We start with the ancients.
It's a warm summers evening in ancient Greece, and the ancient Greeks were busy aspiring towards lives of individual agency, freedom, debate, fuelling curiosity, philosophy and discovery.
Conversation
Meanwhile in Confucian philosophy, the self is viewed in relation to communities, and interpersonal frictionlessness is the ideal, so that it is the group as a whole that is powerful and agentic.
(me, on the sidelines: "Both?" *nod* "Both.")
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The Greeks valued curiosity for its own sake, but the Chinese stopped investigating phenomena when they became intractable.
“In Confucianism there was no thought of knowing that did not entail some consequence for action.”
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The Greeks: really really cared about ontology; definitions, objects, properties, what was fundamental and what wasn't.
The Chinese: "Nah"
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"objects and people are connected not as pieces of pie, but as ropes in a net"
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The fascination with debate, separation and distinctness meant that the Greeks were unique in being able to recognise the map-territory distinction
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The Ancient Chinese philosophers didn't have a principle of contradiction.
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The Yin-Yang concept and symbol are actually pointing at the idea of "A and not A"
(maybe this where I inherited my penchant for answering "both" to every "or" question)
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Are you a "boxes and arrows" person or an "embedded circles" person?
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(before you ask: both.)
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Got nerdsniped, drew the complement to monk's diagram twitter.com/mechanical_mon…
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