Embodiment Theory And Chinese Philosophy

This book analyses some of the seminal texts of the Chinese tradition in light of the embodied tradition: the Analects of Confucius, the Zhuangzi, and the Treatise on Music. Margus Ott's study shows how they exemplify aspects of embodiment theory while highlighting others that have been neglected in contemporary work. Ott also develops far-reaching possibilities of an embodied philosophy. The embodied understanding did not go unchallenged in Ancient China. There were important counter-currents, most notably the Mohists and the so-called Legalists. It has been argued that this challenge set the Chinese philosophical tradition in motion. By using embodiment theory Ott demonstrates how these ideas can be seen as a decontextualizing tendency of thought that plays an important role in human affairs.

This volume examines several theoretical concerns of embodiment in the context of Asian religious practice. Looking at both subtle and spatial bodies, it explores how both types of embodiment are engaged as sites for transformation, transaction and transgression. Collectively bridging ancient and modern conceptualizations of embodiment in religious practice, the book offers a complex mapping of how body is defined. It revisits more traditional, mystical religious systems, including Hindu Tantra and Yoga, Tibetan Buddhism, Bon, Chinese Daoism and Persian Sufism and distinctively juxtaposes these inquiries alongside analyses of racial, gendered, and colonized bodies. Such a multifaceted subject requires a diverse approach, and so perspectives from phenomenology and neuroscience as well as critical race theory and feminist theology are utilised to create more precise analytical tools for the scholarly engagement of embodied religious epistemologies. This a nuanced and interdisciplinary exploration of the myriad issues around bodies within religion. As such it will be a key resource for any scholar of Religious Studies, Asian Studies, Anthropology, Sociology, Philosophy, and Gender Studies.

This book seeks to engage Chinese philosophy to reframe existing Western scholarship in the fields of gender, body, and aesthetics. The assembled essays cover traditional and current global issues related to Chinese female bodies by addressing the following questions: Does Confucianism rule out the capacity of women as moral subjects, and hence, as aesthetic subjects? Do forms of Chinese philosophy in some ways contribute or correspond to the patriarchal Confucian culture? In what ways can Chinese philosophy provide alternative perspectives sought by Western feminist scholars? Professor Man uses an interdisciplinary approach to explore feminist philosophy through the issues of the body, aesthetical representation and gender politics, which are simultaneously historical and contextual. The first section of the book, "Body Discourses in Chinese Philosophy", brings in theoretical and philosophical discussions of Western traditions such as those of Plato, Descartes, and Kant, to examine their views on body and mind and how the Chinese philosophical ideas offered by Confucians and Daoists provide alternative body ontologies for critical feminist practices. The second section, "Chinese Bodies, Aesthetics and Art", reviews female aesthetical representations in classical traditional Chinese works ranging from The Books of Songs, women's embroidery, sexuality and suggested ways of kissing, and the contemporary body art represented by the controversial body artist He Chengyao. These chapters demonstrate the intertwining relationship among body, sexuality, aesthetics and the ascribed gendered roles in social environments. The third section, "Chinese Bodies and Gender Matters", aims to unfold the changing perceptions of femininity from imperial China to contemporary China. Case studies touch on female body ideals in the literary fantasies in late Ming, in the iron girls in Communist China, and in the Olympics Hoopla at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. This section also discusses Hong Kong women's fashion in the 1960s and how their bodies were shaped by colonial politics. Finally, the subject of sex and emotion in the development of ethical discourse of Chinese female sex workers from late Qing to contemporary society is discussed alongside the impact of the global economy on female beauty today. Overall, this book discusses new conceptual models that feminist scholars are using to displace dualism and emancipate notions of the body from Cartesian mechanistic models and metaphors. The different chapters review traditional and contemporary alternatives to understanding female bodies in Chinese society. Eva Man is professor of humanities and creative writing at Hong Kong Baptist University. She publishes widely in comparative aesthetics, feminist philosophy, cultural studies, art, and cultural criticism.

Reconsidering the Life of Power examines Chinese perspectives on bodily self-cultivation and explores how these can be resources for working past the ritual scripts of everyday life. In recent decades, European and American thinkers like Michel Foucault and Judith Butler have called attention to the way that people live out ritual scripts in order to be recognized by other people such that they might survive. Philosophers in China, however, have a long history of considering ritual not just in terms of confining power structures but also in terms of empowering artistic self-cultivation. Out of this convergence, a response to Butler's The Psychic Life of Power becomes possible, along with fascinating implications for improving real-world experience. James Garrison looks at art and aesthetics as a way of responding positively to the vicissitudes of everyday life. This means reframing ritual practice in domains like meditation, yoga, tai chi chuan, dance, calisthenics, fashion, and beyond as a kind of work that delves into and unearths society's long-accruing unconscious habits in a way that makes conscious one's everyday speech, comportment, countenance, and presence. The everyday body thus becomes an artwork, speaking in novel ways to the everyday self by revealing an alternative to the programmed ritual scripts through which most of us tend to survive. Reconsidering the Life of Power offers a compelling contemporary intercultural perspective on body, art, self, and society that bridges theory and practice by providing an actionable yet deeply philosophical approach to enhancing life.

"Chinese philosophy has long recognized the importance of the body and emotions in extensive and diverse self-cultivation traditions. Philosophical debates about the relationship between mind and body are often described in terms of mind-body dualism and its opposite, monism or some kind of "holism." Monist or holist views agree on the unity of mind and body, but with much debate about what kind, whereas mind-body dualists take body and mind to be metaphysically distinct entities. The question is important for several reasons. Several humanistic and scientific disciplines recognize embodiment as an important dimension of the human condition. One version, the problem of mind-body dualism, is central to the history of both philosophy and religion. Some account of relations between body and mind, spirit or soul is also central to any understanding of the self. Recent work in cognitive and neuroscience underscores the importance of our somatic experience for how we think and feel"--

This book uses Western philosophical tradition to make a case for a form of thinking properly associated with ancient China. The book's thesis is that Chinese thinking is concrete rather than formal and abstract, and this is gathered in a variety of ways under the symbol "body thinking." The root of the metaphor is that the human body has a kind of intelligence in its most basic functions. When hungry the body gets food and eats, when tired it sleeps, when amused it laughs. In free people these things happen instinctively but not automatically. The metaphor of body thinking is extended far beyond bodily functions in the ordinary sense to personal and communal life, to social functions and to cultivation of the arts of civilization. As the metaphor is extended, the way to stay concrete in thinking with subtlety becomes a kind of ironic play, a natural adeptness at saying things with silences. Play and indirection are the roads around formalism and abstraction. Western formal thinking, it is argued, can be sharpened by Chinese body thinking to exhibit spontaneity and to produce healthy human thought in a community of cultural variety.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 293-299) and index.

In this collection of original essays, international scholars put Asian traditions, such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism, into conversation with one or more contemporary feminist philosophies, founding a new mode of inquiry that attends to diverse voices and the complex global relationships that define our world. These cross-cultural meditations focus on the liberation of persons from suffering, oppression, illusion, harmful conventions and desires, and other impediments to full personhood by deploying a methodology that traverses multiple philosophical styles, historical texts, and frames of reference. Hailing from the discipline of philosophy in addition to Asian, gender, and religious studies, the contributors offer a fresh take on the classic concerns of free will, consciousness, knowledge, objectivity, sexual difference, embodiment, selfhood, the state, morality, and hermeneutics. One of the first anthologies to embody the practice of feminist comparative philosophy, this collection creatively and effectively engages with global, cultural, and gender differences within the realms of scholarly inquiry and theory construction.

This book presents a systematic account of the role of the personal spiritual ideal of wu-wei--literally "no doing," but better rendered as "effortless action"--in early Chinese thought. Edward Slingerland's analysis shows that wu-wei represents the most general of a set of conceptual metaphors having to do with a state of effortless ease and unself-consciousness. This concept of effortlessness, he contends, serves as a common ideal for both Daoist and Confucian thinkers. He also argues that this concept contains within itself a conceptual tension that motivates the development of early Chinese thought: the so-called "paradox of wu-wei," or the question of how one can consciously "try not to try." Methodologically, this book represents a preliminary attempt to apply the contemporary theory of conceptual metaphor to the study of early Chinese thought. Although the focus is upon early China, both the subject matter and methodology have wider implications. The subject of wu-wei is relevant to anyone interested in later East Asian religious thought or in the so-called "virtue-ethics" tradition in the West. Moreover, the technique of conceptual metaphor analysis--along with the principle of "embodied realism" upon which it is based--provides an exciting new theoretical framework and methodological tool for the study of comparative thought, comparative religion, intellectual history, and even the humanities in general. Part of the purpose of this work is thus to help introduce scholars in the humanities and social sciences to this methodology, and provide an example of how it may be applied to a particular sub-field.