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Power: An Introduction—Part 3(b) ii

Knowledge prior to conceptual articulation), but as that phrase was understood, say, by the founder of the Illuminationist school of Islamic philosophy and mysticism, Shihāb al-Dīn Suhrawardī (549/1154-587/1191). Hossein Ziai explains: "A basic Illuminationist principle is that to know something is to obtain an experience of it tantamount to a primary intuition of the determinants of the thing. Experiential knowledge of a thing is analysed only subsequent to the intuitive total and immediate grasp of it." (Ziai in Nasr and Leaman 1996: 449) , or the fruits of such awareness, what we might best term wisdom, with our routine, cognitive ways of categorizing objects and processes, our learned and habitual ways of conceptually carving up the world. The Daoist could hardly be asking us to give up rational cognition, to abandon our categories, to play loose with our concepts. Rather, she is alerting us to what is forgotten, lost, or ignored in an exclusive reliance on, or in according too much importance to, conventional knowledge, with knowledge by description (with ‘knowing that’), with propositional knowledge. And it is this intuitive and non-propositional knowledge which , to appreciate its perspectival and “relative” character (while the knowledge may be relative, our concept of truth is not). Although Daoists have nothing comparable to Suhrawardī’s fourth stage, they do have something similar if not identical to the first stage of Illuminationist epistemology, namely, that “marked by the preparatory activity on the part of the philosopher: he or she has to ‘abandon the world’ in readiness to accept mystical ‘experience’ (first, of a ‘Divine Light’ [ has numerous passages that speak to the illusory and evanescent character of worldly or conventional criteria for success, fame, fortune, and power. Even Confucius, according to Fingarette (in Chong, Tan, and Ten 2003) subscribed to a belief in “worldly abandonment” in this sense, as only the properly directed individual will can give up purely personal willing: "He tells us that we ought to abjure the quest for personal profit, personal frame, or personal gratification of the senses. It is not that there is anything intrinsically wrong with fame, honor, or even sensual pleasure—if such things arise as incidental effects of a will directed to the Way ( The Daoist is said to cultivate “quiet” (i.e., ‘non-worldly’) virtues like gentleness, frugality and self-effacement. The last line of chapter 45 states that “Purity and stillness rectify Heaven and Earth” (or, ‘can bring proper order to the world’). This celebratory saying is in reference to that stillness and purity of heart-mind ( of the natural and “heavenly” worlds. The third verse of chapter 15 (only part of which follows) asks: “Who can, through stillness, gradually make muddied water clear?” This is often taken to be a reference to meditation practice. Proper cultivation of “stillness” brings about a “hidden” or “empty” state of heart-mind capable of penetrating “into the most obscure, the marvelous, the mysterious,” thereby attaining a “depth beyond understanding” (i.e., beyond propositional knowledge and rational understanding, a reference to the difference between knowledge and wisdom; for a more detailed treatment of preparatory exercises [often referred to as ascetic practices] within medieval Daoism, see Kohn 2003). As Moeller (2004) says in his discussion of the fishnet allegory in the (Inward Training) [and thus] suggest a concrete background of self-cultivation (including introspective meditation), rather than intellectual speculation” (206). For Suhrawardī, the preparatory stage of abandoning the world “is marked by such activities as going on a forty-day retreat, abstaining from eating meat and preparing for inspiration and ‘revelation.’ Such activities fall under the general category of ascetic and mystical practices [cf. in Persia as well as in Persian poetry. By looking briefly at a paradigm concerning the poet-philosopher-mystic’s way of capturing and portraying wisdom, this point will be made evident. [….] In my view, the most distinguishing characteristic of Persian poetry taken as a whole is its almost existential perspective regarding the outcome of philosophy…. From this viewpoint, the end result of philosophy, which is wisdom, can be communicated only through the poetic medium. Innate poetic wisdom thus informs the human being—the philosopher-sage; the sage-poet; and, ultimately, simply the poet—of every facet of response to the total environment; the corporeal and the spiritual, the ethical and the political, the religious and the mundane. The ensuing perception of reality and historical process is constructed (as in the Persian ) in a metaphysical form—an art form, perhaps—that consciously at all stages employs metaphor, symbol, myth, lore and legend. The consequence is that Persian wisdom is more poetic than philosophical, and always more intuitive than discursive. This, in my view, is clearly the more popular legacy of Illuminationist philosophy and of its impact. (here: ‘emptiness,’ ‘nothing’) as a mental state and goal of meditation and self-cultivation cannot be the direct or immediated product of the ego or will, as the effort to will such a mental state can be said to entangle one in a pragmatic contradiction identical to similar efforts at “willing what cannot be willed” (Elster 1983: 43-108). The attempt to simply will the state of “tends to posit and entrench the very object whose absence is desired,” for “If I desire the absence of some specific thought, or of thought in general, the desire by itself suffices to ensure the presence of the object” (46). The state of mind sought by the Daoist is close if not identical to the “emptiness” or state of “no-mind” sought by the Zen Buddhist (cf. too the pinnacle of meditation in Patañjali’s ]) that permits the absence of “self-consciousness,” allowing one to relate directly to the world, without “without relating also to the relating” (or non-relation to self). We might better see this with examples of “positively defined states that similarly elude the mind that reaches out for them” (p. 50). Elster culls a handful of examples from the late psychologist Leslie Farber: I can will knowledge, but not wisdom; going to bed, but not sleeping; scrupulosity but not virtue; bravado but not courage; congratulations but not admiration; religion but not faith. As he explains, the goal of meditation for the Zen Buddhist (and the Daoist) is a state of mind that “is essentially a by-product. Nevertheless the belief cannot be wholly false, since Zen masters [and Daoist sages] do accept pupils and train them” (49). The state of an empty or still mind, be it for the Buddhist or the Daoist, is essentially a by-product, because the attempt to will the absence of a mental object is self-defeating, involving one in a pragmatic contradiction not unlike the one intrinsic to the folly of what Elster (after Farber), terms “willing what cannot be willed.” Put differently, our Daoist sage lives in harmony with the Daoist teachers (and their Yogic and Buddhist counterparts) rely on mind-training and meditation techniques employing breathing exercises in conjunction with other kinds of ascetic practices (e.g., fasting, celibacy, dietary restrictions, etc.) as part of wider moral psychological and spiritual strategies designed to subvert habitual reliance on the will, including routine recourse to familiar modes and patterns of reasoning and a largely egoistic-relating to others and the natural world. These pedagogical strategies are crafted, in the end, to bring about a different way of living and a different kind of person, one naturally (as a kind of 'second' nature in Kupperman's sense) and spontaneously virtuous and wise, meaning a life lived in harmony with the inasmuch as it is understood to mean the “absence of action motivated by the agent’s desires, will, knowledge, education, language or socialization” (Fraser 2007: 99; see too Slingerland 2003). Such action is therefore wholly free and spontaneous in contrast to the intentional or conventionally volitional quality of motivated action. Moreover, the freedom and spontaneity of such action is evidenced in how one is able to respond to the exigencies of any situation or circumstance: in a spontaneous, intuitive, and non-self-conscious manner, in effect, in harmony with was used before 300 BC for a multitude of phenomena: air, breath, smoke, mist, fog, the shades of the dead, cloud forms, more or less everything that is perceptible but intangible, the physical vitalities, whether inborn or derived from food and breath; cosmic forces and climactic influences that affect health; and groupings of seasons, flavors, colors, musical modes, and much else. that form our inner physiology and include the physical organs of the lungs, kidneys, liver, gallbladder, and spleen and the various psychological states comprising our constantly changing continuum of experience from rage and lust to complete tranquility. This last group demonstrates the remarkably modern notion that psychological states have physiological substrates. ),” it is the centrality of the last that accounts for “over 150 works on the interpretation of haptic signs” (19-20). These signs are detected through “pulse taking,” a gesture ostensibly identical in practice to that of European physicians. Yet as we now know, “Chinese palpation wasn’t based on the imagination of the dilating and contracting artery. The (Canon of Difficulties), Chinese physicians periodically decried the singular attention devoted to palpation which, doctrinally speaking, was ranked as the lowest of the four aforementioned means of diagnostic knowing: “Diagnosis encompassed the ‘divine’ art of gazing, the ‘sagely’ art of listening and smelling, the ‘crafty’ art of questioning, and the ‘skillful’ art of touching. Someone who learned the last thus qualified only as skillful, while those who mastered hearing and seeing achieved sageliness and divinity” (71). Lastly, Kuriyama reminds us that while the art and science of “is still very much alive” in China, the haptic knowledge canalized in pulse taking in the Western medical tradition “has become a shriveled, meager science,” largely replaced by the biomedical “precision and objectivity of machines making human touch look hopelessly obtuse and unreliable” (65). Lastly, while the ability to rule , therefore, does not come naturally to us, hence we are instructed to “return to the uncarved block,” dampen the passions and still the mind. Only then might we prove capable of acting in a timely fashion with the consummate skill, grace and spontaneity befitting alike the exigencies of daily situations and unique circumstance. Acting naturally in the Daoist sense means cultivating what for us does not come naturally, and thus self-cultivation brings about, so to speak, a second nature (see Kupperman 1999), a nature capable of spontaneously and effortlessly realizing the by briefly looking at a species of its converse, what we earlier referred to as “willing what cannot be willed.” For it seems plain enough that certain mental states (e.g., sleep, humility, virtue) are not achieved by direct acts of the will and in general there is a patent pragmatic contradiction inherent in the very attempt to “will the absence of will” in any immediate or direct sense. As Elster also informed us above, the Daoist (or Buddhist) must resort to indirect pedagogical strategies designed to undermine our habitual reliance on ego and will, thereby avoiding the pragmatic contradiction intrinsic to willing what cannot be willed. Chris Fraser explains how we might conceive of the Daoist project as avoiding this pragmatic contradiction if we simply re-describe our notion of intentionality: [I]n some accounts of intentionality an agent cannot cause herself to perform actions that are wholly unintentional, because intentions (unlike effort) remain in effect over time, even when not consciously held in mind, and their scope covers all the subsidiary actions that contribute to their fulfillment. For example, this morning I set out to work on this review spontaneously, without consciously forming an intention to do so. Nevertheless, my activity was intentional, because it is part of a project I am performing intentionally. At some level of description, any voluntary movement an agent performs is intentional, merely by being an action rather than a reflex. On this account, our action is still intentional in a wider or long-term sense (allowing time for the ego to recede into the background or for action that is no longer self-conscious) but not willful in the short-term or immediate sense. In any case, self-consciously “relating-to-the-relating” (to-the-world) and egoistic acting have to do with the state of mind ( are perfectly compatible, as it is not intentionality or even willing that is the locus of the problem but rather the obsessive, narcissistic or solipsistic ego or what we call willfulness, an inability to “let go” (exhibiting ‘non-attachment’ to the fruits of action is how the Indic yogi would describe it) while acting in the world that is the reason for our inability to live in harmony with the natural world, 70.3: ‘And so the Wise Person, dressed in shabby clothes, jade under his shirt.’]. This contrast of motives brings to our attention dimensions of will that may be but that are not inevitably and distinctively personal. It will be recalled that my will, in respect to its generative source, control over its arousal, intensity, and direction and its power in turn over conduct, is inherently personal. For in all these respects my will can only be identified and described by identifying me personally. But the ground for willing a certain act is distinguishable from any of these and it need not be personal. It is true that I and only I can will my will but it may be that what I will is called for by the : Five Phases or Five Agents (theory). Joseph Needham (1956) and Manfred Porkert (1974) well explain Five Phases in general, and Kaptchuk (2000) devotes an appendix of his seminal study of Chinese medicine to elucidating Five Phases in relation to medical doctrine and clinical practice. A.C. Graham (1989) makes clear that Five Phases theory is the conceptual fulcrum facilitating correlative thinking and rudimentary cosmology in classical Chinese thought: I disagree, as I suspect would Lloyd and Sivin (2002), and Kuriyama (2002), with Graham’s characterization of Classical Chinese Medicine (CCM) as simply a “proto-science” in his discussion of Five Phases and correlative reasoning, based as it is on an historical characterization in light of later causal reasoning in the history of science in the West, an understanding that decisively and absolutely privileges Western biomedicine over medical traditions outside its geo-historical boundaries. In other words, Graham refers to CCM as a proto-science because much of the reasoning intrinsic to CCM’s theoretical edifice is utterly dependent on correlative thinking which Graham believes is historically and philosophically superseded by analytical and causal reasoning of the sort exemplified in modern Western science and philosophy. Nonetheless, Graham does not, in the main, denigrate correlative thinking, for he recognizes its fundamental and universal character: “We find correlations of the building-blocks of thought, of the same kind as in the most exotic cosmologies, in the operation of language itself, which may be claimed as the one activity to which correlative thinking is perfectly adequate” (Graham 1989: 323). In fact, for Graham, analytical thinking itself presupposes and is dependent on the linguistic and conceptual building-blocks of correlative reasoning. All the same, Michael Nylan (2001) is right to point out that while to Five Phases is rather less intuitive, perhaps one reason we over time we see changes in the specifics of Five Phases theory. Be that as it may, I think it’s prudent that we classify such correlative thinking as we find here as merely one type of reasoning, if only because (global and historical) meta-philosophical reflection helps us to appreciate the manner in which reason is “embedded, articulated and manifested in culturally specific ways” (Ganeri 2001), as well as the manner in which the “forms of rationality” are “interculturally available even if they are not always interculturally instantiated” (1-3). Such appreciation need not rank one form of reasoning over another, especially until or unless we can be said to fully and comparatively understand the nature, function and purposes of the various forms of rationality. According to Kaptchuk (2000), “The Theory of the Five Phases is an attempt to classify phenomena in terms of five quintessential processes, represented by the emblems Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water” (437). These “emblems,” as we saw in the quote above from Graham, are correlated with such things as directions, colors, seasons and, with regard to medicine, tastes, emotions, makes possible the microcosmic/macrocosmic correspondences that are fundamental to many religious and some philosophical worldviews (cf. the Hermetic maxim, ‘As above, so below,’ or, ‘That which is Below corresponds to that which is Above, and that which is Above, corresponds to that which is Below, to accomplish the miracles of the One Thing’). Kaptchuk further notes that today "some [medical] practitioners, especially in Korea, Japan, and parts of the West, have creatively emphasized the Five Phases Theory and made it the cornerstone of a rich and insightful clinical practice. And, just as important, all East Asian physicians recognize Five Phases as an important vocabulary in their semantic network, theoretical perspective, and clinical practice." (449) and the Five Phases encourage us to view the natural world as more than a collection of discrete objects, particularly those captured by “basic level categories” (see, for instance, the discussion in Lakoff and Johnson 1999: 26-30), but as things belonging to a complex web of interrelated forces and events marked by both identity-in-change and change-in-identity, be it manifest, latent, or hidden; hence chapter 42 continues: “The myriad creatures shoulder

Source: Ratio Juris

World Socialist Website

24 June 2009

In the midst of massive budget cuts, the University of California regents are coming under fire for hiring new chancellors with exorbitant salaries, one of whom is in the middle of a scandal at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

In early May, on the same day that the UC regents decided to raise student fees by 9.3 percent (or $693, for a total of $8,720 per year for in-state undergraduates), they also hired two new chancellors.

Susan Desmond-Hellman was named the new chancellor of UC San Francisco with a salary of $450,000, a nearly 12 percent increase over her predecessor. Earlier this month, she informed students and staff that the budget crisis in the state would force sharp cuts in university programs and services.

Linda Katehi, who has been hired to be the next chancellor of UC Davis starting on August 17, with a salary of $400,000, will earn $85,000 more than her predecessor, Larry Vanderhoef. This will be an increase from her current salary of $356,000 as the provost of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Katehi will also be provided a generous compensation package that includes a $100,000 relocation allowance, free housing, a $9,000 annual automobile allowance, a generous health and pension package, a low-interest home loan and a faculty position when she ends her service as chancellor.

The pay increases for the UC chancellors were defended by UC President Mark Yudof, arguing that their pay is in fact low in comparison to the salaries of chancellors at similar universities.

“I felt like I got a pretty good discount, as a matter of fact,” Yudof stated.

Yudof’s salary runs at about $900,000 a year.

The soaring pay of these top officials, even as budgets are cut and tuition rises, underscores the way in which university administration has been increasingly run as a business and integrated into corporate America. Pay for university presidents throughout the country rose 7.6 percent in 2008, the latest figures available. Fourteen presidents at public universities brought home more than $700,000.

Katehi’s salary and compensation package is not the only source of controversy. Katehi is currently the provost at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, which is reeling from an admissions scandal. Over the last five years, it is alleged that under-qualified students were admitted due to political patronage.

The admissions scandal at Urbana-Champaign came to light through an ongoing investigation by the was able to obtain some 1,800 pages of documents, including e-mails from state lawmakers to university trustees attempting to get students admitted into the university.

“The records chronicle a shadow admissions system in which some students won spots at the state’s most prestigious public university over the protests of admissions officers, while others had their rejections reversed during an unadvertised appeal process,” the article noted.

The terms the “clout list” or what the university refers to as “Category I” admissions.

The paper discovered that for the 2008-2009 school year, about 77 percent of the students on the clout list were accepted to the university in comparison to 69 percent of all applicants. In addition to this, the investigation showed that those admitted from the clout list had lower average ACT scores and class rankings than the average for all admitted students.

Linda Katehi became Urbana-Champaign’s provost and vice chancellor of academic affairs in 2006. In the 1,800 pages of documents obtained by the ’s investigation, she pleaded ignorance. “I was not aware of all this. I considered it very inappropriate.” She stated, “I don’t know what Category I is.”

On June 12th, Katehi sent a two-paragraph e-mail to UC Davis officials in an attempt to clarify her role in the admissions scandal. “The so-called ‘Category I’ admissions process was not part of the regular admissions system and was handled at a higher level in the institution,” she wrote.

This statement, however, appears to be contradicted by the fact that individuals who worked for her would regularly handle Category I requests. This includes Ruth Watkins, the vice provost, Keith Marshall, the associate provost for enrollment, and Debbie Kincaid, an assistant to Marshall.

Source: Affordable Education for All