two and a half philosophies

It was one of those rare sunny days in Taipei, I took the subway to a suburban university that I'd been to a few times before for some philosophical topical discussion forum that I signed up a couple weeks ago but now didn't have the faintest idea what it was except for the location and the fact that I was already half an hour late. 

I rushed into the library-classroom where the event was supposed to be, where an old gentleman was talking with a dozen young people listening and found a side chair to settle in. Everyone turned their eyes on me, and the old gentleman stopped his talk, and asked:
 
"What are you doing here?"
"I am just here for listening, may I?" (True, I always start my attendance to any topical discussion with pure listening)
"It's the end of the semester already, isn't it a bit too late for that?"

Now I realized this was not the forum I was going to but a regular classroom session and after some students realized my situation they told me the venue for that discussion forum had been changed to a different location and suggested I find the new one at the department office.

I apologized for the disruption and left the room and started looking for the department office, but then saw a lit room with a young man speaking in, with text projection on the board and a couple people listening. Quite a small crowd, I thought... could it be the one I was after? But after peeking and listening at the door for a couple minutes I decided to move in and participate for whatever it's worth anyway.

It was a study on some German sounding author's book "System of Ethics", and though the writing was a bit dry and drab, the ruminations were elaborate and repetitive I got the gist of it (that human feelings and drive for self-interest are natural and subjective but the will and freedom to act morally are self-determined and objective) and even asked the speaker some question of my own after listening for about half an hour.

Then came the break, the speaker left the room and I chatted with the three young men sitting close to me.

"You guys are students from the Philosophy Department, I suppose?"
"Oh no, we are from the Law Department," one of the young men said,
"I am here because I signed up for some philosophical seminar a couple weeks ago," I kind of explained myself, in case my appearance here seemed odd to them.
"Oh you mean that seminar on Phenomenology? This is not it, it's the one downstairs at the end of the hallway."

Oops, wrong room again! I bid them farewell and went downstairs to the end of the hallway, and there it was, a big easeled poster at the door of a packed room with the title of the discussion forum that I knew was exactly the one I signed up for two weeks ago!

I slipped in after checking my name at the registration table, and was immediately pleased by what I heard: a clear, succinct talk by a young woman (an associate professor from another university, I learned later) of the thoughts of a famous French philosopher (Henri Bergson) on time, movement, intuition, art, etc. A couple of key points I took from her presentation:

"While Intellect provides access to what is already known through symbolic systems like language and mathematics, Intuition is the mode of perception that can directly know what exceeds the current grasp of our language and is more important for creativity and human development in general."

"Reason, reasoning on its powers, will never succeed in extending them. Thousands and thousands of variations on the theme of walking will never yield a rule for swimming: come, enter the water, and when you know how to swim, you will understand how the mechanism of swimming is connected with that of walking."

After the lunch break (yes, free lunch for all who attended), another interesting topic presented by another scholar, titled "vague essence and material essence". To speed you through such "philosophese" wonderland I'll use an example:

Imagine doing carpentry work with a handsaw (or dissecting a cow with a carving knife, like the famous 庖丁解牛 story in Zhuangzi's): your hand movement, along with the saw, and the wood it cuts through, form a "material essence" that flows through a "vector stream" (or call it "force field" if you like) toward an end production that is never to be of "ideal" shape or form, but a "vague essence" that is created by the material essence of this world.

One may then postulate, that all our geometrical theorems come from the doables and imaginables–the material essence–of our perceived world. For example, to prove that the sum of the interior angles of a triangle is 180 degrees, we imagine a line passing the top of the triangle in parallel with the bottom line of the triangle, as below:

We have ∠DBA≅∠A because they are alternate interior angles and alternate interior angles are congruent when lines are parallel. Therefore, m∠DBA=m∠A. Similarly, ∠EBC≅∠C because they are also alternate interior angles, and so m∠EBC=m∠C. m∠DBA+m∠ABC+m∠EBC=180° because these three angles form a straight line. By substitution, m∠A+m∠ABC+m∠C=180°.

Such proof is possible because we can imagine and actually draw the line crossing point B in parallel to line AC, and see the shape and the angles, on a two dimensional paper.

Imagine, then, in a three dimensional world, you start walking from the North Pole of the Earth, straight to the Equator, turn 90 degrees right (west), walk one quarter of the Equator line, turn 90 degrees right (north), going all the way back to the North Pole where you started. You have just created a triangle whose sum of the interior angles is 90+90+90=270 degrees, not 180!

I would like to continue attending the remaining sessions of the day and its final discussion, but decided not to, because there was another discussion forum I had registered and liked to attend somewhere else, so off I left.

-----  to be continued -----