We are interwoven beings

Fernando Kaskais

Dec 2

Dragons in Clouds (1684) by Zhou Xun, Qing dynasty. Courtesy the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art

A dragon needs the clouds and the wind in order to fly. What happens when we too relinquish individualistic reasoning?

Mercedes Valmisa is assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania. She is the author of Adapting: A Chinese Philosophy of Action (2021).

What if I told you that there's no such thing as an individual action? That every time you eat, walk up the stairs or read a book, you are not the sole agent behind what you are doing, but are engaged in a process of co-creation – as much acted-upon as acting?

To grasp what I mean here, imagine riding a horse. While I can effortlessly distinguish between myself and a horse, I'm aware that neither I nor the horse alone can produce the action of riding. Riding emerges as a kind of co-action between myself and others, and these others are not limited to the horse: they extend towards the particularities of the terrain, the open space that affords movement, the training that the horse and I have undertaken together, the bridle and saddle, and even the food we have ingested to give us energy. All these agencies and many more collaborate to produce the event of riding.

I'm going to suggest that, just like riding, all actions are collective. While this would be close to common sense for a Chinese philosopher of the 'classical period' (roughly 6th to 2nd century BCE), it might seem counterintuitive to those of us raised in Western contexts.

There's currently a dominant tendency in what we call 'the West' (the Anglosphere and some parts of Europe) to buy into the myth of individualism: the notion that individuals alone are responsible for their failure or success, that we are self-reliant and independent from each other and the natural world. Basically, that we can do things by ourselves. A prominent manifestation of individualism is the American Dream – which in her book Cruel Optimism (2011) Lauren Berlant called a desire that becomes 'an obstacle to your own flourishing'. Individualism promises prosperity and success based on individual effort and merit, but it delivers ideas and conditions that make those things unattainable for all but a privileged few. Under this ideology, drug addicts are blamed for their weakness, pregnant women who choose not to become mothers are shamed for their recklessness, and the unemployed are condemned for their laziness. Yet in a world where corporations manipulate doctors to overprescribe drugs, where reproductive rights are in retreat, and where jobs are often humiliating, exhausting and poorly paid, individualism has become a cover for those very entities responsible for these grave injustices and inequalities. The performance of an ideology that supposedly benefits the person but brings about the opposite of what was intended – that's the notion of cruel optimism.

What happens, though, if we dispense with the individualistic way of framing reality? In parts of contemporary academia, the countervailing notion of relationality has become a prism to rethink both the humanities and the sciences. There are Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's assemblages; Bruno Latour's actor-network theory; Donna Haraway's posthumanism; and Karen Barad's entanglement, among many others. And this is just in the West. Asia has more resources to think through relationality simply because it's been doing it for a longer time. Along with classical Chinese philosophers, I support a form of relational and process metaphysics, which favours flowing interrelations, interconnectedness and interdependence. These concepts can help us think differently about issues that affect our daily lives, reframing agency in terms of our relations and dependencies with others. Much as we can't ride a horse by ourselves, there's nothing in our social and political life that's entirely up to us as individuals. We are co-constituted, co-acted and co-dependent on others – from the air we breathe to the ground that affords our walking. If we start seeing the world like this, it has the potential to make things much better for the many life forms that inhabit this planet.

According to an influential strand of thought within Chinese philosophy, humans and other animals are not the only entities with the capacity to act. We are in turn acted upon by everything around us: objects, ideas, laws, genes, food, rules. The claim that these things can act subverts our conventional understanding of agency. Traditionally, in the West, agency is linked to intentionality: we have agency – the capacity to act – only insofar as we can represent our intentions and goals. But in classical Chinese philosophy, things like drinking vessels and dress attires, while not animate, have tendencies to behave in certain ways, and such behaviour affords certain possibilities for action...

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https://aeon.co/essays/in-classical-chinese-philosophy-all-actions-are-collective