(Part 2) If you undertake the journey into the sacred cave,

you will never grow old the way other people do.

I left college after three semesters, at the end of 1971, and—as mentioned in an earlier installment—joined the Army, studied Chinese full-time for a year, and was then stationed in Japan for two years. 

If you stop and think about it, the Eastern and Western hemispheres of the globe resemble the right and left hemispheres of the brain. As global communication increases we can distinguish characteristic styles of East and West, somewhat similarly to the way we see the specialization of the cerebral hemispheres. In neuroscience, various theories have been put forth to try to describe the character of the right and left hemispheres as complementary: since the left controls speech that is necessarily sequential in time, the right has been proposed to predominate in matters concerning space; or, since the left is executive, the right is intuitive (e.g., “drawing on the right side of the brain”); and so on.  Since we don’t really know that much about the actual workings or organization of brain function, these characterizations are perhaps more metaphorical than anything else. But such theories do express our predisposition to find harmony and balance in wholeness, to discern opposites that integrate in order to work together.  “Differences that make a difference.” Global harmony, instead of seizures of warfare and cross-purpose. A Whole Earth. A Gaia hypothesis.

Haverford philosophy professor Paul Desjardins teaching his Intro class, circa 1975. Paul had spearheaded the renovation of the Gest Center, classroom pictured here. He was much enamored of single columns in the middle of the room, and commissioned the oak copies of the Windsor chairs with Ionic volutes from Independence Hall in Philadelphia. (The back of the head, lower right, is Steve Sawyer, who later directed Greenpeace.)

When I returned to college after three years in the Army, I came under the tutelage of philosophy professor Paul Desjardins. Last night, I stumbled across a description of Paul that I wrote in reply to a blog posting by Justin E. H. Smith. In the interests of simplicity, I’ll simply reprint my comment here in full:

I too read this article with interest, and it took me back to my days as an undergraduate at Haverford College in 1975-77, when I read philosophy with Paul Desjardins. Paul was a brilliant, brilliant and eccentric man, a student of Paul Weiss’s at Yale, and probably the one who brought Richard Bernstein to Haverford after he was refused tenure at Yale (where they had been friends as graduate students, I suppose), making—along with others such as Tink Thompson, Aryeh Kosman, Ashok Gangadean, Diskin Clay, Joe Russo and visitors like Louis Mackey, Richard Rorty, and Jurgen Habermas—a truly great philosophical scene.

I took two year-long courses with Paul: Origins of Philosophy one year, and Philosophy East West the next.

Origins consisted of a first semester on the first eight lines of Homer’s Iliad; the second semester we did the rest of Bk 1 and the other 23 books. (We also read Hesiod at the beginning there.) This was all done in English translation.

East West consisted of the first two chapters of the Shu Jing (the histories of Yao and Shun), followed by a week’s worth of Articles Criticizing Lin Piao, then the rest of semester one on the Da Hsueh, a Confucian classic (which we were expected to memorize and recite by heart in Chinese) recorded in the Li Chi, and then the second semester on The Analects of Confucius, mostly the first book. We used the Ezra Pound rendition of Confucius, a dubious translation perhaps but useful because it reproduces rubbings from the Stone Classics, the earliest publicly erected stele of the Confucian texts. (I had studied Chinese in the Army before then, so I had a little standing on that count.)

Paul was essentially a Platonist, but also a devout Catholic who had once written on Augustine (his only paper ever, I believe). Trained in Japanese at Yale during the Second World War, he had been a naval officer commanding Marines in the first wave at Iwo Jima, and was later a judge involved in the adjudication of the return of Chinese possessions in China from the Japanese after the war. He had a fantastic collection of Dogon masks (African philosophy?!) and had built a little stream that trickled through his second story apartment where he conducted classes. We would all take off our shoes upon entering, before crossing the little second story water garden. (He also had had a Fulbright at a Zen monastery in Kyoto sometime in the sixties.) His wife Rosemary, an Australian, taught Greek philosophy at Swarthmore after his death in 1991.

Paul was one for beginnings; in fact, he liked to undermine existing structures and give them new foundations.

In the intervening years I have spent a modest amount of time reading Heraclitus and Parmenides, as well as Chuang tzu. One salient point to make is that there is a fair amount of overlap between Heraclitus’ concept of the Logos and the Chinese idea of the Tao, enough to wonder if there wasn’t some sort of influence then, coming from the Orient. In truth, I have found these three philosophers inexhaustible and sufficient, even though I have also looked into Plato, Spinoza, Hume, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and some latter day French stuff over the years. I’m not sure I agree with the suggestion that we put Chinese thought in some sort of straitjacket, though. On the contrary, what is striking is the remarkable adequacy of Chinese thought (Confucian/Taoist) to come to terms with the wide range of philosophic thought so early and so completely. But perhaps because I studied Chinese before I studied philosophy has some effect here.

In his Book of Five Rings, the Japanese swordsman/calligraphic artist Miyamoto Musashi disparages reliance on the practice of “indoor strategy”, ridiculing dojos who fail to grasp the point of getting a jump on an adversary by dropping out of a tree.

I will skip over the ways conventional academic careerists misunderstood Paul.

Posted by: stefan | May 14, 2016 at 09:04 PM

Two views of a Dogon Female Figure, by Ogol circle of artists, Mali; a wood carving from Paul and Rosemary’s collection. From a letter by Paul:

"As a working hypothesis, I'd venture that their being brought up from the house to the terrace at times of funerals has to do with the theme of death and resurrection, not merely of a particular corpse, but of La Terre, which receives the Word from Heaven as the fields receive the millet, the mother the male sperm, or the tribe the law. She represents, I suspect, the act of receiving and of being resurrected or born anew. Her knees are bent as she rises (in the larger figure the dynamic movement is suggested further by her slight turning to the side). [...] One of the greatest things about the large N'gol figure is the way it manages to suggest interiority of vision in leaving out the eyes, a conventional device which isn't always successful. Also I find the thighs and breasts convincingly human: they both arouse and sublimate energies; one gets to encounter in her more than just a human being [..., she] really manifests sublimity. [...] "