/lit/ - Literature

>The moral can be established only when the human is already in-the-world, and being in-the-world only gains its profound meaning in the presence of a cosmology or principles of heaven— otherwise it would be only something like the animal-Umwelt relation described by Jakob von Uexkull. A few pages later, Mou also affirmed that, in Doctrine of the Mean and Yi Zhuang, ‘cosmic order is moral order’. In Mou's interpretation of the whole tradition of Neo-Confucianism, then, this unity of the cosmic order and the moral order is always central, although, as we shall see (§18), because of his affinity to the work of Kant, for Mou xin (‘heart’) is posited as the absolute beginning. What we wish to emphasise here is that the unity between the cosmos and the moral is characteristic of ancient Chinese philosophy, and that this unity was further developed in the Neo-Confucianism that emerged from the time of the late Tang dynasty.

and it is the question for us too, in a way. it certainly explains, at least in part, the eleventh-hour appearance of Dr. JBP, who is attempting to right the cosmic balance in his own time and space by going back to the foundations of the Western experience by way of Jung, Nietzsche, Eliade and others. peterson wants nothing more than a moral order or a cosmic-theological dimension of human life, and he’s right to point out that the absence of this leads to technological nightmares of modernist political experimentation, to tyrannical societies of control.

it’s not like he’s all the way wrong either. i don't think he is. but it’s worth noting also that the West doesn’t have quite the same feeling for the role of the Emperor as sage-king. the West has a regard for the ontological primacy of the individual that the East does *not* have. but these are different cultures also, and it’s not like either is immune to going off the deep end.

and this is the situation in which i think it is best to situate ourselves. postmodernity no longer has anything like an exclusively Western meaning. it gets wrapped up with capital and technology, and can all-too-easily just become a strain of virulent nihilism. in 2016 this hit a kind of crescendo with Trump that is still playing out. people today are saying No to a lot of things, with no idea about what they might say Yes to. and it leads to fifty groups of anarcho-fascist meme-tribes all labeling each other as being fascist, and all of them being in their own ways correct.

but a moral order and a unity between individual and cosmos is neither exclusively Western nor Eastern. nor is it *reducible* via technics to either one or the other, or *to neither* and a pure abstraction. and i don't even think nick land would disagree with this.