This is a reworking of an older essay from a previous blog of mine. It is overtly antagonistic and politically controversial, and as such not in keeping with my new direction. The tone is quite sharp, possibly even offensive and out of character with what I want to produce here on this site. For these things I apologise.
A great strength of traditional (principally, though not exclusively Confucian) Chinese philosophy is in it’s basic distinction between substance and function. This emphasis on the practical and dynamic character of existence contrasts to a more abstract and sclerotic vein of western thought pre-enlightenment. This western train is one which rather separates existence into substance and properties or form, matter and activity (Aristotelianism).
The importance therefore in this generalized depiction of Chinese thought has been to observe and acknowledge the dynamism and the changes that appear without undue stress on the ‘substance’ or ‘being’ which manifests the changes. In fact, when Buddhism reached and was further developed in China, the doctrine of emptiness as the principle of everything could easily and very pragmatically be integrated to produce a philosophical attitude which was very open to accepting (if not institutionally so – Confucianism was for a very long time overbearingly conservative) change and renovation.
The importance of distinguishing substance from function is painfully relevant to the current events concerning Palestine. Germany, the locus of the most monstrous iteration of ethno-nationalism and fascism in the 20th century has been slavishly supportive of Israeli Zionist crimes against the people of Palestine. This pivots on the weakness of the western public consciousness in separating the substance of ethno-nationalism from it’s function.
Ethno-nationalism is simply a cloak whereby the ruling class of a country, in concord with the international ruling class based out of the imperial homelands and their centres of capital, conjures up a heady brew of identitarian aesthetics, symbology, fictionalised and romanticised history, and other assorted follies of blood-mysticism to bewitch the population into a false solidarity with their ruling class and so prevent rational revolution which is the constant crest of change. This is always the function of ethno-nationalism.
It’s substance is a fabricated phantom which can be cobbled together in any country or region. It doesn’t matter to its function in this situation that it’s German iteration took as part of its ghastly substance anti-Semitism, while it’s Israeli progeny uses Zionism and symbols of historical Judaism. Rather, the function (and grisly consequences) of the two iterations is essentially common.
But because of the aesthetics of substance in this case, any opposition to the Zionist dispossession and now full on extermination of the Palestinians, can be labelled as anti-Semitism and thus used to assault the good conscience of the people of Europe and Germany in particular. That is a weakness for which the Chinese philosophical attitude pointed to above would be useful to adopt in overcoming
A further point on the obsession with ‘identity’ as a function rather than substance in our present context.
The great Confucian philosopher, Wang Yangming, held that the superior person can regard themselves as forming one body with Heaven and Earth (the universe), and can regard all other people as family, while the lesser person is stuck focusing on divisions, ephemerality, and excuses for pettiness and selfishness. This I think has significance for what has become known as ‘identity’ politics, or identitarianism in the west. It seems to pervade all across the online political spectrum. Since my familiarity is with the left, I will direct my criticism that way.
Those who are now peddling such alike synthetic fare as the new varieties of ‘communist traditionalism’ or ‘conservative communism’ , as well as not actually transcending identity-politics, appear to me to be simply victims of despair (set to become future victimizers) and what they are proffering to be the new iterations of distracting post-modernist babble-
From the Frankfurt school and Foucault to la Rouchism or Alexander Dugin inspired trends and fads, these are all bends in the same polluted river, becoming slower, shallower, and more choked up as it flows.
And now to substance in relation to political worldviews of the left.
There is a pitfall for those who fill all history with a progressive significance, just as harmful and misleading as the one for the historical nihilist.
From an abstracted distance, the roar, the colour and clamour of an unfolding historical narrative is admittedly emboldening and edifying, but can also be so beguiling as to rip the human of their humanity. By humanity I mean what is there in and of us prior to intellectualisation; natural empathy and all related impulses. Love the people, but with a heart that is not merely mechanical.
It is not that I advocate a kind of regressive sentimentalism. This latter itself is a conceit of the ego, just as much as the willing abandonment into popular passion, which is often excused by appealing to historical necessity. Both, though they may cite rationality and reality as legitimising them, are forms of subjective idealism with an overcoat, or the aesthetics of ‘objectivity’.
The experience of living and dying, of actual life, death and suffering should not be glossed over with exciting narratives, however otherwise beneficial, which glibly assert “the death of the old giving birth to the new”. That is reductionism of the ideological kind.
What kind of dialectical process (and I’m not saying there isn’t one) is served by the bloody extermination of the people of Palestine by the latest, longest lasting, and most hideously successful manifestation of European national-mysticism-as-a-tool-for-imperialism (Israel)? What dialectic was served by the holocaust of the 20th century? What was the nature of the old giving birth to the new in that instance? An inhumanity birthing inhumanity.
Further, what future-history will be born out of the refusal of our species to universally acknowledge the great, impending threat from our careless use of the Earth's natural, and limited, resources? The answer is of course, none, if by history we mean human history. A balance must be maintained between the powerful rational and the bewitchingly romantic lenses through which human existence is viewed, and the innate, natural, affective and pre-intellectual awareness of our dependent existence, inextricable from the matrix of life on Earth
When one appeals to the iron laws of history and the inevitable progress of humanity through overcoming contradictions by necessity, I caution that what we move to become through our active participation in the unfolding of this historical dialectic must be a humane humanity. If not -barbarism and annihilation.