Lovers of Sophia

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Lovers of Sophia Page 60

by Jason Reza Jorjani


  is by no means suggesting a sacrifice of oneself through uncritical

  empathy with various willful dogmatists. While it is important

  not to “start from a conclusion” in relating to another, the person

  to whom one relates may be far from capable of also setting aside

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  “comparison and condemnation.” A relationship that is unmediated

  in both directions is possible only among free spirits, but establishing a relationship to the other that is at least unmediated on one’s own

  end helps one to defeat opponents by being less rigidly conditioned

  by unconsciously held beliefs than they are:

  When real feeling occurs, such as anger or fear, can the stylist

  express himself with the classical method, or is he merely

  listening to his own screams and yel s? Is he a living, expressive

  human being or merely a patternized mechanical robot? …Is his

  chosen pattern forming a screen between him and the opponent

  and preventing a “total” and “fresh” relationship?1

  Jeet Kune Do is “the Way of the Intercepting Strike” because the delay in the opponents attacks on account of his psychological

  conditioning affords one’s unconditioned mind the chance to

  decipher it and allows one time for interception. The opponent gives himself away through his psychological deliberation and lack of

  versatility in his actions.

  Lee hung this motto on the wall of his Los Angeles school:

  “Man, the living creature, the creating individual, is always more

  important than any established style or system.” We should couple it

  with these lines from the Tao of Jeet Kune Do: “Classical forms dull your creativity, condition and freeze your sense of freedom…When

  one is not expressing himself, he is not free… But in classical style, system becomes more important than the man!” A student of Drama as much as of Philosophy, Lee was the first person to view martial

  art first and foremost as art, not merely in the sense of techne or

  ‘crafts’ artistry but in the fullest sense of poesis:

  The aim of art is to project an inner vision into the world, to

  state in aesthetic creation the deepest psychic and personal

  experiences of a human being. It is to enable those experiences

  to be intelligible and general y recognized within the total

  1 Bruce Lee, The Tao of Jeet Kune Do (California: Ohara, 1975), 15.

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  framework of an ideal world… We must employ our own souls

  through art to give a new form and meaning to nature or the

  world.2

  This is unquestionably a Western development of Eastern traditions

  that, as we have seen, Lee has already deconstructed as ‘traditions’.

  Lee’s own work as the Hol ywood director, choreography, and

  screenplay writer of Way of the Dragon (1972), Enter the Dragon (1973), and the uncompleted Game of Death attests to his own

  artistic ability. In Game of Death he symbolical y represents the steps in finding one’s own way in martial arts, until one attains the style

  of no style. He chooses the Buddhist temple of Pope Ju Saw as his

  shooting location. On the site a 33 meter high Buddha statue (caste

  in one mold, with 150 tons of bronze, largest such standing figure

  in all of Asia) stands in front of five-story pagoda. In his role as the protagonist, Lee takes on advocates of different styles at every level and, having no fixed style of his own, is able to fit in with each and defeat them according to their limitations. A green bamboo whip

  that he uses at one point represents flexibility, the pliable adaptability needed in order to change with change. His character wears a one-piece yellow tracksuit rather than a traditional uniform, because

  while it is comfortable and flexible it has no affiliation with any style.

  Very aware of how camera angles worked in fight scenes, Lee was

  a perfectionist on the film set, choreographing all of the fights and

  reshooting them many times. Lee’s footage from the uncompleted

  original version of Game of Death is considered by many “the most graceful and dynamic presentation of the human form in hand to

  hand combat ever captured on film.”

  As in the Western tradition of fine arts, he recognizes that “Art

  cal s for complete mastery of techniques” but that to produce a work

  of creative genius – a genuine work of art – the artist must be able to use his disciplined skill to channel the limitless source of the

  unconscious and irrational. This insight lies at the heart of how Jeet Kune Do approaches training in diverse techniques, just as a great

  2 Ibid., 9-10.

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  painter studies many styles diligently before breaking out of his

  schooling:

  Having “no form,” then, does not mean having no “form.”

  Having “no form” evolves from having form. “No form” is the

  higher, individual expression. No cultivation does not real y

  mean the absence of any kind of cultivation. What it signifies is a

  cultivation by means of non-cultivation. To practice cultivation

  through cultivation is to act with conscious mind.3

  The liberated, authentic individual and the creative genius in touch

  with the wel spring of the unconscious mind are one and the same:

  “Art reaches its greatest peak when devoid of self-consciousness.

  Freedom discovers a man the moment he loses concern over what

  impression he is making or about to make.” According to Lee,

  “Artistic skil ” is only one “step in psychic development”, and “artistic perfection” cannot be attained until: “An artist’s expression is his

  soul made apparent, [behind] his schooling… behind every motion,

  the music of his soul is made visible.” Lee laments that the martial

  arts have hitherto stunted the kind of psychic development of the

  individual that we see in the fine arts, where training in technique is only a preparatory tool for creative self-expression:

  The second-hand artist blindly following his sensei or sifu accepts

  his pattern. As a result, his action and, more importantly, his

  thinking become mechanical. His responses become automatic,

  according to set patterns, making him narrow and limited.4

  In combative arts, it has been the problem of ripening. This

  ripening is the progressive integration of the individual with his

  being, his essence. This is possible only through self-exploration

  in free expression, and not in imitative repetition of an imposed

  pattern of movement.5

  3 Ibid., 25.

  4 Ibid., 22.

  5 Ibid., 24.

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  However, this is not simply a case of the adoption of ‘Western’

  values over Eastern ones. Bruce Lee has an understanding of artistic

  creativity that surpasses that of both monotheistic and materialistic

  Western aesthetic theorists and that emerges from out of the core of

  Eastern spirituality. In a 1972 interview with his leading biographer, John Little, Lee made it clear that he not only had no religious

  affiliation whatsoever, but that he did not believe in God at al .

  Rather than postulating ‘God’ or the ‘Absolute’ as the unconscious

  source tapped by the creative genius, Lee understands that: “Art

  reveals itself in the psychic understanding of the
inner essence of

  things and gives form to the relation of man with nothing, with the nature of the absolute.” This inversion of “the nature of the absolute”

  into nothing is significant not only as a critique of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic worldview, but also as a Buddhist modification of

  the Taoist understanding of nature. In The Tao of Jeet Kun Do Lee describes the non-referential self-expression of the true (martial)

  artist as “Zen” and he follows the Zen masters in their fusion of Tao and Shunyata. He describes “thusness – what is” in terms that are clearly Taoist: “Thusness does not move, but its motion and function

  are inexhaustible.” At the same time, Lee equates this “isness,

  or…suchness” in “its nakedness” with “the Buddhist concept of

  emptiness.”

  To some extent, this leads Lee in the same direction as it led

  the Japanese Zen masters, namely beyond Taoist naturalism and

  Buddhist pacifism and onto the Heraclitean view that: “Life is

  combat.” There are lines in The Tao of Jeet Kune Do, where the influence of D.T. Suzuki is clear: “Jeet Kune Do teaches us not to

  look backward once the course is decided upon. It treats life and

  death indifferently.”6 This kind of decisionism is the exception

  and does not sit well with Lee’s overwhelming influence on

  personal expressiveness arrived at through “a continuous state of

  inquiry without conclusion.”7 He realizes that a true relationship

  to nothingness, wherein one has the “insight [that] one’s original 6 Ibid., 12.

  7 Ibid., 19.

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  nature is not created” – in effect that there is no fixed human nature endowed by God or anything else – does not nihilistical y negate the

  individual, but frees one for creative self-expression: “Creation in art is the psychic unfolding of the personality, which is rooted in the

  nothing. Its effect is a deepening of the personal dimension of the soul.”8 Martial art cultivates fearlessness for this honest encounter with the Abyssal, and it, in turn, expresses the creative power

  unleashed through the destruction of retarding and constraining

  beliefs that takes place when one enters the life-giving Void: “The

  void is all inclusive, having no opposite… It is a living void, because all forms come out of it and whoever realizes the void is filled with

  life and power and the love of all beings.”9

  Again, this does not mean surrendering to one’s opponents.

  The two purposes of using one’s natural tools in Jeet Kune Do are

  “to overcome your own greed, anger, and fol y” and “to destroy the opponent in front of you – annihilation of things that stand in

  the way of peace, justice and humanity.”10 Since Lee advocates the

  self-deconstruction of all judgmental and prejudicial fixed beliefs,

  by “the way of peace, justice and humanity” he cannot mean any

  definite ideology but rather the “annihilation” of al ideologies “that stand in the way” of a free society dedicated to the creative self-expression of individuals in dynamical y open relationship to one

  another.

  Unlike the early Taoists and orthodox Buddhists, whose apolitical

  pacifism opened a vacuum that has allowed Asians to be dominated

  by collectivist tyranny for most of their history, Lee shares the

  classical Greek concern with a just society. However, unlike most

  Greeks, with the possible exception of Heraclitus, Lee recognizes

  that Justice is not an absolute form, a universal concept come down

  from on high that instantiates itself in this imperfect world of

  relativity and change. Instead, a just society can only be grounded

  in an encounter with Nothingness and a consequent recognition of

  8 Ibid., 10.

  9 Ibid., 7.

  10 Ibid., 13.

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  the artificial, provisional character of all forms. This means a society that has “annihilated” faith in the Abrahamic God, and one wherein

  Tao ism and Buddh ism have deconstructed themselves through their own deepest insights.

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  PHILOSOPHY, SCIENCE, AND ART

  The attempt to define Philosophy as a discipline distinct

  from Science and Art, one justified by its unique type of

  productivity, is Gilles Deleuze’s central concern in What

  is Philosophy? Philosophy, Science, and Art all aim at

  establishing order in the face of Chaos – or infinite variability – by some means other than the insulation of mere opinion.1 Whereas the

  sciences crystallize the field of experience into functions of variables and the arts break up an accretion of clichés by cultivating chaos in

  the form of varieties of percepts and affects, philosophers produce conceptual personae whose variations cut planes of consistency through Chaos. In the following, I argue that on the contrary, the

  unity of Philosophy/Science may be discerned with a view to the

  aesthetic nature of conceptual personae. Deleuze himself makes

  observations that undermine his tripartite disciplinary distinctions.

  My ultimate aim is to demonstrate that, on Deleuze’s own terms, we

  can see the partial observers of science and the aesthetic figures of

  art as ultimately indistinguishable from conceptual personae.

  Deleuze does not accept Martin Heidegger’s idea that Philosophy

  has irretrievably disintegrated into the disparate empirical sciences

  and that a scientific thinking that could reflectively regulate technical endeavors, would require some irreducibly aesthetic insight. He refers to talk of “the death of metaphysics” or “the overcoming of

  philosophy” as “tiresome, idle chatter”, and he concludes that “even

  1 Gilles Deleuze, What Is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 203.

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  if it is called something else” philosophy persists insofar as there is still “a time and place for creating concepts.”2 The “concept” belongs to philosophy alone.3

  Deleuze identifies two types of inseparability distinctive of

  concepts. Firstly, on account of both the conditions of historical

  genesis enfolded within it and its insufficiency to grasp the totality of its present situation, each concept relates to (it does not “refer”

  to) concepts other than itself. Second, while the components that

  constitute a concept are somewhat distinct, at their threshold they

  neighbor each other in a zone of ultimate indiscernibility that

  renders them analytical y inseparable and confers the concept that

  they collectively constitute with its endoconsistency.4 These zones

  of indiscernibility also deny concepts any conditions of reference.5

  Each concept is that point at which its coincident components

  accumulate and condense into a certain consistency.6 Deleuze also

  describes this development of concepts as the emergence of “centers

  of vibrations” that “resonate” rather than refer.7 Moreover, these

  vibrations are not measurable in terms of mathematical magnitude;

  the concept “has no number.”8

  Consequently, Deleuze claims that there are no concepts in

  science, which is strictly concerned with the conditions of states

  of affairs in terms of propositions and functions.9 The elements of

  these scientific functions are functives, which are at work in different forms in sciences as diverse as physics, where they are explicitly

  m
athematical, and biology, where they are the functions of lived

  states.10 Unlike the philosophical concept, scientific functions

  2 Ibid., 9.

  3 Ibid., 34.

  4 Ibid., 19.

  5 Ibid., 143.

  6 Ibid., 20.

  7 Ibid., 23.

  8 Ibid., 144.

  9 Ibid., 33.

  10 Ibid., 117, 151.

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  consist of individual features that can be categorized into variable

  species under one or another constant genus.11 Confusing concepts

  with propositions that can be linked together, as in logicians’

  “infantile idea of philosophy”, is what leads to the mistaken belief

  that there are scientific concepts.12 Unlike concepts, propositions

  are concerned with the referential relationship between bodies

  extensional y situated in states of affairs.13 This is a relationship

  between independently isolable variables or convertible units, whose clean separation admits of them being “varied” or interchangeable.14

  A state of affairs grasped in terms of scientific propositions is, in

  turn, a complex variable expressing a relationship between two or

  more variables.15

  Unlike independent variables that interlock into states of affairs

  like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, philosophical concepts resonate

  with one another on what Deleuze alternatively cal s a “plane of

  consistency” or “the plane of immanence of concepts.”16 One cannot

  simply add a new component to a concept without causing the whole

  concept to break up or catalyzing a radical change that transforms

  it into a different concept addressing problems of a different order.17

  The concept is not an aggregate. Its whole is more than the sum of its parts.18 It is a unity of diversity that may be disturbed in such a way as it crystallizes into a new unity; it has a wholeness that remains

  open to catalytic change.19 This means that the plane of consistency

  is not a concept of (the) concepts (to be found on it). If it were, the concepts would lose their genuine singularity and planar openness

  and instead become universals that are closed off – therefore dead,

  11 Ibid., 20.

  12 Ibid., 22.

  13 Ibid.

  14 Ibid., 23.

  15 Ibid., 122.

  16 Ibid., 35.

  17 Ibid., 31, 90.

  18 Ibid., 50.

  19 Ibid., 35.

 

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