that “the highest state of philosophy is humor”; it is indeed evocative.
The author of those two books, Gaarder, likens the philosopher’s image to JOKER, and it is very well done. But my metaphor was reached independently. In fact, I have not read The Secret of Cards, and I only flipped through Sophie’s World a bit a few years ago. My thought of JOKER came simply from a chain of associations sparked by the word “cards.” Later, when I found the book and took a look, it really was a perfect fit.
Even so, my evaluation of Sophie’s World is still not very high, and I do not want to read it carefully. This is not because I am dissatisfied with the author’s philosophical ideas or writing style. In my view, the biggest problem with Sophie’s World is not that it is too light, but rather that it is too stiff. The embedding of the history of philosophy into the plot feels awkwardly forced, relying on an external story to add color to the history of philosophy instead of truly telling the history of philosophy itself in a vivid and moving way. Moreover, the letters, one after another, seem too long—can a fourteen-year-old girl really be so deeply captivated by them? It always feels a bit fake… If I were to find some little girl to play this kind of correspondence game with, I’m afraid I’d be taken for a pervert… Someday I will have to write a better introductory philosophy book for fifteen-year-olds, maybe in the style of Sophie’s Adventures or something like that, with philosophers really appearing in the roles of magicians and clowns.
But back to the main point: the author’s use of JOKER as a metaphor for the philosopher is brilliant, though the traits he depicts are still somewhat incomplete. Of course, I haven’t read it carefully, so I should not say too much; I’ll just proceed according to my own line of thought.
In the previous piece, “The Structure of the Pirate Ship,” I did not mention the place of philosophy, let alone explain where the “Pirate King” actually is. I mentioned politics at the helm, but the Pirate King is not a king in that sense—not the KING as the old K, but the greater, unique trump card: the JOKER as the “big joker”!
The adventure of the Pirate King does not unfold directly in the sea belonging to the ship of “civilization,” but in another mirrored world—the world of thought. The structure of the pirate ship corresponds to the ship of “civilization,” but the whole thing undergoes a magical transformation: the ship of “civilization” becomes the ship of philosophy, while the structure remains the same, and all its parts become their philosophical counterparts—philosophy of art, philosophy of religion, philosophy of science, philosophy of culture, philosophy of language, philosophy of history…
This is a wondrous magic, and it is precisely cast by JOKER: with a whoosh, a new world is created. To cast this spell requires only that one step back and utter the three-character incantation: “Why?”
The world created by JOKER may seem ridiculous, like a world viewed through a magic crystal ball, absurd as if seen in a funhouse mirror. That world inevitably appears distorted and misshapen, very different from the world we know, yet it seems closer to the secret of the world.
On the ship of “civilization,” JOKER is utterly superfluous; there is no place that needs his labor. To survive on board, the role he plays is often that of an entertainer, performing ridiculous tricks and telling clumsy jokes for all kinds of people, until they feel that it would do no harm to have a little clown lingering on the ship, and so they settle him on board.
But settling down does not mean behaving oneself. JOKERs are born troublemakers; they do not deliberately wreak havoc, but they tell annoying jokes and perform bluffing tricks, unsettling everyone’s minds.
JOKERs only want to say: Hey! Look! How marvelous this is! How interesting that is! Hm? Is it interesting? Come, come, take this thing—pretty normal, right? Mm-hm, turn it sideways and have a look? Turn it over and look again—hey! Funny, isn’t it? Look at this too—hm, it’s empty, nothing in it, right? Hey, look what I can make appear! Fun? Marvelous? Hahaha…
This is what philosophers do. Most of the busy people walking across the deck will not stop to watch; many will hurry away even faster, out of sight, out of mind. Some, when they have nothing to do, will occasionally come and watch the clowns’ entertainment, but after they have had their fun, they will never identify with the JOKERs’ way of life. They will not join in the JOKERs’ tricks, though the JOKERs assure them that no special skill is needed to participate; still less will they let their own children become JOKERs. The girls may scream with excitement at the JOKER’s performance, yet they will never go on dates with a clown…
JOKER is a role that makes people laugh, but even more a role that makes people sneer. No matter whether one enjoys watching a JOKER’s performance, one is always contemptuous of it.
Only children can appreciate the JOKERs’ tricks without reservation. Children are full of curiosity, and they are far from having been infected by utilitarian and worldly attitudes. They do not consider whether the clown’s work is “decent,” whether it is beneficial to society, whether it is meaningful, and so on. It is surprising, amusing, and interesting—that is enough.
Every JOKER is a child who will not grow up; he is dissatisfied with this adult, customary world, yet must also step out of the world of fairy tales. So what is to be done? He must create the world himself, using his own magic to turn this familiar world into something wondrous and interesting. That is the three-character spell: “Why?”
What is called magic is the art of turning stone into gold. Take an utterly ordinary stone, and in the magician’s hands it suddenly becomes radiant, containing infinite possibilities, becoming astonishing, becoming dazzling. That is magic. JOKERs rely on their spells, on joking and trickery, to turn a dull and ordinary world into one full of excitement and wonder.
Many busy modern people think their gaudy world is too rich, and often want to find a poorer kind of life, believing that then their minds will become peaceful. But in fact they have misunderstood. Their world is not too rich; it is precisely too poor. Go and look at those people who truly find pleasure in so-called plain living—look at Walden, A Sand County Almanac—is their world poor? No! On the contrary, how rich their world is! The same scenery, in my eyes, contains only birds, flowers, and trees, whereas in their eyes there are this bird, that bird, this flower, that flower, the woods in the morning, the woods in the evening… Things that seem utterly unremarkable to ordinary people become so rich in their world!
Philosophers are the same; their magic is even more powerful. Simply lying in bed, with no props or scenery whatsoever, using only the most everyday words as toys and uttering simple spells, they conjure up the whole world!
The power of JOKER lies in imagination. If they merely lie in bed and do nothing, their power will tend toward exhaustion; they need to draw magic from this real world.
The source of magic is “communication,” because the JOKER’s job is to tell jokes; without communication, there are no jokes to be told. JOKER can converse with himself, can converse with nature and with things, but in the end he still must converse with other people. “Needling” can greatly strengthen a joke, and the appropriateness of the needling lies in the timing and the occasion. “Needling” is a kind of “unmasking”; by exposing the joke, it brings the joke to fulfillment. Through “needling,” the strange world displayed by JOKER is linked with the real world, and the plain and ordinary world is lit up.
JOKERs run about everywhere on the ship, sometimes climbing up the mast, sometimes diving below the hull, talking with the sailors and the ghosts everywhere, needling them, and being needled by them in turn; thus the JOKER acquires an endless supply of magic. On the ship, JOKER is active everywhere, but his identity is always that of an outsider.
January 16, 2009
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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