Abstract
I discuss Extended Cognition theory in relation to Confucius’s Analects, the Mozi, and the Zhuangzi. Extendedness is treated as part of an approach that sees cognition as embodied, embedded, enacted, extended and affective. A common feature of extended cognition views is their resistance to the Cartesian split between extension and thinking (res extensa and res cogitans) and as squeezed between two other capacities that involve extension, namely perception and action. This creates the “classical sandwich”: extensive input (perception)—unextended symbolic processing (cognition)—extensive output (action). In the Chinese tradition, an embodied understanding of knowledge is dominant. Yet, we can discern two directions for its development by thinkers, either towards contextualization and engagement, or towards decontextualization and disengagement. I shall illustrate the two positions using examples from the Analects and the Mozi. They imply two different directions in furthering or extending knowledge, towards intensity and towards extensity. In the final part, the Zhuangzi is presented as an excellent example of an embodied and extended view of cognition, but which at the same time also takes the decontextualising direction to the utmost.
“This paper was funded by Estonian Research Grant PRG319”.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Although some authors (e.g. Rowlands 2010) disentangle Extended and Embedded Cognition and even oppose them to each other.
- 2.
- 3.
As “thrown against” me, ob-iectus in Latin.
- 4.
In Clark’s and Chalmers’ Otto story, it is indeed an old-fashioned paper-and-pencil notebook system used by Otto.
- 5.
In the following treatment, I will use Slingerland’s translation in Slingerland 2003.
- 6.
In this chapter, I use these personal names as a shorthand for the author(s) of texts traditionally related to them (the Analects to Confucius; the Mozi to Mo Di and the Zhuangzi to Zhuang Zhou) and to the eponymous figures appearing in those texts. It is possible that very little, if anything, of the citations discussed in this chapter was written or spoken by those historical figures.
- 7.
I have treated those other aspects more thoroughly in a forthcoming book about the Embodiment Theory and Chinese philosophy.
- 8.
Although for a traditional Western reader it may seem the least philosophical part of the Analects: “This chapter is often skipped over in embarrassment by Western scholars” (Jones 2008: 121); “Largely concentrated in book 10 of the Analects, the passages concerning Confucius’ everyday style are perhaps some of the most puzzling in the text” (Olberding 2007: 360).
- 9.
Following the instructions of Confucius himself: “The Master said, ‘I will not open the door for a mind that is not already striving to understand, nor will I provide words to a tongue that is not already struggling to speak. If I hold up one corner of a problem, and the student cannot come back to me with the other three, I will not attempt to instruct him again.’” (7.8; Slingerland 2003: 66) 子曰: 「不憤不啟, 不悱不發, 舉一隅不以三隅反, 則不復也.」Here and below, the Chinese originals are from the Chinese Text Project, http://ctext.org/.
- 10.
In fact, Confucius most probably never served as an envoy to a foreign state, and this piece is one of the evidences that the descriptions in Book 10 were originally general precepts that were only later attributed to Confucius.
- 11.
Indeed, the very choice of “old rituals” served as a critique of many contemporary cultural forms.
- 12.
It is possible that Mozi himself had experience in this, like Socrates did in pottery.
- 13.
The Chinese originals for “Mozi” are from Chinese Text Project, http://ctext.org/mozi.
- 14.
Although the Mohists admit that an idea and a ready-made form may also serve as standards: “The idea, the compasses, a circle, all three may serve as standard” (Explanation to A 70; Graham 1978: 316).
- 15.
In effect, in both citations of the word for “measure”, du 度, are used.
- 16.
This link to quantification seems to be much vaguer in the case of Platonic ideas, which have a more significant qualitative aspect.
- 17.
This idea was developed by the Legalists.
- 18.
These same ideas contributed either directly or through their influence on other schools such as Legalism.
- 19.
Indeed, the contemporary Mandarin phrase 規矩 (guiju: rule, regulation) is composed of these two tool names.
- 20.
Note the words for measurement: liang 量 and du 度.
- 21.
In fact, Greimas and Courtés consider disengagement as primary: “Every engagement thus presupposes a disengagement operation which logically precedes it” (1982: 100). Only after we have shifted out, broken out of the immediacy to a “(s)he”/”it”, “there”, “then”, can we come back to it and say “me”/”you”, “here”, “now”.
- 22.
For my purposes here, it is not necessary to become involved in questions of authorship and dating. The “Zhuangzi” was composed by several authors over a long period of time, but it does not matter whether the stories discussed here were written by one or many authors, in one or another period. It is sufficient that their content expresses consistent ideas.
- 23.
Although cf. Analects 11.26, where swimming and singing for pleasure is extolled by Confucius.
- 24.
庖丁為文惠君解牛, 手之所觸, 肩之所倚, 足之所履, 膝之所踦, 砉然嚮然, 奏刀騞然, 莫不中音. 合於《桑林》之舞, 乃中《經首》之會. 文惠君曰: 「譆! 善 哉! 技蓋至此乎?」庖丁釋刀對曰: 「臣之所好者道也, 進乎技矣. 始臣之解牛之時, 所見无非牛者. 三年之後, 未嘗見全牛也. 方今之時, 臣以神遇, 而不以目視, 官知止而神欲行. 依乎天理, 批大郤, 導大窾, 因其固然. 技經肯綮之未嘗, 而況大軱乎! 良庖歲更刀, 割也; 族庖月更刀, 折也. 今臣之刀十九年矣, 所解數千牛矣, 而刀刃若新發於硎. 彼節者有間, 而刀刃者无厚, 以无厚入有間, 恢恢乎其於遊刃必有餘地矣, 是以十九年而刀刃若新發於硎. 雖然, 每至於族, 吾見其難為, 怵然為戒, 視為止, 行為遲. 動刀甚微, 謋然已解, 如土委地. 提刀而立, 為之四顧, 為之躊躇滿志, 善刀而藏之.」文惠君曰: 「善哉! 吾聞庖丁之言, 得養生焉.」(3/7/2–3/8/12) References to the Chinese text are from Zhuangzi 1986: chapter number/page number /line number. The electronic text is from the Chinese Text Project at www.ctext.org/zhuangzi.
- 25.
“Flow denotes the holistic sensation present when we act with total involvement. […] It is the state in which action follows upon action according to an internal logic which seems to need no conscious intervention on our part. We experience it as a unified flowing from one moment to the next, in which we feel in control of our actions, and in which there is little distinction between self and environment; between stimulus and response; or between past, present, and future.” (Csikszentmihalyi 2014: 136–7).
- 26.
Tim Ingold makes the same point, when he talks about “the widespread misapprehension that the training of the body through repetitive exercise […] leads to a progressive loss of conscious awareness or concentration in the task. […] In this view, awareness intervenes only to interrupt the otherwise automatic and involuntary flow of habitual action. I have shown, to the contrary, that the skilled handling of tools is anything but automatic, but is rather rhythmically responsive to ever-changing environmental conditions […]. In this responsiveness there lies a form of awareness that does not so much retreat as grow in intensity with the fluency of action. This is not the awareness of a mind that holds itself aloof from the messy, hands-on business of work. It is rather immanent in practical, perceptual activity, reaching out into its surroundings along multiple pathways of sensory participation […]. The retreat of awareness that Connerton takes to be an effect of enskilment in fact results from the very opposite process of deskilling—that is, from the dissolution of the link between perception and action that underwrites the skill of the practitioner. Only in a perfect, determining system can concentration be thus banished from practice, so as to intervene solely in the intervals between stopping and starting. The conjunction of rhythmicity and concentration is, as we have seen, characteristic of the workmanship of risk. It is in the workmanship of certainty—in the operation of a determining system—that concentration lapses, movement becomes automatic and rhythm gives way to mechanism” (2011: 60–61).
- 27.
And I think that the “flow” should be understood in this sense of sensitivity. Otherwise, if it would have only one temporality, emanating from the subject, it would resemble an actor who pays no attention to other actors, props and the public, but hurriedly deploys its inner programme of learnt words and gestures. But this is something completely different.
- 28.
For example, such as 20, which is constituted by 2*10 or 4*5. Prime numbers are also present in the natural world. For example, the larvae of periodical cicadas stay under the ground for 13 or 17 years, and then they come out all at once. It may be a predator avoidance strategy, since the latter could otherwise synchronise their own cycle of generations to divisors of the cicada cycle (see Goles et al. 2001).
- 29.
This sounds similar to certain aporias pronounced by the Chinese “Sophists” such as Hui Shi, the friend of Zhuangzi. For example: “that which has no thickness and cannot be accumulated is a thousand miles in size” (無厚不可積也, 其大千里, Chap. 33, Mair 1994: 343, translation modified by the author).
- 30.
For the topic of interpenetration, see also Ott 2019.
- 31.
The zhuangzian blade without thickness could be brought together with Henri Bergson’s cone of memory (1911: 211) that stands at its tip. The cone refers to the interpenetrating or the virtual, and it stands on the juxtaposing plane of the actual world. The tip of the cone is the present moment of bodily interaction with the world. Two common tendencies are to become dispersed in imagination or in action. Dispersed in imagination, a part of the spirit detaches from other parts and from the actual world. Dispersed in action, we give automatic responses to the environment, on the basis of certain semi-independent systems. In neither case does our behaviour spring “from our whole personality” or express “the whole of the self” (that are Bergson’s requirements for a free act; see 1960: 172 and 166).
- 32.
Perhaps another example is the story of the swimmer in Chap. 19, that may play on the word you 游/遊 “travel”, “ramble”, “swim”. It is one of Zhuangzi’s key notions (translated as “ramble”, “wander”), and it may have been the word itself that occasioned the invention of the story of a swimmer.
- 33.
For example, when an ontological justification is given to certain assonances, for example, in the similar pronunciation of “knot” jié 結 and “untie” jiĕ 解, and in the associations, as noted earlier, of “knife” and “ox” in the character jiĕ 解.
References
Bergson, Henri. 1911. Matter and Memory. London: George Allen & Unwin.
———. 1960. Time and Free Will. New York: Harper & Brothers.
Brooks, Rodney A. 1991. Intelligence Without Representation. Artificial Intelligence 47: 139–159.
Carter, J. Adam, et al., eds. 2018. Socially Extended Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Clark, Andy. 1998. Being There. Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again. Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books.
Clark, Andy, and David Chalmers. 1998. The Extended Mind. Analysis 58 (1): 7–19.
Cook, Scott. 1995. Yue ji. Record of Music. Introduction, Translation, Notes, and Commentary. Asian Music 26 (2): 1–96.
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihalyi. 2014. Flow and the Foundations of Positive Psychology. Springer.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1988. Spinoza, Practical Philosophy. Trans. Robert Hurley. San Francisco: City Lights Books.
———. 2007. On Spinoza. Lectures at Vincennes. http://deleuzelectures.blogspot.com/2007/02/on-spinoza.html. Accessed 15 April 2018.
Dollens, Dennis. 2015. Autopoiesis + Extended Cognition + Nature = Can Buildings Think? Communicative & Integrative Biology 8 (4): e994373.
Dupuy, Jean-Pierre. 2009 [1994]. On the Origins of the Cognitive Science. The Mechanization of the Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Eno, Robert. 1990. Confucian Creation of Heaven. Philosophy and the Defense of Ritual Mastery. New York: SUNY Press.
Goles, Eric, Oliver Schulz, and Mario Markus. 2001. Prime Number Selection of Cycles in a Predator-Prey Model. Complexity 6 (4): 33–38.
Graham, Angus 1978. Later Mohist Logic, Ethics and Science. London: School of Oriental and African Studies and Hong Kong, The Chinese University Press. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, and London: School of Oriental and African Studies.
Greimas, Algirdas Julien, and Joseph Courtés. 1982 [1979]. Semiotics and Language. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Hall, David, and Roger Ames. 1998. Thinking from the Han: Self, Truth, and Transcendence in Chinese and Western Culture. New York: SUNY Press.
Heidegger, Martin. 1996 [1927]. Being and Time. New York: SUNY Press.
Hurley, Susan. 2001. Perception and Action: Alternative Views. Synthese 129 (1): 3–40.
Ingold, Tim. 2011. Being Alive. Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London and New York: Routledge.
Johnston, Ian. 2010. The Mozi. A Complete Translation. New York: Columbia University Press.
Jones, David. 2008. Confucius Now. Contemporary Encounters with the Analects. Chicago: Open Court.
Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Legge, James, ed. 1885. Li Ki. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Mair, Victor. 1994. Wandering on the Way. Early Taoist Tales and Parables of Chuang Tzu. New York: Bantam Books.
Malafouris, Lambros. 2013. How Things Shape the Mind. A Theory of Material Engagement. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2013 [1945]. Phenomenology of Perception. Routledge.
Olberding, Amy. 2007. The Educative Function of Personal Style in the “Analects”. Philosophy East and West 57 (3): 357–374.
Ott, Margus. 2017. Confucius’ Embodied Knowledge. Asian Studies 5 (2): 65–85.
———. 2019. Deleuze and Zhuangzi: Actualization and Counter-actualization. Asian Studies 7 (1): 315–335.
Rowlands, Mark. 2010. The New Science of the Mind. From Extended Mind to Embodied Phenomenology. Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books.
Slingerland, Edward. 2003. Confucius’ Analects with Selections from Traditional Commentaries. Cambridge: Hackett.
Turkle, Sherry, ed. 2007. Evocative Objects. Things We Think With. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Van Norden, Bryan. 2002. Introduction. In Confucius and the Analects. New Essays, ed. Bryan Van Norden, 3–36. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
von Uexküll, Jakob. 1992 [1934]. A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men: A Picture Book of Invisible Worlds. Semiotica 89 (4): 319–391.
Watson, Burton, ed. 2013. The Complete Works of Zhuangzi. New York: Columbia University Press.
Xunzi. 1994. Xunzi. A Translation and Study of the Complete Works. Volume III. Trans. John Knoblock. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Zhuangzi. 1986 [1947]. Zhuangzi yinde 莊子引得 (A Concordance to Zhuangzi). Shanghai: Shanghai Guji Chubanshe.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Ott, M. (2022). Contextualising and Decontextualising Knowledge: Extended Knowledge in Confucius, Mozi and Zhuangzi. In: Lai, K.L. (eds) Knowers and Knowledge in East-West Philosophy. Palgrave Studies in Comparative East-West Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79349-4_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79349-4_13
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-79348-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-79349-4
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)