“The Hebrew Bible: Psalms” (translated by Robert Alter)

Years ago, Alter started with annotating the Book of Psalms, well before beginning this larger project of translating the entire Hebrew Bible. In this introduction, he first gives the historical context behind the psalms. “The psalm was conceived in the ancient period as a fairly flexible poetic form. Sung and played in the Temple service, it could be a liturgical text in the strict sense. It could also accompany individual ritual acts of thanksgiving, confession, and supplication, or perhaps express these various themes outside a ritual context…. The psalm could serve as a poetic vehicle for philosophic reflection or didactic instruction or the commemoration of national history or for the celebration of the monarch and the seat of the monarchy.” Alter continues by explaining the specific poetic nature of the psalms. “Biblical poetry is based on a parallelism of meaning between the two halves of the line (or, in the minority of lines that are triadic, among the three parts of the line). There is no requirement of rhyme (very occasionally one encounters an ad hoc rhyme) and no regular meter…. Between the two halves of the line there may be some equivalence of meaning (“semantic”), and equivalent number of stressed syllables (“accentual”), and a parallelism of syntax…. Much of the force of ancient Hebrew poetry derives from its rhythmic compactness…. A typical line of biblical poetry has three beats in each verset.” Finally, Alter defends his translation choices, “What I have aimed at in this translation—inevitably, with imperfect success—is to represent Psalms in a kind of English verse that is readable as poetry yet sounds something like the Hebrew—emulating its rhythms wherever feasible, reproducing many of the effects of its expressive poetic syntax, seeking equivalents for the combination of homespun directness and archaizing in the original, hewing to the lexical concreteness of the Hebrew, and making more palpable the force of parallelism that is at the heart of biblical poetry. The translation is also on the whole quite literal.”

In Psalm 8:10, Alter alerts the reader to a familiar biblical structure, the envelope form, but then also how this case is unique, “Lord, our Master,/how majestic Your name in all the earth. Although biblical literature, in poetry or prose, exhibits considerable fondness for envelope structures, in which the end somehow echoes the beginning, this verbatim repetition of the first line as the last, common in other poetic traditions, is unusual.”

Alter’s annotations often point out poetic technique. In Psalm 14:2, he notes, “The LORD from the heavens looked down/ on the sons of humankind/ to see. These three versets are remarkable for involving enjambments from verset to verset (a rare maneuver) and avoiding semantic parallelism, which appears only at the end (“discerning,/ … seeking out”). Thus, the eye is drawn downward in a miniature narrative sequence, following the divine gaze, from the heavens to the human sphere.”

Psalm 22:2 is famous in Christian theology. Alter notes, “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me? These famous words are the ones pronounced by Jesus in his last agony—though in Aramaic, not in the original Hebrew. That moment in Mathew is a kind of pesher, or fulfillment interpretation, of this psalm.”

Alter also is quick to note when his translation differs from more standard versions and gives an explanation for his choices that reveal them far from arbitrary. In Psalm 23:4, he states, “in the vale of death’s shadow. The intent of the translation here is not to avoid the virtually proverbial “in the shadow of the valley of dearth” but rather to cut through the proliferation of syllables in the King James Version, however eloquent, and better approximate the compactness of the Hebrew—begey tsalmawet.”

In Psalm 27:10, Alter points out a poignant verse, “Though my father and mother forsook me,/ the LORD would gather me in. The extravagance of this declaration of trust in God, perhaps the most extreme in the whole Bible, is breathtaking and perhaps even disturbing.”

Often, Alter alerts the reader to unique stylistic moments in the psalms. However, the transition from paganism to monotheism is also a recurring motif throughout the Bible. In Psalm 82:1, he notes, “God takes His stand in the divine assembly. Like the psalms of supplication, this poem is concerned with the infuriating preponderance of injustice in the world. It differs from them, however, not only because God is the principal speaker (from verse 2 through verse 7) but also because the psalm is frankly mythological in character. Alternatively, one could describe it as a poem about the transition from mythology to a monotheistic frame of reference because in the end the gods are rudely demoted from their divine status.”

In Psalm 86:8, the shadow of paganism’s influence in the Bible is again described, “There is none like You among the gods, O Master. This line quotes the Song of the Sea, Exodus 15:11. The move from this quotation to verse 9 and 10 traces the trajectory from henotheism to proper monotheism. In the old poem in Exodus, other gods are imagined as existing but are feeble in power compared to YHWH, God of Israel; here the poet goes on to affirm that “You alone are God” verse 10.”

Alter notes that psalms were often song chorally. In Psalm 98:7, he states, “Let the sea and its fullness thunder. There is a concordance between the human orchestra—in all likelihood, an actual orchestra accompanying the singing of this psalm—with its lutes and rams’ horns, and the orchestra of nature, both groups providing a grand fanfare for God the king. The thundering of the sea in a percussion section, joined by the clapping hands of the rivers, then the chorus of the mountains…. The Israelites chanting the poem’s words of exaltation, to the accompaniment of musical instruments, are invited to imagine their musical rite as part of a cosmic performance.”

Finally, Psalm 114:1 is an example of the layers of meaning often alluded to in biblical literature. Alter reveals, “When Israel came out of Egypt…. This psalm is used to illustrate the fourfold levels of interpreting a sacred text (literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical or mystic)…. The original intention of the psalmist, however, seems clearly literal—which is to say, historical—a celebration of God’s spectacular intervention in history on behalf of the people of Israel.”

“Three Reformers: Luther, Descartes, Rousseau” by Jacques Maritain

Maritain’s book is a set of pen portraits of Luther, Descartes, and Rousseau from his perspective as a reactionary Catholic philosopher. “Three men, each for very different reasons, dominate the modern world, and govern all the problems which torment it: a reformer of religion, a reformer of philosophy, and a reformer of morality.”

Maritain begins with Luther, “It would be astonishing if the extraordinary loss of balance induced in the Christian mind by heresy had not had the most important repercussions in all spheres, particularly in that of the speculative and practical reason. By the very fact that the Lutheran revolution bore on religion, on that which governs all human activity, it was bound to change most profoundly the attitude of the human soul.” Obviously, Maritain is far from an impartial commentator on Luther’s character flaws, “One might sat that that immense disaster for humanity, the Protestant Reformation, was only the effect of an interior trial which turned out badly in a religious who lacked humility…. In origin and principle the drama of the Reformation was a spiritual drama, a battle of the soul…. What first impresses us in Luther’s character is egocentrism…. Luther’s self becomes practically the centre of gravity of everything, especially in the spiritual order…. The Reformation unbridled the human self in the spiritual and religious order…. After Luther decided to refuse obedience to the Pope and break with the communion of the Church, his self is henceforth supreme…. And so in Luther the swollen consciousness of the self is essentially a consciousness of will, of realisation of freedom…. The Reformer, and with him the whole modern world, rises against two mysteries: the mystery of the divine operations, and the mystery of immanent activity and the capacity of spirits.”

Descartes is viewed as the philosopher who ushered in the age of modernity, with its primacy on the individual. “What Descartes really attacks, in his impatience of the servitude of discursive work is the potentiality of our intellect, that is to say, its specifically human weakness, what makes it a reason. So by curious chance the first move of rationalism is to disown reason…. Behold it reconstructed after an intuitive type…. Descartes applies to the certitudes of reason and science the classical solutions of the traditional teaching about the formal motive of faith…. If we could not lean on the guarantee of the truthfulness of the Creator, author of things and author of our mind, we could not know on trustworthy authority that there is a material world, or that there exists outside our thought things in conformity with our ideas…. Rational cognition is for Descartes a sort of natural revelation…. The transition to existence, the grasp of existence by the help of the intelligence alone and starting from pure ideas, forms just the crucial problem of the Cartesian philosophy…. We must arrive at being, we must rejoin it, or deduce it, or beget it, from an ideal principle set or discovered in the depths of thought…. In the modern world, reason turns its back on eternal things and is ordered to the creature. It rates the mathematics of phenomena above theology, science above wisdom.”

Maritain saves his most searing scorn for the philosophical system of Rousseau, “Such is the “sincerity” of Jean-Jacques and his friends. It consists in never meddling with what you find yourself at each moment of your life, for fear of perverting your being. So now all moral labour is tainted…. “You must be yourself”…. On his lips it meant: you must be your feeling, as God is His being…. Every form imposed on the inner world of the human soul, whether it come from nature or grace, is a sacrilegious wrong to nature…. He attributes to himself the privilege of being the still unblemished Man of Nature, without trace or stain of the original corruption due to civilization…. Mimicry of sanctity, changing of the heroic life into a religious enjoyment of self, ambition to reach God and the divine life by sensation and the affective imagination: is not Jean-Jacques the finest specimen of the naturalist mysticism of feeling?” Maritain particularly disdains the fact that Rousseau never turned away from his religion, but simply perverted it. “Rousseau plunged the heart into endless uneasiness, because he hallows the denial of grace. With the philosophers he rejected the gift of Him Who first loved us, but yet he makes an outlet for religious feeling. He turns our hunger for God towards the sacred mysteries of sensation, towards the infinite of matter…. As the search for mystical enjoyment in things which are not God is an endless search, it can stop nowhere…. If we want a label, we may say that Jean-Jacques, like Luther, is a very perfect and unalloyed specimen of anti-intellectualist religious thought.”

“Poetry, Language, Thought” by Martin Heidegger (translated by Albert Hofstadter)

This is a collection of Heidegger’s lectures circling around the themes of art, aesthetics, and language. He begins with the origins of art, “The thingly element in the art work is like the substructure into and upon which the other, authentic element is built…. These three modes of defining thingness conceive of the thing as a bearer of traits, as the unity of a manifold of sensations, as formed matter…. It is precisely in great art—and only such art is under consideration here—that the artist remains inconsequential as compared with the work…. To be a work means to set up a world…. World is never an object that stands before us and can be seen. World is the ever-nonobjective to which we are subject as long as the paths of birth and death, blessing and curse keep us transported into Being…. By the opening up of a world, all things gain their lingering and hastening, their remoteness and nearness, their scope and limits. In a world’s worlding is gathered that spaciousness out of which the protective grace of the gods is granted or withheld…. A work, by being a work, makes space for the spaciousness…. The work as work sets up a world…. Thus art is: the creative preserving of truth in the work. Art then is the becoming and happening of truth…. All art, as the letting happen of the advent of the truth of what is, is, as such, essentially poetry. The nature of art, on which both the art work and the artist depend, is the setting-itself-into-work of truth. It is due to art’s poetic nature that, in the midst of what is, art breaks open an open place, in whose openness everything is other than usual…. If all art is in essence poetry, then the arts of architecture, painting, sculpture, and music must be traced back to poesy…. But poesy is only one mode of the lighting projection of truth, i.e., of poetic composition in this wider sense. Nevertheless, the linguistic work, the poem in the narrower sense, has a privileged position in the domain of the arts…. Language alone brings what is, as something that is, into the Open for the first time…. Language, by naming beings for the first time, first brings beings to word and to appearance.”

Heidegger, in another lecture, deals with poets more directly. “Poets are the mortals who, singing earnestly of the wine-god, sense the trace of the fugitive gods, stay on the gods’ tracks, and so trace for their kindred mortals the way toward the turning…. To be a poet in a destitute time means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods. This is why the poet in the time of the world’s night utters the holy…. What threatens man in his very nature is the willed view that man, by the peaceful release, transformation, storage, and channeling of the energies of physical nature, could render the human condition, man’s being, tolerable for everybody and happy in all respects…. What threatens man in his very nature is the view that technological production puts the world in order, while in fact this ordering is precisely what levels every ordo, every rank, down to the uniformity of production, and thus from the outset destroys the realm from which any rank and recognition could possibly arise…. Who are we? We are those who will, who set up the world as object by way of intentional self-assertion…. Only in the invisible innermost of the heart is man inclined toward what there is for him to love: the forefathers, the dead, the children, those who are to come…. But the interior of uncustomary consciousness remains the inner space in which everything is for us beyond the arithmetic of calculation, and, free of such boundaries, can overflow into the unbounded whole of the Open…. The interiority of the world’s inner space unbars the Open for us. Only what we thus retain in our heart (par coeur), only that do we truly know by heart. Within this interior we are free, outside of the relation to the objects set around us that only seem to give protection…. The real dwelling plight lies in this, that mortals ever search anew for the nature of dwelling, that they must ever learn to dwell. What if man’s homelessness consisted in this, that man still does not even think of the real plight of dwelling as the plight?”

The lectures end by returning explicitly to the theme of language. Heidegger concludes, “Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man…. For, strictly, it is language that speaks. Man first speaks when, and only when, he responds to language by listening to its appeal…. Language beckons us, at first and then again at the end, toward a thing’s nature.”

“The World as Will and Representation: Volume 1” by Arthur Schopenhauer (translated by Christopher Janaway, Judith Norman, and Alistair Welchman)

Schopenhauer’s magnum opus is about the nature of reality and the individual’s place in it. He begins with the understanding, “The subjective correlate of matter (or causality, since the two are the same) is the understanding…. To have cognition of causality is the understanding’s only function, its single capability…. All causality, and therefore all matter, and with it the whole of actuality, exists only for the understanding, through the understanding, and in the understanding…. What the eye, the ear, the hand senses is not an intuition: it is merely data. Only when the understanding proceeds from the effect back to the cause is the world present in intuition, spread out in space, its form capable of change, its matter persisting through time…. Just as the world as representation exists only through the understanding, it exists only for the understanding as well.”

Schopenhauer moves on to the conception of the world. “The world is exactly as it presents itself and it presents itself completely and without reserve as representation, held together by the law of causality. This is its empirical reality. But on the other hand, causality exists only in the understanding and for the understanding. Thus the understanding is always the condition for the actual (i.e. active) world as such and in its entirety: without the understanding this world is nothing.”

Next, Schopenhauer circles back to individual consciousness. “We start out neither from the object nor the subject, but rather from representation as the primary fact of consciousness, whose most essential and primary form is the subject/object dichotomy…. The total and complete relativity of the world as representation, both in its most universal form (subject and object) and the form subordinate to this (the principle of sufficient reason), indicates, as we have already said, that the innermost being of the world is to be sought in a wholly different side of the world, in something utterly distinct from representation…. This new, more highly potentialized consciousness, this abstract reflection of everything intuitive in the non-intuitive concepts of reason is the only thing that gives people the circumspection that so completely distinguishes their consciousness from that of animals…. People are determined by abstract concepts independent of the present moment…. It is only through abstraction that the simultaneous presence of such motives in consciousness can lead to the knowledge that one motive excludes the other and hence permits a comparison of the relative force each exerts on the will. Accordingly, the prevailing motive, in so far as it is decisive, is the considered decision of the will and announces itself as a sure sign of the state of the will.”

Reason is the next concept Schopenhauer tackles. “Reason only ever reproduces in cognition what had already been received by a different means, it does not actually extend our cognition, but only gives it a different form: it allows what is already cognized concretely and intuitively to be cognized abstractly and universally.” Next, Schopenhauer explains philosophy. “Philosophy has the peculiarity that it does not presuppose anything as already known… even the principle of sufficient reason itself…. The very thing that the sciences presuppose and posit as the basis and limit of their explanations is exactly what constitutes the real problem of philosophy…. The principle of non-contradiction only establishes the mutual consistency of concepts, but does not specify the concepts themselves. The principle of sufficient reason explains the connections between appearances, but not the appearances themselves. So philosophy cannot use these principles to search for either an efficient cause or a final cause of the world as a whole…. But such cognition is intuitive, concrete cognition: philosophy’s task is to reproduce this in the abstract, to elevate the succession of transient intuitions and in general everything that the wide-ranging concept of feeling includes (and designates merely negatively as knowledge that is neither abstract nor clear) into permanent knowledge. Accordingly, philosophy must be an abstract statement of the essence of the entire world, of the whole as well as of all its parts…. Philosophy will be a complete recapitulation, a reflection, as it were, of the world, in abstract concepts…. We human beings always lead a second, abstract life alongside our concrete life…. Our abstract life, as it appears before us in rational contemplation, is the calm reflection of the first life and the world it is lived in.”

Schopenhauer moves on to the subjective individual and his will. “His cognition, which upholds and conditions the entire world as representation, is nonetheless completely mediated through a body whose affections, as we have shown, are the starting point for the understanding as it inuits this world. To the pure subject of cognition as such, this body is a representation like any other, an object among objects…. The subject of cognition, appearing as an individual, is given the solution to the riddle: and this solution is will…. Every true act of his will is immediately and inevitably a movement of his body as well…. The entire body is nothing but objectified will…. The will is a priori cognition of the body, and the body is a posteriori cognition of the will…. The will is the most immediate thing in our consciousness…. Only the will is thing in itself…. All objects are the appearance, the visible manifestation, the objecthood of the will…. This thing in itself (we will retain the Kantian expression as a standing formula) can never be an object, because an object is only its appearance and not what it really is…. The concept of will is unique among all possible concepts in that it does not come from appearance, it does not come from mere intuitive representation, but rather comes from within, springs from everyone’s most immediate consciousness…. We are this…. It is only by virtue of time and space that something that is one and the same in essence and concept can nonetheless appear as different, as a multiplicity of coexistent and successive things…. The will as thing in itself lies outside the province of the principle of sufficient reason in all its forms, and therefore has absolutely no ground…. It is one in the sense that it lies outside of time and space, outside the principium individuationis…. The individual, the person, is not will as a thing in itself, but rather an appearance of the will…. Although the will is in itself groundless, its appearance is very much subject to the law of necessity, i.e. the principle of sufficient reason…. Although each motion is an appearance of the will, it must nonetheless have a cause that situates it in relation to a particular time and place, which is to say: not in general, according to its inner essence, but rather as a particular appearance…. What is universal, the common essence of all appearances of a particular sort, what must be presupposed if causal explanation is to have sense or meaning, is the universal force of nature, which can never be more than an occult quality for physics, precisely because this is where aetiological explanation ends and metaphysical explanation begins…. The differences between these original forces (forces that can never be derived from one another) in no way interrupts the unity of that chain of causes and the connections between all its links. The aetiology of nature and the philosophy of nature will never detract from one another…. Aetiology accounts for the causes that necessarily give rise to the particular appearances to be explained…. Philosophy however only thinks about universals, even in nature: here, the original forces themselves are its object.”

Schopenhauer circles back to the world. “This world in which we live and have our being is, in its whole essence, the will through and through, and at the same time representation through and through…. Everyone finds that he is this will that makes up the inner essence of the world, and he also finds that he is the cognitive subject; the whole world is only the representation of the subject and to this extent it exists only in relation to his consciousness, as its necessary bearer.” Now, he goes back to the nature of the will, “In fact the absence of all goals, of all boundaries, belongs to the essence of the will in itself, which is an endless striving…. Every goal that is achieved is once again the beginning of a new course of action, and so to infinity…. Eternal becoming, endless flux belong to the revelation of the essence of the will.”

Schopenhauer riffs on meditation, the subjective perspective, and the nature of the will. “No longer led by the forms of the principle of sufficient reason to pursue merely the relations between things (which in the end always aims at their relation to our own will), if we stop considering the Where, When, Why and Wherefore of things but simply and exclusively consider the What, if we do not allow our consciousness to become engrossed by abstract thinking, concepts of reason; but if, instead of all this, we devote the entire power of our mind to intuition and immerse ourselves in this entirely, letting the whole of consciousness be filled with peaceful contemplation of the natural object that is directly present… we lose ourselves in the object completely, i.e. we forget our individuality, our will, and continue to exist only as pure subject, the clear mirror of the object, so that it is as if the object existed on its own, without anyone to perceive it…. The individual has lost himself in this very intuition: rather, he is the pure, will-less, painless, timeless subject of cognition.” However, Schopenhauer understands that everyday life is not often like this. “As long as our consciousness is filled by our will, as long as we are given over to the pressure of desires with their constant hopes and fears, as long as we are the subject of willing, we will never have lasting happiness or peace…. But when some occasion from the outside or a disposition from within suddenly lifts us out of the endless stream of willing, tearing cognition from its slavery to the will, our attention is no longer directed to the motives of willing but instead grasps things freed from their relation to the will, and hence considers them without interests, without subjectivity, purely objectively; we are given over to the things entirely, to the extent that they are mere representations, not to the extent that they are motives: then suddenly the peace that we always sought on the first path of willing but that always eluded us comes of its own accord, and all is well with us…. The particular intuited thing is at once and inseparably raised to the Idea of its type, and the cognizing individual is raised to the pure subject of will-less cognition; as such, neither stands in the stream of time or any other relations…. Happiness and unhappiness disappear: we are no longer the individual, this is forgotten, we are only the pure subject of cognition: we continue to exist only as the one eye of the world.”

Schopenhauer discusses art. “As we have said, the whole visible world is only the objectivation, the mirror of the will, accompanying it for its self-cognition and indeed, as we will soon see, for the possibility of its redemption; as if, at the same time, the world as representation, viewed on its own breaking it free from the will, letting it be the only thing occupying one’s consciousness, is the most joyful and the only innocent side of life; — we have to consider art as the greater intensification, the more complete development of all this, since it essentially accomplishes the same thing as the visible world itself, only more concentratedly, with deliberateness and clarity of mind, and it therefore may be called the blossom of life.”

Schopenhauer describes infinity, time, and history. “An entire eternity, i.e. an infinite time has elapsed before the present moment, and thus everything that could or should have become already necessarily has become…. Cognition made possible by the principle of sufficient reason can never allow anyone to gain access to the inner essence of things; all we do is chase appearances to infinity…. The truly philosophical way of looking at the world, i.e. the way that leads beyond appearance and provides cognition of the inner essence of the world, does not ask where or whence or why, but instead, always and everywhere, asks only for the what of the world…. In the world of representation, the will finds a mirror in which it can cognize itself with an increasing clarity and perfection that culminates in the human being…. Since the will is the thing itself, the inner content, the essential aspect of the world, while life, the visible world, appearance, is only the mirror of the will; life is as inseparable from the will as a shadow from its body…. The individual comes into being and passes away; but the individual is only appearance, it exists only for cognition that is caught up in the principle of sufficient reason, the principium individuationis…. The present is the only form of all life…. Since the whole human being is only the appearance of his will, nothing can be more mistaken than for him, starting from reflection, to will to be something other than he is: this is a direct contradiction of the will with itself…. Every individual, every human face and its life history is just one more short dream of the infinite spirit of nature, the persistent will to life.”

Finally, Schopenhauer returns to the nature of the world. “Eternal justice is really part of the essence of the world…. The world in all the multiplicity of its parts and forms is the appearance, the objecthood of the one will to life…. The world itself is the world tribunal, the Last Judgment…. The greatest, most important and most significant appearance that the world can show us is not someone who conquers the world, but rather someone who overcomes it…. If the negation of the will has arisen in someone, that person is full of inner joy and true heavenly peace, however poor, joyless and deprived his situation might look from the outside…. It is an imperturbable peace, a profound calm and inner serenity…. Every fulfilled wish we wrest from the world is really like alms that keep the beggar alive today so that he can starve again tomorrow; resignation on the other hand is like an inherited estate: it frees its possessor from all cares forever…. Negation is the only act of the freedom of the will that emerges into appearance.”

“Absence: On the Culture and Philosophy of the Far East” by Byung-Chul Han (translated by Daniel Steuer)

Han has recently been focusing on Asian culture and philosophy. In his monographs he uses his neo-Hegelian framework as a jumping off point to contrast Western thinkers, from Aristotle to Nietzsche, with those from the East, especially Confucius, Lao Tzu, Zhuangzi, and the Buddha. This short book is on the Eastern concept of absence and, particularly, the lack of an individual essence embedded within objects, as well as the impermeability of things. Han begins, “Desire, appetition, is what makes you a someone. A someone in the strong sense has no access to wandering. A someone dwells. Only someone who empties himself and becomes a no one is able to wander. A wanderer is without an I, without a self, without a name. He forgets himself. He does not desire anything and does not hold on to anything. He therefore does not leave a trace. Traces, the imprints left by holding on and desiring, form only in being. The wise man, however, does not touch being.”

A rarity in Han’s older works, here he directly focuses on Eastern philosophy. “Both Daoist and Buddhist thought distrust any substantive closedness that subsists, closes itself off and perseveres. With regard to absencing, understood in an active sense, the Buddhist teaching of kong is certainly related to Daoist emptiness, xu. Both bring about an absencing heart, empty the self into a non-self, into a no one, into someone ‘nameless’…. Zhuangzi therefore teaches that one should associate oneself with the whole world, even to be as large as the world, to elevate oneself to a wide world, instead of clinging on to a small narrative, a small distinction.” Zhuangzi, himself, posits, “But if you were to hide the world in the world, so that nothing could get away, this would be the final reality of the constancy of things.” Han suggests, “Buddhism is ultimately a religion of absence, of fading out and blowing away, a religion of ‘dwelling nowhere’…. Absencing does not empty love and friendship and make them irrelevant. It turns them into bound-less friendliness.”

Han contrasts the Eastern and Western aesthetic, first within the concept of space. “Essences block transitions. Absencing is in-difference…. One rarely finds flowing transitions in the West…. An absencing gaze has an emptying effect, flowing transitions create places of absencing and emptiness…. It widens space. A space makes space for another space.” He continues on beauty, “In the sensibility of the Far East, neither permanence of being [Standigkeit] nor stability [Bestandigkeit] of essences is part of the beautiful. Things that persist, subsist or insist are neither beautiful nor noble. Beautiful is not what stands out or exceeds but what exercises self-restraint or retreats, not what is solid but what hovers. Beautiful are things that carry the traces of nothingness…. What is beautiful is not full presence but a ‘there’ that is coated with an absence, that is made lighter or less by emptiness. What is beautiful is not what is clear or transparent but what is not clearly delineated…. In-difference does not lack anything.” Finally, Han discusses Eastern cuisine, “Rice, without a doubt the centre of Far Eastern cooking, appears empty because it lacks colour. The centre is empty. The bland taste of rice also pervades it with emptiness and absence. Zhuangzi would say that rice is able to cling to any dish, any taste, because it does not have a taste of its own. Rice appears as empty as the white ground of Far Eastern ink drawings…. In the Far East, eating is not a matter of cutting something up with knife and fork but a matter of putting something together with chopsticks.”

Throughout this work, Han insists that absence is not a lacking. “As opposed to the idea of freedom, which is ultimately based on a world-less subject, effortlessness is the result of an in-difference between consciousness and world, between inside and outside.” Zhuangzi suggests, “To forget all things and to forget heaven, that is called being oblivious of self. But whoever is oblivious of self reaches heaven for that very reason.”

Han spends a fair amount of time contrasting the Eastern and Western concepts of the sea and of water. In the East, “the sea symbolizes the world’s immanent space of in-difference, out of which contours of things emerge and into which they flow back again…. ‘Longing’ is alien to the Far East, which does not know of a radical somewhere else for which one could set sail…. Water does not dwell.” In contrast, “Hegel’s perception of water and the sea is everywhere guided by a compulsive desire for solidity…. Western thinking has its source in a desire for a solid ground. It is precisely this compulsive desire for permanence and clarity that makes every deviation, every transformation, look like a threat…. If ‘reason’, as the ‘ultimate touchstone of truth’, sets sail for the beyond of objective intuition, it ends up in a dark space…. Chinese wisdom, by contrast, does not hide. It does not withdraw and is not shrouded in mystery. Instead, it is placed under the light of a particular kind of evidence, of the obviousness of being-so, of a bright being-present.” Han continues, “The world is a verb, or, to be more precise, an infinitive, a happening that is in many respects infinite, that is, undetermined. In positive terms, it points to an endless process of transformation.”

Finally, Han discusses the concept of nobility in Eastern thought. “For what is noble is to hold oneself back, to disappear and to step back behind what is happening without anyone’s intention or intervention, without a will being involved and without emphasis on an act. What is noble is absencing…. One might also say: the subject is a slave who is under the delusion that he is master. What would be noble would be, also from a Buddhist perspective, to escape this delusion of subjectivity. Absencing is a Buddhist ideal, a formula for deliverance. Escaping is deliverance. Doing and clinging on is suffering. Deliverance means escaping from karma, which literally means ‘doing’ or ‘acting’…. Buddhist emptiness (kong) empties essence into absencing…. Essences are distinguishing; they create differences. Absencing, which must be understood as something active, turns difference into in-difference…. I am you because there is no identity, no compulsion towards essence, that distinguishes the I from the you.”