Daoist Encounters with Phenomenology

Thinking Interculturally about Human Existence

David Chai

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781350069558
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350069565
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Eastern Philosophy

This collection is intercultural philosophy at its best. It contextualizes the global significance of the leading figures of Western phenomenology, including Husserl, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Buber and Levinas, enters them into intercultural dialogue with the Daoism of Laozi and Zhuangzi and in doing so, breaks new ground.

By presenting the first sustained analysis of the Daoist worldview by way of phenomenological experience, this book not only furthers our understanding of Daoism and phenomenology, but delves deeper into the roots of human thinking, aesthetic expression, and its impact on the modern social world. The international team of philosophers approach the phenomenological tradition in the broadest sense possible, looking beyond the phenomenological language of Husserl.

With chapters on art, ethics, death and the metaphor of dream and hermeneutics, this collection encourages scholars and students in both Asian and Western traditions to rethink their philosophical bearings and engage in meaningful intercultural dialogue.

PART ONE

Precursory Encounters: Unearthing Fertile Seeds

1

Daoism and Hegel on Painting the Invisible Spirit:

To Color or Not?

David Chai

1. Introduction

To look upon the world is to see an astonishing array of colors. Indeed, the colors that fall under our gaze bewitch our eyes and intoxicate our hearts and yet, if we were to sweep away said coloration, turning the world into a monochrome palette, would we still be enraptured by its bedazzling visuality? What would we make of a world lacking the emotional, psychological, and religious signification of color? Based on the bond between color and these states of human realization, we confidently ascribe each an array of identificatory markers. With this toolkit at our disposal, we take the world at large to be constructed in a similar manner, forgetting the fact that all outward manifestations of inner potential are fleeting in nature; moreover, what makes each thing a particular thing—its spirit—is colorless. The foggy translucency of spirit is not because it is impervious to color; rather, by embodying colors in their collectivity, spirit colors the world such that it transcends conventional representation. The challenge, therefore, lies in conveying spirit’s resistance to literal expression.

One aspect of spirit commonly seen in the world’s great works of art is freedom—not of the social, political, or religious kind, but that belonging to humanity as a whole—and nowhere is freedom felt more than in Nature. The artwork that merely imitates Nature, however, is but a decorative image insofar as it lacks spirit. Ornamental art fails to encourage its viewer to contemplate its painted scene, even though it might be pleasurable to look at, because it does not bring said viewer a sense of inner freedom. In order for art to be spiritually transformative, it needs to uplift our sense of self-awareness, in terms of not just who we are as individuals, but who we are as members of the collective being of spirit.

In discussing painting and spirit, one cannot but turn to the German philosopher Hegel. In his Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art (hereafter, Aesthetics), Hegel proclaims painting has united what was formerly two distinct spheres of art: that of the external environment (architecture), and that of the embodied spirit (sculpture). The color of a painting, he says, gives the spiritual inner-life its appearance by rendering the invisible visible. While this chapter is not concerned with Hegel’s account of the history of art, nor with his discussion of the different styles of art or particular artists, it is interested in exploring his thesis that a painter literally colors the living sensuousness of an object. Neither drawing technique nor the clever use of light and shadow can match the effect color has on spirit. While Hegel’s discourse on the role of color in painting is an admittedly minor aspect of his corpus, when compared to the writings of Alexander Baumgarten (1714–62) and Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), it is just as stimulating and phenomenologically innovative.

Many centuries before Hegel, Chinese painters had come to an altogether different conclusion regarding painting and color. For them, inner-spirit was brought to life through brushwork, not color. Indeed, the influence of Daoist philosophy on Chinese painting made color antithetical to the naturalness of the depicted scene. What is of utmost importance is the spiritual resonance between the painter and her subject. Although color was used in early Chinese painting, it was done so sparingly in order to avoid masking the brushwork delimiting the figures or scenes therein. Indeed, the blank canvas was just as important to a painting as its content, so much so it became a vital component of the finished work. In this way, when early Chinese artists speak of the harmony between the white canvas and the black ink applied to its surface, they were pointing to a human–cosmic harmony reflective of the non-coloration of Nature. Daoist-inspired painting thus draws observers into the collective spirit of Dao qua ultimate reality by freeing them to partake in the naturalness of the painter’s heart-mind. In what follows, we will compare the Hegelian and Daoist appropriation (or lack thereof) of color and how it bears upon the standing of spirit in both its human and worldly form.

2. Spirit as Art’s Foundation

Amongst his writings on art, Hegel’s analysis of painting in his Aesthetics has received an inappropriately low amount of scholarly attention.¹ Although he might not formally belong to the phenomenological tradition associated with Husserl, Hegel nevertheless speaks of the coloration of painting in a manner that can be construed as phenomenological. His approach to art is decidedly European in orientation however, and while Hegel claims “the Chinese, Indians, and Egyptians acquired fame on the score of their paintings,”² he undermines himself when he says “the Chinese, Indians, and Egyptians, in their artistic shapes, images of gods, and idols, never get beyond formlessness or a bad and untrue definiteness of form.”³ The reason why they were incapable of mastering true beauty, Hegel says, is because the content of their art lacks that which is absolute in itself (i.e., spirit). One must then ask, what is this true beauty Hegel speaks of? In his Aesthetics, he writes that painting has united the disciplines of architecture and sculpture through its use of color; to be specific, the painter colors spirit by making visible its invisible nature. This bringing to light what was formerly dark is spiritual resonance, what Hegel calls shining (scheinen). We will interrogate Hegel’s claim that the painter colors the living sensuousness of a subject via the Daoist doctrine that color handicaps access to spirit. To support this claim, it will be argued that the non-coloration of Daoist painting allows for a deeper level of harmonization between the painter and her subject such that the latter marks the naturalness of the former’s heart-mind (xin

). In this way, Chinese monochrome painting transcends color thereby bringing it and those who gaze upon it to a higher realm—not the shining of spirit as Hegel would have it—but that which gives rise to spirit: Dao

.

The ancient Chinese term fo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Text
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Editor’s Introduction
• Part One: Precursory Encounters: Unearthing Fertile Seeds
• 1 Daoism and Hegel on Painting the Invisible Spirit: To Color or Not?
• 2 Two Portrayals of Death in Light of the Views of Brentano and Early Daoism
• 3 In the Light of Heaven before Sunrise: Zhuangzi and Nietzsche on Transperspectival Experience
• Part Two: Early Encounters: Nourishing the Sprouts of Possibility
• 4 The Pre-objective and the Primordial: Elements of a Phenomenological Reading of Zhuangzi
• 5 Martin Buber’s Phenomenological Interpretation of Laozi’s Daodejing
• 6 Martin Buber’s Dao
• 7 The Dao of Existence: Jaspers and Laozi
• Part Three: Mature Encounters: A Forest of Ideas
• 8 Heidegger and Daoism: A Dialogue on the Useless Way of Unnecessary Being
• 9 Heidegger and Zhuangzi: The Transformative Art of the Phenomenological Reduction
• 10 The Reader’s Chopper: Finding Affinities from Gadamer to Zhuangzi on Reading
• 11 Unknowing Silence in Laozi’s Daodejing and Merleau-Ponty
• Part Four: A Most Urgent Encounter: Re-Rooting Our Futural Selves
• 12 Grounding Phenomenology in Laozi’s Daodejing: The Anthropocene, the Fourfold, and the Sage
• Index
• Copyright