Suixuan

标签：wilderness

  • The Shameful Greek Spirit

    Culture & Public Commentary

    The Shameful Greek Spirit

    The London Olympics are over, and I should also turn my jet lag back to the timezone of my graduation thesis. This essay can count as a bridge between what came before and what comes after~ Let me give a heads-up first: this should be a fairly loose, freewheeling conversation, not entirely centered on the title. During the Olympics there were obviously two kinds of people on Weibo: those watching the Olympics, and those not watching the Olympics. Among the latter were a considerable number of people who were either cursing the Olympics or using the Olympics as a pretext to curse the system. Basically speaking, the left in China…

    Chinafreedomautobiographypursuit
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  • Nature as Raw Meat or Bacon

    History of Science & Scholarship

    Nature as Raw Meat or Bacon

    Today in discussion class, Liu Ping’s paper, which he will be presenting next week, came up. He wants to write on “wilderness and flesh,” attempting an environmental-philosophical reading of Merleau-Ponty’s later philosophy. It sounds very interesting. This important concept in Merleau-Ponty’s later philosophy is usually translated as “flesh,” but Liu Ping said this translation is not good, because it misses a great deal of meaning. But don’t be like Liu Zhe: since we are using Chinese to do phenomenological thinking, rather than working as mere scholars of texts—and foreign scholars of texts at that—to do philological research, of course we should still ultimately translate these concepts. Even if some meaning…

    sciencephenomenologyenvironmentnature
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  • Planting Trees and Reforesting Is Not as Good as Preserving Wasteland

    Culture & Public Commentary

    Planting Trees and Reforesting Is Not as Good as Preserving Wasteland

    At the time of Arbor Day, I had finished listening to the Keke Forum and was about to write this piece, but after jotting down a title, for some reason I put it aside and forgot about it… A while ago I saw a news item about a “barren mountain painted green” incident, saying that somewhere they had smeared an entire barren mountain with paint and counted that as greening; it really was laughable. Later I heard that this was all because of “feng shui.” Actually, if one really planted trees out of feng shui concerns, that would instead be a very good thing! I think if you rummaged through…

    cultureChinatraditionenvironment
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