“Invitation to a Banquet” by Fuchsia Dunlop

This book is Chinese history seen through the lens of regional Chinese cuisine. “If cooking was key to the evolution of humans in general, only the Chinese have placed it at the very core of their identity…. The Book of Rites noted that some of the wild tribes of the east and south were not only tattooed, but ate food untouched by fire…. Some foreigners were less uncouth than others. While those who were beyond the pale could be described as ‘raw’ (sheng), more amenable barbarians were ‘cooked’ (shu).”

Dunlop begins by describing the setup of a standard meal. “A Chinese meal normal consists of fan, usually rice in the south, plus cai (or song in Cantonese) which means dishes, which is to say ‘everything else’. The Chinese character cai means both ‘dish’ and, literally, ‘vegetable’; it is built from the sign for ‘grass’ above the sign for ‘pick’ or ‘gather’, which itself is a pictogram of a hand over a plant…. Yet however delicious and extravagant the dishes, their ultimate purpose is to accompany the staple grain, or, as people say, to ‘send the rice down’ (xia fan)…. Fan can mean any kind of cooked grain, but there is a traditional hierarchy of cereals. Rice is most highly prized for southerners, while northerners prefer wheat in the form of dumplings, noodles, pancakes and breads. Less desirable are the so-called ‘course’ or ‘miscellaneous’ grains (cu liang or za liang) eaten by the poor and in marginal areas, including maize, sorghum and oats. At the bottom of the pile lie starchy tubers such as potatoes and sweet potatoes, which are normally only eaten as staple foods during famines or because of dire poverty.”

The basic format of a typical Chinese dish is detailed thus, “Chinese ate food that was transformed through cutting into small chopstickable pieces. One ancient term for cooking was ge peng — ‘to cut and to cook’. The habit of cutting food into slices, slivers or dice was, of course, inseparable from the habit of eating with chopsticks, and the two evolved together…. Most Chinese dishes are blends of two or more ingredients cut into similarly shaped pieces and cooked together…. Much everyday Chinese cooking involves vegetables cooked with morsels of meat. Perhaps the archetypal modern Chinese supper dish is a few slivers of pork stir-fried with garlic chives, bamboo shoots or any other vegetable…. You don’t even need much of the meat as such, because even a trace of pork can enhance the taste of vegetables: a dash of pork broth, a scattering of cracklings or a spoonful of lard as the cooking medium…. To be Chinese was not just to eat cooked food; it was also to eat grain. Describing the barbarian tribes on the fringes of the Chinese heartland, the Book of Rites mentioned, besides their tattoos and their weird habit of eating food untouched by fire, that some of them didn’t eat grain.”

Chinese also appreciate different aspects of food than those in the West. “When Chinese people discuss something they have eaten, they rarely omit mention of its mouthfeel…. Achieving textural perfection is a key concern for any cook worth his salt…. The Chinese not only relish a much greater range of mouthfeels than most westerners; they also appreciate contrast…. This creative exploration of texture allows the Chinese to eat not only a much greater range of ingredients than most westerners, but a much greater range of parts of those foods…. Elite Peking duck restaurants famously offer banquets made from ‘every part of the duck but its quack’, from webs to tongues, hearts to gizzards, each part prepared in a different way…. In most places in China, offal is still more expensive than meat.” 

Another aspect of Chinese cooking is how the ingredients that are used are prepared, “Chinese chefs always try to strike a balance between ‘root flavours’ (benwei) and ‘blended’ or ‘harmonized’ flavours (tiaowei) — the latter meaning flavours that are created through the addition of seasonings…. Often, dishes like [the former] have the word ‘clear’ (qing) in their names as a reminder that the character of the main ingredient should shine out, clear and bright, uncluttered by extraneous elements…. The most elitist food in China is often the most understated…. Even within regions, the higher you ascend the social scale, the lighter the flavours…. A light soup (tang) is an essential part of almost every Chinese meal. In fact, a kind of shorthand for a basic meal is ‘four dishes and a soup’ (si cai yi tang)…. At simple suppers in Chinese homes, a light broth may be the only liquid refreshment, serving the same function as a glass of water or wine at a western meal.”

Finally, Dunlop describes the most essential aspect in the preparation of Chinese food. “The crux of Chinese cooking is what is known as huohou, the command of heat, in terms both of intensity and duration (the first part of the word, huo, means ‘fire’, while the second can mean ‘waiting’ and/or ‘watching’)…. Written or printed Chinese recipes tend not to specify timings in seconds or minutes because this would be impossible, yet their instructions for huohou are meticulous…. The pressure on a chef working at the wok range in a high-level restaurant with an exacting clientele is unbelievably intense. If he is cooking for discerning Chinese guests, he will know that they expect him, with every dish, to hit all the targets of se xiang wei xing — ‘colour, fragrance, flavour, form’ — each of which depends on his command of huohou.”

Dunlop concludes, “There are some commonalities to Chinese cuisines: the use of chopsticks and the cutting of food into small pieces, the centrality of fermented legumes and tofu, the lack of dairy foods, the ubiquity of steaming and stir-frying, the concept of a meal consisting of fan and cai. But beyond these generalities, Chinese local and regional traditions are so diverse that they resist a unifying definition…. Areas that are now fully integrated and of the utmost culinary significance like the Cantonese south were once regarded as beyond the pale: primitive swamplands filled with snake-eating barbarians…. China, with its vast geographical diversity, is more like a continent than a nation. Within the borders of post-Qing China are many terrains and climates…. During the Song Dynasty, the key principles of healthy eating were thought to be moderation and ‘naturalness’ (ziran).”

“Exact Thinking in Demented Times” by Karl Sigmund

This book is a history of the Vienna Circle, a group of philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists who met regularly every Thursday evening in a private, by-invitation-only, seminar at the University of Vienna, followed by drinks and more debating late into the night at a neighborhood coffeehouse. Together, the members of the Vienna Circle originated and molded the idea of logical positivism, while having the ambitious goal of unifying all human knowledge into one grand discipline. Their program was anti-metaphysical and anti-theological to its core. The Circle’s manifesto stated, “the scientific worldview is characterized not so much by theses of its own, but rather by its basic attitude, its points of view, its direction of research…. In science there are no ‘depths’; instead, there is surface everywhere. All experience forms a complex network, which cannot always be surveyed in its totality and which often can only be grasped in parts. Everything is accessible to Man; and Man is the measure of all things…. The scientific worldview serves life, and life embraces it.”

The Vienna Circle was formed in 1924 by philosopher Moritz Schlick, mathematician Hans Hahn, and sociologist Otto Neurath. The Circle hammered away at the tension between science and metaphysical philosophy. “Clarification of the traditional philosophical problems sometimes leads to their unmasking as pseudo-problems, and other times converts them into empirical problems, which can thereby be subjected to the methods of experimental science. The task of philosophical work lies in this type of clarification of problems and statements, rather than in the crafting of special ‘philosophical’ statements.” The intellectual milieu in Vienna during the inter-war years was vibrant. Scholars from all over the Empire, as well as Germany, and the rest of Europe strove to get chairs at the University of Vienna. 

One particular inspiration for the Vienna Circle was Ernst Mach. He wrote, “all of science tries to replace or economize experience by mental models, since models are easier to deal with than experiences, and can even replace them in some situations…. By recognizing science’s fundamentally economical nature, we rid science of all mysticism…. [However,] we should not confuse the foundations of the real world with the intellectual props that serve to evoke that world on the stage of our thoughts.” Mach was an anti-Kantian. He did not believe in the “Thing-in-Itself”. For him, there was no independent object absent of our sensations. The whole world was made up of sensory perceptions. The physicist Mach was to have a great debate with the mathematician Ludwig Boltzmann on whether atoms existed. Mach was skeptical, as atoms, in his day, could not be seen, detected, or experienced. Boltzmann was less of a radical empiricist. He stated, “what the brain is to man, mathematics is to science…. No equation ever represents any phenomenon with absolute precision. Each equation is an idealization, stressing commonalities and neglecting differences, and therefore going beyond experience.” Despite his best efforts, he was also a closet metaphysician. “Metaphysics appears to exert an irresistible charm on the human mind, and this temptation, despite all our vain attempts to lift the veil, has not lost any of its intensity. It seems impossible to squelch our inborn urge to philosophize.” Anguished to the end, he would hang himself from a window pane while on vacation. Hertz retorted, “science has progressed almost more through deciding what to ignore than through deciding what to study.” Albert Einstein’s breakthroughs in physics, particularly his special and general theories of relativity, his principle of equivalence, and his discovery that light consists of particles, David Hilbert’s mathematics, particularly his extrication of geometry from the human physical world, and Bertrand Russell’s new logic, particularly his paradoxes, were all vital inspirations for the Circle.

One motto of the early Vienna Circle was that facts should replace human intuitions when they disagreed. As such, in math, Hahn’s work on infinite dimensions was a step in that direction. In philosophy, Schlick pronounced, “after thus sentencing theoretical philosophy to death, life itself urged me to delve into the most important part of practical wisdom, the study of man and the human condition, something I had always maintained belonged to science rather than philosophy.” The philosopher Schlick became one of Einstein’s proteges and popularizers, writing a book on spacetime, which expounded Einstein’s combination of gravity with geometry.

Ludwig von Wittgenstein was to fundamentally change the direction of the Vienna Circle, although he never attended a single meeting. The Circle became enamored with the analysis of language. Two times in a row the Circle read aloud and analyzed every word in Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus” line by line, first under the suggestion of Kurt Reidemeister, then under Rudolf Carnap. Carnap was insistent that all philosophy had to be distilled by the new logic being espoused by Russell, Frege, and Wittgenstein. “If philosophy is willing to follow the path of science (in the strictest sense), then it will not be able to do so without this thoroughly efficient instrument for clarifying concepts and cleaning up problematic situations.” The Circle adopted Wittgenstein’s phrase from the “Tractatus” as its own shibboleth, “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

Wittgenstein, himself, felt that “philosophy is the discipline that deals with all those propositions that are assumed to be true without proof by the various sciences.” His book’s aim was to “draw a limit to thinking, or rather- not to thinking, but to the expression of thoughts; for, in order to draw a limit to thinking we should have to be able to think on both sides of this limit (we should therefore have to be able to think what cannot be thought). The limit can, therefore, only be drawn in language, and what lies on the other side will simply be nonsense.” Wittgenstein was always a bit of a riddle, even to himself. He goes on about the nature of philosophy, “philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. Philosophy does not result in ‘philosophical propositions’, but rather in the clarification of propositions. Without philosophy, thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries.” But then he continues, “the inexpressible is contained- unexpressed- in the expressed…. There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.” What are we to make of all of this contradiction? Wittgenstein tries to square the circle. “My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)” Despite the cryptic phrasing, or perhaps because of it, the “Tractatus” was a huge hit within the Circle. Hahn stated, “logic therefore does not say anything about the world; it only has to do with the way in which I talk about the world.” Schlick added, “logical conclusions express nothing about real facts. They are merely rules for using our signs.” Neurath, however, thought that Wittgenstein was all bunk and his words all smelled distinctly of metaphysics.

In 1929, the Vienna Circle finally published its own manifesto, “The Scientific Worldview.” It was a rejection of all things metaphysical and theological. It stated that only results based on experimentations and logical analysis were to be accepted as truth. Its goal was to tackle the problems at the foundations of mathematics, physics, geometry, biology, psychology, and the social sciences and to integrate them into one core discipline. Later Schlick emphasized, “philosophy is not a set of statements. It is not a science. But what is it then? We see in philosophy not a system of knowledge, but a system of actions: philosophy is that activity through which the meaning of statements is revealed or determined. Through philosophy, statements are explained; through science they are verified. The latter is concerned with the truth of the statements, while the former is concerned with what they actually mean…. The method of science is observation and experiment, combined with calculation and inference; through this method one establishes the set of true propositions about the real world. The method of the philosopher, by contrast, is reflection; the philosopher looks upon the given statements, observations, and calculations, and explains what they mean. To do philosophy is not to give a list of true propositions. It is, rather, an art- an activity leading to clarity.” Hahn separated philosophies turned towards the world, such as Epicurus and Hume, with philosophies turned away from the world, such as Kant and Plato. “The English, after all, are known as a nation of shopkeepers. And it is surely no accident that one and the same nation gave the world both democracy, on the one hand, and the rebirth of a philosophy turned toward the world, on the other; nor is it an accident that the same land that saw the beheading of a king also witnessed the execution of metaphysics.” Questions such as “Is the external world real?” are not genuine problems, but pseudo-problems, for they cannot be answered conclusively. According to Carnap, “everything that is beyond the factual must be considered meaningless” because according to the manifesto, “the scientific worldview knows no unsolvable riddles.”

As the years past, the Vienna Circle became more publicly known and its membership grew more diverse, although still having to be specially invited to join. Kurt Godel was a mathematician universally recognized as brilliant and insane. Einstein considered him his only true peer. Godel solved Hilbert’s riddle that “there exist true mathematical statements that cannot be derived by formal means from a set of axioms.” Godel’s proof of incompleteness claimed, “if mathematics is consistent, then the statement “mathematics is consistent” is precisely one of those weird Godelian propositions that are true but cannot be proved!” Karl Popper was never invited into the Vienna Circle but was a friendly antagonist, sparring and clarifying the views of the Circle because his views were greatly similar. He viewed induction as a flawed method because no matter the amount of experimentation, it could never lead to a general law. He stated, “my view implied that scientific theories, if they are not falsified, forever remain hypotheses or conjectures. This consideration led to a theory in which scientific progress turned out not to consist in the accumulation of observations, but in the overthrow of less good theories and their replacement by better ones- in particular, by theories of greater content.” The mathematician Karl Menger  advanced the ideas of dimension theory, while in his spare time editing his father, Carl’s, posthumous book, clarifying his invention of marginal utility theory. The economist Franz Alt invented the concept of a utility function and contributed to the burgeoning field of computer science. Abraham Wald founded the field of statistical sequential analysis and started to sketch out the concept of general equilibrium in economic systems. Oskar Morgenstern invented game theory along with John von Neumann, a friend of many in the Vienna Circle.

Already tottering from years of domestic authoritarian rule, the Vienna Circle finally broke up after the Anschluss. A few members had already left Austria, sensing which way the fascist winds were blowing. After the German invasion, even those members who were not themselves Jews were branded as friends of Jews and lost their University positions as well. Some emigrated to England or America and continued their correspondence as best they could. Godel had to take the trans-Siberian railroad across Russia, before setting sail to America from Japan. Neurath hopped on a stolen Dutch naval schooner to cross the heavily mined English Channel. The lucky ones found professorships in the Allied countries. The historian of physics Gerald Holton coined the phrase, “from the Vienna Circle to Harvard Square.” In fact, many were not so fortunate. The more junior members of the Circle often could not get teaching visas to flee abroad and many died in the concentration camps, committed suicide, or lived out their days in poverty, stripped of all ability to earn a living teaching in the Reich.

After World War II, there was a feeble effort to resurrect the Vienna Circle, but most of its members were dead or refused to return to Vienna from teaching posts in the West. The Vienna Circle petered out with a whimper. A few members even recanted their positivist worldview. Godel, ensconced at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, wrote to his mother after the war, “the world and everything in it has a reason and meaning, and actually a good and indubitable meaning. This immediately implies that our existence on Earth, since it has by itself at best a very doubtful meaning, must be a means for another existence…. For we understand neither why this world exists, nor why it is constituted just as it is, nor why we are in it, nor why we were born in just these and no other circumstances. Why then should we fancy that we know one thing for sure, that there is no other world, and that we never were nor ever will be in another?” He was certifiably insane, but that sounds like metaphysics to me.

“Derek Parfit: His Life and Thought” edited by Jeff McMahan

This is a collection of remembrances of Parfit by those who knew him best: his wife, his sister, and his closest colleagues and philosophical collaborators over the years. The collection purposefully avoids treading over the same ground as Edmonds’ famous biography, instead giving anecdotes, life snippets, and very personal remembrances. However, in all, it still gives a very accurate portrait of Parfit’s personality and intellectual pursuits. The philosopher, Johnathan Dancy, suggests, “Parfit thought that correct philosophical thought could free us from an obsessive concern with ourselves and our weal and woe, since the distinction between self and others was not as stark as common sense takes it to be.”

In her essay on their life together, Parfit’s wife, the philosopher, Janet Radcliffe Richards, reminisces, “What I suppose I was gradually discovering was the extremity of the extent to which Derek lived in his mind…. As regards achievement, nearly everything that other people might count as comfort or leisure or enjoyment was sacrificed to his perfectionism in both his philosophical work and his photographs. He wanted to achieve things that he thought had real value in the advancement of knowledge and the production and preservation of things of beauty…. As regards beauty, he was again concerned more with what there was and what there might be than anything he would experience.” She concludes, “He did not want to be a well-rounded human being. He was deeply, essentially, an academic and aesthete, fascinated by the capacities of the human mind in advancing knowledge and creating things of beauty, and he thought of the purpose of his life in terms of advancing such achievements…. He thought it would be appalling if it were true that nothing really mattered…. Also, permanently in the background, were his intense feelings for beauty in art, architecture, the natural world, poetry, and music. My impression is that if he had thought he could produce outstanding work in any of those areas, he might have pursued them, but that he judged that he would not be able to achieve anything of the very highest quality in any of them and had no interest in spending his time on anything less…. What he wanted to do in both areas [of philosophy and photography] was produce something of real objective value, which would in its particular way make the world better than it would have been without it.”

The philosopher, Larry Temkin, suggests about Parfit’s quest for objective truth, “For Derek, the problem of disagreement among epistemic peers regarding the most fundamental truths about ethics was deeply troubling.” Temkin continues by stressing the utter focus of Parfit’s life mission, “Derek not only wrote about future generations, he constantly wrote for future generations. Derek thought in terms of the lasting significance of the truth. Correspondingly, he wrote with the hope, and thought, that his work would still be read for many centuries after he was gone…. Other than books and ice cream, Derek had very few material wants and needs. He didn’t drive a car, own a lavish home, take vacations, dine out extravagantly, have a TV, or have any expensive habits.” The philosopher, Jeff McMahan, relates, “For almost anyone, myself included, a life like Derek’s would be unfulfilling. But he was happy—by which I do not mean that he was subjectively contented, though he was certainly that…. Derek believed, and I agree with him, that there can be various elements in a life that are objectively good for the person in whose life they occur. He referred to this belief as the Objective List Theory of self-interest. He cited as examples “moral goodness, rational activity, the development of one’s own abilities, having children and being a good parent, knowledge, and the awareness of true beauty.” (He also mentions, on the preceding page, loving and being loved by many people.) Derek also suggested, as perhaps the most plausible understanding of well-being, that for these objectively good features of a life to be genuinely good for a person, the person must desire and take pleasure in them.” Parfit, himself, admitted, “My life is my work. I believe I have found some good reasons showing that some things matter objectively, not just because we care about them. If I am wrong, my life has been wasted.” His views on his own death were also somewhat idiosyncratic, “My death will break the more direct relations between my present experiences and future experiences, but it will not break various other relations. There will later be some memories about my life. And there may later be thoughts that are influenced by mine. This is all there is to the fact that there will be no-one living who will be me. Now that I have seen this, my death seems to me less bad.” On the breath of humanity in general Parfit posits, “We shall increasingly have the power to make life good…. It may depend on us and our successors whether it will all be worth it. What matters now is that we avoid ending human history…. We are part of a universe that is starting to understand itself.”

The philosopher, Ingmar Persson, shares some thoughts on Parfit’s method of doing philosophy, “Derek got his philosophical ideas first and foremost by reading and rereading texts—especially Sidgwick’s Methods of Ethics—again and again rather than by sitting thinking with closed eyes…. If he was not reading, he would be at his computer, wearing out its keys at a speed that amazed computer people, or in a philosophical discussion with somebody…. Derek’s method was that of an extrovert: as remarked, in his thinking he ruminated on a steady flow of inputs from fellow philosophers, alive and dead…. If possible, Derek would always be hooked up to some medium: if he was not reading or writing, he would listen to music or watch a movie, or view works of art or photos…. So Derek lived on cultural products, but also, I think, he lived chiefly for them, in the sense that he lived in order to contribute to increasing their quantity and quality. His all-consuming passion and mission in life seems to have been to leave as good a record as possible for posterity.” Parfit, himself, claimed, “Most of the world looked better in reproduction than it did in life.” He also admitted, “I want people to admire what I produce.”