Philosophía

On Going On Diet

2011-05-25T02:01:00.000-07:00

My piece for the Pub:

Aside from fashion and cosmetic products, one way to enhance feminine beauty for women is perhaps going on diet. In this skinny era, far too many women depart from the classical ideals of feminine beauty and often find themselves complaining that their waists are too wide, legs too short, and sometimes even breasts too small. Unlike ancient times, chubbiness is no longer an indicator of physical virtue, but rather, an offensive deviation from an ideal proportion that runs contrary to the Golden Ratio.

How much determination they need to resist the temptation to salivate towards a box of Belgian chocolate; how much courage they may have to show to devour a piece of strawberry cake regardless what a scientific formula about sugar and fats may have to reveal. To fill their stomach with the tiniest amount of sugary product is to lay down the very foundation of obesity. It's almost as if a piece of candy may easily lead women to avoid the verdict of a full-length mirror and possibly deny them of the opportunity to appear on a Vogue magazine.

Yet this aesthetic assault which women have so rigorously practised is hardly the sole evidence of masochism. Humans are both independent and dependent creatures. If women are willing to suffer from this assault, it might be because men tend to be seduced by this concept of slimness as well. According to most men, physical beauty of women can be measured according to an objective standard, a view that is so influential on women that it has become their own. In order for a woman to be beautiful, the contour and the shape of a woman have to be symmetrically balanced, waists narrow, breasts not flat, bottoms slightly larger, and legs thinner so as to make them seem longer. This view seems to suggest that there is a mathematical basis of beauty, hence the faces that successfully appear on the front cover of magazines are necessarily rather than subjectively pleasing.

What's more is that the rigours of going on diet may bear a certain wisdom that comes from ancient Greek philosophy. In ancient Greece, self-control was of the utmost importance. Inscribed on thousands of vases and ceramics was the guidance on how people should maintain their diet. Socrates once said to one of his companions Epigenes, "You've got the body of someone who just isn't engaged in public matters." He then suggests, "You should care for your body no less than an Olympic athlete." Apparently, physical training was part of the duty of a Greek citizen. The ancient Greeks believed that physical self-control could eventually lead to self-control of the mind which was a necessity if one were to participate politics. Hence modern women may be said to draw wisdom from the ancient Greek philosophy not in order to participate in politics, but instead to nurture their reasoning abilities. How easily a masochistic practice may be mistaken to be self-indulgent.

However, ruminating over the schism between aesthetic perfection of femininity and culinary delight, is it really impossible to reconcile these two ideals? Are women to rely on bases, mascaras, eye liners and such which could chisel a dent from their bank accounts to meet the criterion of absolute beauty? Do they have to be committed to a self-inflicting diet in order to wear bikini and lingerie?

The fact that most women spend a great deal of fortune on cosmetic products, fashion, and diet programmes has risked inspiring an unfair neglect of their habits of eating and a misguided enthusiasm towards artificial inventions. If their appreciation of dessert and junk food is liable to rupture their physical beauty, it is not because these things are inherently harmful, but because women have never quite got the ability to savour what they eat rather than taking in too-big quantities, given the fact that we are living in a society that encourages us to get several things done within a day. The stomach needs time to register fullness, and through taking our time while eating, we may slowly reduce our overall consumption which will prevent obesity. Slower eating not only helps us to productively realise how much food we really need, but also enjoy life while we are eating. We should not forget that the best kind of food is to be enjoyed through our manner of absorption instead of the extent of our consumption.

Those who have known me long enough should testify that I'm not very far from being a skeleton. So eating slowly must work. Therefore, women should eat all they want. Only through eating what they like and enjoying it, they can become slimmer.

Why We Are Better Left Unhappy

2011-05-24T00:56:00.000-07:00

Recent scientific survey suggests that happiness may be linked to our genes which come in either long or short versions. It says that people who inherit the long versions of the gene are generally happier and those with the short versions tend to be more pessimistic. Thanks to modern science, parents of the forthcoming generations may look up to a better future, whose children might finally be genetically engineered to live a fulfilled life instead of one being constantly filled with anxiety and despair . What’s more promising is that it might as well put an end to the age-old philosophical debate of how happiness may be attained. Sooner or later, we should no longer feel guilty of not having finished the works of Plato, Epicurus, and Cicero which we have bought years ago.

However, if we survey the history of philosophy, we may be tempted to discover that a range of philosophers who would disagree that happiness might not be actually worth pursuing. If happiness should not be confused as an object of desire, it is because happiness might harbour within us a sense of primordial optimism, forcing us to muddy the true schema of ourselves. Think of the self-help books in the franchise bookstores. Rather than helping us to realise our limits, self-helps books tend to fool us into thinking that we may eventually overcome all sorts of obstacles and aspire to greatness if we are willing to summon the desirable versions of ourselves through an optimistic temperament.

The problem of fierce optimism is that we may be easily invited to assume tomorrow will be much like today. It leads us to cast aside our tragic awareness of life and favour an absolute trust in science. But science can so far only offer us knowledge, not value judgements. In this age bombarded by a wide range of scientific techniques, we tend to think that roads and highways are mysteriously traffic-free and smartphones were invented to simplify our lives. But the reality, unsurprisingly, is always cruel. However fast our vehicles may become, however user-friendly our smartphones may seem, the traffic lights nevertheless provoke our anger while we are on the way to work and smartphones, on the other hand, have us suffer from a psychological assault on our capacity to fix our minds steadily on almost anything.

Behind the tendency to feel happy lies the danger of ignoring what life actually constitutes. Our hope to adjust our temperament to an optimistic one through genetics hints at a refusal to accept life is inherently frustrating. It easily generates in us a satisfactory feeling of what life naturally throws at us. It takes away our motivation to strive for the better, our ability to change what is, and thereby denying us of the liberty to invest our hopes in perfection.

Yet the value of pessimism is far more arresting. If pessimism is a more vital ingredient to a fulfilled life, it is because it allows us to grow wiser. Our happiness depends not on the commonly cherished things on earth: friendship, romantic love, beauty etc., but rather, things like intervals of separation and the endurance of loneliness. It is through our experience of pain and suffering we become wise of how we should live. It helps enforce moments of contemplation, pushing us to acquire a better sense of reality and placing pain in a more proper context, just like only when we stump a nail on the ground, we may have the awareness of pain, thus becoming wise to the fact that human bodies are fragile.

It’s because we are at the mercy of mortality, we may reflect on our regrets and take on a bigger to quest to compensate what we are previously reluctant to do. It’s the fact that life is short and might end at anytime we try to savour the moments we spend with our loved ones and fortify them within our souls. Pessimism grants us permanent access to certain emotional textures which could not have been arisen without loneliness, frustration, and despair.

Instead of consciously looking for solutions to cure sadness, we need to learn to be productively unhappy and let it become a seed for actual happiness. Happiness is always founded on sadness. To be sad is to be happy. So what does that say about science? It means even if we possess the technology to make ourselves happy, we should still let nature decide the fate for us. It’s better not to have full control over our destiny.

The Lessons of The Bohemians

2011-05-14T10:40:00.000-07:00

Thanks to capitalism, the bourgeois ideals have successfully forced us to arrive at an objective assessment of what success is. A life of success has been defined by what we do rather than who we are. Our inability to purchase a brand-new Mercedes suggests that we are losers in the game of life, placing us at the grass-root level in the pyramid of social hierarchy. Hence the modern idea of success necessarily aligns with economic reward. Our incapacity to bring out the best of us through material articulation is a forceful reminder of the fact that perhaps we have not worked hard enough or that we are far from being lucky to be born with God-gifted talents, because a meritocratic society is ultimately just and fair.

If meritocracy is based on an objective evaluation of who can be rewarded, we might then easily come to the conclusion that destitution of money is not merely pitiable, but also deserved. To display our sympathy towards the poor is therefore to expose our emotional vulnerability, because the poor are destined to be unsuccessful. In the early 19th century, however, there emerged a group of people called the bohemians whose traditions have been passed on down to this day. What distinguishes them from the ordinary mortals who surrender to the bourgeois system is their distaste for business and material success. They lack the usual patience to engage in meaningless conversations concerning money, deal with insincere handshakes, and bureaucracy. Rather than associating the modern idea of success, they take pride on being poor, as a unique characteristic to stand out from the flock (because being poor indicates moral goodness rather than human greed). They tend to cultivate their intellectual adequacy and emotional sensitivity. Their allegiances are to the arts and emotions.

If the bohemians don't think material success indicates the glory of a person, it is perhaps because being financially unsuccessful suggests that one has directed his energies to other activities that might prove more fruitful, cherishing values that might be undermined by the mainstream culture which actually are more vital to human civilisation. What is valuable about this part of the Bohemian philosophy lies not in preventing us from suffering financial assault, but in the ability to realise our own limits. Of course, to realise our limits is to risk hampering the potentials that might lay beneath us. But if an architect can work with the materials available to him, why, then, can't we accept our own limits and explore our potentials within them? Why can't we place focus on ourselves rather than the herd to understand who we really are? Do we really have to be like Bill Gates and Steve Job?

We need to realise where we belong to. To discard what our nature limits is to become self-indulgent (because forgetting our limits may seduce us to be overly optimistic about our own abilities). Understanding our limits not only allows us to become humble, it also allows us to discover what we are actually good at, urging us to be specific instead of being generic, hence nurturing our own potentials at their best. Therefore, we are likely to amount to failure in some aspects of life. But accepting failure also indicates the fact that we are all unique. Instead of acknowledging that we are obedient drones, the humility to accept failures affords us a better sense of reality about ourselves, providing us with a ruinous defence mechanism against illusions and arrogance, anxiety and rage, incompetence and self-contempt.

Prompted by financial necessity, too many understand the value of entertainment and neglect the value of leisure. Stretching out on the ground and letting the grass caress my bare feet would be considered one of the most unproductive activities in the modern era. If leisure offends the bourgeois values, it is perhaps because leisure is in violation of the fundamental law of what anchors to capitalism, seeking to destroy the inevitable contract between economy and productivity. Therefore, merits not measured in money are regarded as useless.

If only financial merits may be considered useful, could we then easily conclude that what the Bohemians do proves unimportant in the modern era? Can we not say that their pursuit of the arts is useless merely because writing poetry and understanding Shakespeare are unable to afford them a decent condo? If the Bohemian lifestyle is to be established on unshakable grounds, perhaps a philosophy which dated back to the sixth century B.C. emerged on a different continent might offer a better understanding of the Bohemian lifestyle.

The philosophy is Daoism. The founder of Daoism, Laozi, might be regarded as one of the first prototypes of the bohemians. In his celebrated work "Dao De Ching", he dedicated several chapters in defence of uselessness or idleness and articulated its value in a rather obscure language:

“We put thirty spokes together and call it a wheel; But it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the wheel depends.

We turn clay to make a vessel; But it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the vessel depends.

We pierce doors and windows to make a house; And it is on these spaces where there is nothing that the usefulness of the house depends.

Therefore, just as we take advantage of what is, we should recognise the usefulness of what is not.”

These were not haphazard and reckless articulations of what is valuable about uselessness. This verse in Dao De Ching laid a well-developed philosophy, an arresting claim that risks ascribing a more proper value to what is useless and undermining a misguided enthusiasm of what is useful. It invited us to reconsider the notion of usefulness that inherently contained in things which may on the surface seem useless. Though taking a leisurely stroll in the park deprives us of the chance to invest in the stock market, it actually allows a contemplative habit of mind to flourish and nurtures deep friendship. Though reading poetry may spare us of the opportunity to acquire an eminent position in the business world, it fosters a family of life-cultivating emotions which are of supreme importance to friendship and romantic love.

Hence Daoism recovers a sense of justification for the Bohemian lifestyle. It paradoxically gives weight to what seems useless, forcing us to readjust the values we commonly regard as unproductive. Though the Bohemian lifestyle is unable to allow us to grow richer in cash, but it allows us to grow richer in intellectual adequacy and emotional sensitivity.

The Bohemians suggest an alternative way of living which deviates itself away from the bourgeois mainstream. Their role lies in opening our eyes, in sensitising our awareness of what is around us, and in inculcating in us an appreciation of objects whose qualities are previously neglected. Moreover, we tend to be more productive during leisure. It's not just because it makes allowance for periods of contemplation about life, it's also because we are able to escape from the monotonous everyday rituals enforced by the bourgeois society.

A life dedicated to the Bohemian lifestyle gives us something new, something refreshing. It restores in us a better mental functioning to which deep, sophisticated thoughts are anchored. The lessons? We have devoted too much time in doing "something" rather than nothing. And only after we submit our thinking to the bourgeois philosophy, we amount to ultimate failure.

When All That's Solid Melts Into Uncertainty

2011-04-01T02:20:00.000-07:00

Here is my piece for SCMP:

On Pornography

2011-01-06T12:01:00.000-08:00

My piece from the Pub:

It must be admitted that watching pornography is time-consuming business for men. One can easily locate a liar within a flock of men when he confidently remarks that pornography has failed to inspire glimpses and enlarge his sexual imagination during his teenage. In the age of liberalism, a restriction on pornography not only offends our sexual interests, but it also hints at a refusal to enrich our sexual lives by doing away our erotic fantasies. But whatever pornographic interests we may have, does liberalism necessarily suggest our erotic imaginations should flow freely within the fabric of our consciousness and intentionally leave the unconscious ones unguarded? What might be the limits and consequences when we liberate them to their maximum potential?

If pornography not only suffices as a visual medium to unleash our suppressed sexual desires, it is perhaps because pornography is as well a contemporary incarnation of Kama Sutra, where it infinitely extends the pages of the age-old "science" of love and fills up the empty pages of positions and foreplays that might have been neglected or undiscovered centuries ago. Many romantically deluded teens look to pornography not just for masturbation, but also for sexual guidance, for it makes up for the lack of dynamics and drama in the uncreative moves that are only allowed to perform in their beds. How easy we might enrich our sexual lives by streaming a few pornographic films online.

Perhaps this is it. For many teens, physical intimacy might be the very reason why they embark on a romantic journey in the first place. How complicated and time-consuming when we realise that there is much money and sense of humour involved just to woo someone into bed; how life would be much easier if we could monitor the dating process on a screen where we can push the fast forward button and skip the foreplay whenever we please and push the play button at the precise sequence to render our latent desires visible. Yet if there is something interrupting this Eden, it is because pornography has risked harbouring an illusion so strong that we might be fooled into thinking that we are actually in love, because we are already having sex. The act of sexual intercourse forcefully and immediately suggests psychological intimacy that binds us with another person.

Hence, if we follow strictly the teenage logic, we only need sex instead of appeasing our romantic yearnings. Love is something that needs to be chipped off its edges, polished, and distilled to reveal its essence. It is only a by-product of sex. It clouds us with a romantic illusion that lure us into believing that there is someone we should actually caress for and die for. There comes the time when sex should become a sport, merely for pleasure and health, just like one is working out in a gym to assure one has a robust buildup and a better immune system.

However, sex is not merely done merely for the sake of pleasure. If there is something neglected during the act of intercourse, it is because we are still at heart obsessed with the age-old distinction of the body and mind which we unfairly consign love to the mind and sex to the body. Behind the act of intercourse lies a psychological aspect longing to be satisfied. While love doesn't necessarily go with sex, sex, however, always goes with love, for love grants us permanent access to certain emotional textures which may seem forbidden during intercourse. With love, we have sex not for pleasure, but for intimacy. Our partners are not merely at our service, but to be loved.

Sex is founded on our longing for intimacy. Love, unlike sex, is not merely a desire, instead of being a means to possession, it allows us to escape from loneliness to which our greatest unhappiness is anchored. Hence physical intimacy suggests a material articulation of what is affectionate. However, if sex is stripped of its association with the desire of bonding, while it may offer physiological delight, it hardly deepens our sense of intimacy, for psychological intimacy requires communication and understanding whilst physical intimacy is rooted in the art of seduction which is founded on the display of our finest qualities. Therefore, psychological intimacy aspires to the witness of one blowing his nose aggressively without a handkerchief whilst its physical counterpart stems from a rather superficial appreciation of the perfect contour of female body and her skin texture. Only through the language of love, sex can harbour a psychological fulfilment to the instinct.

Thought might be antithetical to pornography, for sexually arousing mediums are meant to be intuitive, spontaneous and unreflective. To meditate on the role of pornography is to mitigate the depth of our sexual satisfaction may aspire to. But this is precisely where the danger of pornography lies. It pays too much attention to positions and styles and is entirely lacking the psychological flavour of sex. Greek philosophers had contemplated much on the topic which Plato, in "The Symposium" remarked that desires should be directed to the right end at the right place, at the right time, and at a right degree. Rather than liberating our sexual desire to its maximum potential, we should instead cultivate it. Not only we need to keep an open-mind on sex itself, but also we need to learn the art of watching pornography to ensure we are actually having sex properly. Because pornography is risky.

Should We Read?

2010-12-14T21:06:00.000-08:00

Edited version of the Pub:

How seriously should we take books? Though many teenagers are reluctant to read nowadays, reading is still generally regarded as a way to cultivate our intelligence. Rather than manifesting our awareness of the dangers of books, defenders of reading assure us that reading must necessarily cultivate our intellectual and emotional demands and instead urge us to adopt a fetishistically reverent attitude to their literary merits. Prompted by this literary fervour, we are therefore obliged to surrender to the reading lists carefully formulated by school teachers so we may obtain a wider vision of the world to accomplish a range of intellectual endeavours.

For many devoted readers, the benefits of reading cannot be more obvious. In the face of financial assault, political disgrace, and romantic pessimism, our wretched souls are likely to assume a melancholy air and contemplate the inherent frustrating experience of life. Disconsolate, books invite us to abstract all our surroundings and take refuge in a more agreeable world, tempering our anxieties that are caused by the reality. The other benefit of reading, and a more crucial one, is that it makes allowance for our critical analysis, and thereby makes way for us to develop our intellectual faculties of what we feel, even when it means other writers help us to do so. Instead of taking whom we admire as oracle, we should consider these writers milestones of our own thoughts, through distilling their wisdom, remedy and refine the significant parts of ourselves.

But books often cause their readers a few problems. Not only we often mistakenly regard our favourite writers as being lucid on almost all topics, but it's also because they might silence us. If good writers might influence us in a negative way, it is because their writings contain bits and pieces that we don't yet know how to articulate. A survey of Shakespeare's works, through the insights into human nature that are beautifully suggested in the balanced phrases, may strike us with awe, but it's maddening in the way we are unable to command our minds with fluidity to articulate our pens across a blank sheet of paper to state precisely what we feel. The works of a fine prose stylist detonates a too great potential to rival against even the most insatiable desire to write.

Another problem is idolisation. When we encounter a beautifully written work, it is perhaps not the case that we might idolise the writer, but, rather, the objects the writer so skilfully describes. Upon reading Gombrich's "The Story of Art", though one may learn how to appreciate certain works of art more properly, behind its forceful description of works of art lies the implicit tendency to savour what Gombrich aligns with artistic merits, harbouring within us an appreciation of what is depicted in the pictures rather than the artistic quality of the pictures. We are forced to reconcile an intended artistic reverence with a neglect of what constitutes the essence of the works of art, hence liable to suffer the rigid inability to appreciate what is ignored by Gombrich.

To read too much is therefore to paralyse our intellectual temper with literary idolatry and deny us our right to individuality to voice out what we value. It forgoes a family of life-enhancing ideas which can only arise through the rigours of critical analysis and invites a sense of authoritarianism to which we consistently surrender. It discolours the flexibility and complexity of the human mind to which our imaginative vision is anchored. Moreover, reading is a response to anxiety and unhappiness. To encourage the habit of reading is to further acknowledge one is in a state of unhappiness, frustrated at our inability to translate and adapt ourselves to the realistic incarnation of what is desirable.

For those who think reading is necessarily a good thing, I should strongly argue for the opposite, that reading too much, or even reading itself, may actually close our minds to what is intelligent. Not only parents should stop encouraging their children to read, we should also acknowledge that a place that is devoid of passionate readers is the best place to live in, because most people scarcely have the need to read.

Hotel Management and Architecture

2010-11-25T19:00:00.000-08:00

Keen to take a break from routine, we often hope to get away from the habitual and summon the desirable versions of ourselves in order to take on a different perspective to look at the world. But change is not always easy. One possible reason is that we tend to think of our homes as anchors of identities. If homes are indicators of who we are, it is perhaps because they are often the material articulation of what we think a good life is. Not only they help lay down a framework of our identities, but they also subtly suggest the values we hold dear to.

However, problems arise because our homes are often reluctant to change. Our furniture and decor implicitly suggest that the values we are liable to adopt are more praiseworthy than the ones that are left unexplored. But there are times when we doubt whether we are heading to the wrong direction and are no longer sure who we really are. Hence, in order to get away from our moral confusions and the chatter of societies, a change is needed. The solution is travel.

Only until we encounter a temple in Kyoto, an exotic palm tree, a landscape of Dutch modernist houses, we may venture to revise our previous assumptions of life and initiate a breakthrough. Unfortunately, aside from cities like Las Vegas, books and tour guides written on the subject tend to seduce us to generate a receptivity to famous tourist sites instead of the places all tourists and travelers are necessarily clung to, namely, hotels.

Travel guides often avoid in-depth descriptions of hotels except matters regarding prices, the kinds of restaurants, and the kinds of entertainments as if hotels are merely a means to shelters. To exaggerate the facilities in hotels is to disregard the settings and the layout of them, that is, the architecture itself and how it may be beneficial to the people. But tourism is a field that is constantly evolving. It often investigates what may attract tourists and how it may improve the general quality of travel. If tourism is a field that constantly demands new ideas, why can't we direct our focus on hotels as ideal tour sites rather than cliche landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower and the Tokugawa Castle? Can we not spend more time in hotels that we favour instead of forcing ourselves to be moved to tears by what all tourists are supposed to like?

Hotels, like airports, may be thought to be centres of cultural diversity and globalisation where people from all over the world, through the struggle of choices of hotels that are available, finally settle on a particular one to be their temporary homes. It is interesting to witness how many people with different cultural backgrounds envisage an identical vision of happiness, offering conclusive evidence of a global village. Yet hotels are far from being merely shelters whose rooms offer comfortable beds for us to stretch our legs, wrap ourselves up with blankets, and extinguish consciousness for several hours. They operate like our homes, suggesting a certain visions of what we might want to become.

If buildings are meant to be functional, yet translations of our psychological make-up, we may be tempted to look at the Villa Savoye at the summit of Poissy constructed by the renowned French architect Le Corbusier. Though Le Corbusier once remarked that the sole function of a house was shelter against severe weather and to accommodate us with a range of activities such as cooking that were essential to our survival, it seemed rather hard not to detain our attention when the flat roof sprang a leak in a bedroom where the boy of the Savoye family suffered from a chest infection because of the amount of water the roof had invited during rainy days. However functional Le Corbusier insisted the house was, what motivated him to construct the house was aesthetic interest rather than practical concerns. Behind this principally technological house lies the implicit attempt to support a way of life that appealed to the modernists: science, technology, efficiency, democracy etc. Le Corbusier wished the house to contribute to a certain mood, a transubstantiation of what we value into a material medium. How ironic the fact that he subtly designed a house out of beauty that was theoretically justified on technological terms rendered it uninhabitable.

For architectural gravity, many great religions are its practitioners. Over the course of human history, we have constructed temples, churches, and cathedrals to enforce our moral aspirations within ourselves. In the face of financial necessity, political disgrace, and romantic pessimism, the heaviness concentrated upon our mortal souls is perhaps too great to be fortified within our material casings. Hence we are tempted to inscribe certain values on works of architecture to act as sobering reminders of what we hold dear to. Gazing at the coloured windows that depict the story of Christ and frescos that illustrate the majesty of God at once harbours within us a feeling of solemn awe and force us to contemplate ideas that might have been inconceivable in the commercial world. Surrounded by the Gothic grandeur, ideas that might seem laughable in the secular world would begin to make sense and assume an air of sanity, for works of architecture beautifully administer the correct dosage of our missing virtues we wish to savour in our hearts.

Therefore, if we wish to change ourselves through travel, can we not regard hotels the kinds of places that help enforce the aspirations we wish to secure? If they are our temporary anchors of our undiscoverable identities, can we not direct our energy towards where we want to stay at instead of dedicating at full force our geographical interests to the place where we set foot on? The field of hotel management has long rested the improvements of hotels on the regulation of prices, the sorts of facilities, and customer service. Yet the notion of architecture largely leaves unnoticed, if noticed, neglected.

If the field of hotel management is to make some serious progress, perhaps its practitioners may need to invite architects to reconcile beauty with what is functional. There comes the time where we need to find a balance between hotels and the destination that can supposedly change us. The value of a beautiful work of architecture lies in its ability to grant us permanent access to certain emotional textures that allows us to arrest the transient moments, and solidify them, the kind of things that a beach or an exotic plant might not profess to do. It allows us to experience certain visions of a good life which we can regularly attend to.

What makes hotels significant is that they are the only places that retain the possibility to strike us with familiarity when we travel abroad. Through a setting that differs greatly from our homes, our continued exposure to it, rather than the places we tend to only visit once upon travel, suggests that the qualities contained within the hotel may assume a greater hold on us. It makes allowance for the possibility to bind our emotions to the fabric of our temporary homes, project them up to the sky, and reflect them back onto the ones that are located thousand miles away.

We shouldn't be repelled by Wittgenstein's claim that doing philosophy is nothing compared to being a good architect. A beautifully constructed hotel not only inspires examination of one's own self, but also reflects the values of the place where it is situated. It seeks to compress all the memorial qualities of a place and translate them into a material language we are all inclined to understand- so to hope to reform our deeply flawed characters. Upon travel, perhaps nothing can be more tiresome than selecting a hotel to fathom our souls.

Why Self-Help Books Should Be Useful

2010-11-24T20:00:00.000-08:00

A piece for the Pub:

There is no more ridiculed genre than the self-help book. Yet far too many turn to this genre to escape from bureaucracy and the chatter of societies. If self-help book seems to offer consolations of our miserable lives, it is perhaps because it wishes to pin our hopes firmly on the sentiment of fierce optimism. Rather than telling us how the world actually operates, it tends to depict the world as totally just and equal, rendering it completely meritocratic.

Whatever shortcomings self-help books may have, though novels and literature may offer a better solution to human condition, to undermine the value of self-help book is to downplay its traditional role in literary history in contribution to our wellbeing. Much of the history of this genre spent its gloriest history analysing aspects of human psychology and aiming to enrich our lives through practical advice on the art of living such as friendship, romantic love, and diet instead of how we might boost up our self-esteem . The prestige of self-help books owed its success to its practitioners who were largely made up of philosophers and essayists, whose writings seduce us to bear a philosophical mind to even the most trivial details of our everyday life, through sensitising our awareness of the habitual, attuning our minds to pick up certain details that we are previously ignorant of.

Many of these writers were Stoic thinkers. Philosophers ranging from Epicurus and Seneca, Cicero to Marcus Aurelius, wrote a great deal of self-help books almost on every topic, offering practical advice to help us deal with death, the rejections of our lovers, and how to be happy without being rich. Instead of telling us how we might save up our money and invest in stock market, their advice went to the very core of human nature, urging us to perfect the art of going with the flow even when what was before us was as hard to swallow as, to use Arthur Schopenhauer's phrase, a toad.

This is precisely the bent of thinking that underlay the prominence of traditional self-help books. Not only they ventured to portray the world as it is, but also convinced us to be lightened by life's absurdities, adapting to the change rather than resisting it. But this is no optimism. Rather, it suggests pessimism, refuting the grave assumption that we will be cheered up when we are told all is well, and instead drawing us to the thought that we should never expect anything to go well, so we may restore the tranquility of our mind.

If the tradition of self-help books is deliberately divorced from philosophy, then perhaps philosophers are largely to blame, for they are no longer concerned with how to live happily, but, rather, how to get facts and concepts right. The greatest enemy of this genre may be thought as analytical philosophy, whose main objectives are clarification of concepts and logical consistency which seem almost totally irrelevant to our everyday experience however much we need logic to distinguish good arguments from the bad ones. Modern philosophy is entirely lacking its traditional vigour to improve our wellbeing.

Unfortunately, our steering away from analytical philosophy is not enough. The crucial danger of modern philosophy is that many philosophers suffer from the rigid inability to write beautifully. If we survey the history of philosophy, most of the philosophers, aside from the ancients, are terrible writers. Their inability lies not in being unable to articulate their ideas clearly, but, rather, in taking on a wrong perspective of how the human mind operates. The fact is the human mind needs to be seduced and entertained. Instead of employing the art of writing in merely a logical, coherent manner, they should pay more attention to plotting, a characteristic to which novels and literature are anchored.

Therefore, not only philosophy should resume its importance in self-help books, philosophers should also relearn to recast our moral confusions and griefs and collapse an old wisdom into beautiful, communal sentences in order to appeal to the lay audience. I wish to imagine one day where philosophers write much less for philosophy journals and fill their own writings without the slightest trace of jargons, where the self-help sections in any franchise bookshops whose bookshelves will be filled with volumes of Stoic writings, the entire collection of Alain de Botton's popular philosophy, and Bertrand Russell's essays instead of books with lurid covers and images of optimistic-looking faces that tend to falsely do away our anxieties and worries. Because, as the British philosopher John Stuart Mill put it so well, "ask yourself whether you are happy and you cease to be so."

On Novels and Literature

2010-11-21T22:50:00.000-08:00

A piece for the Pub:

If we walk into any franchise American book shops nowadays, most bestsellers may be classified into one broad category: self-help. Self-help books tend to bear optimistic titles that supposedly help us to cope with our existence, hovering between "How To Boost Up Your Self-Esteem" and "How To Awaken The Giant Within Yourself".

But it wasn't always like this. Much of our literary history has rested its glory on the genre of novels and literature. Classics ranging from Shakespeare's and Oscar Wilde's to Harry Potter and Twilight, it seems rather hard for us to neglect their importance to our wellbeing. But why would novels and literature start to lack their appeal? Do self-help and finance books help us make some serious improvement of the quality of life so we may legitimately ignore the lessons novels and literature have to offer?

If self-help and finance books are the guidance of how to live, it is perhaps because these genres supposedly aim to seduce us to get something practical out of them and help us improve our lives in a certain way. But as we contemplate pages of practical advice in our beds, sadness might have been returned, for not only they are filled with illusions of what life actually is, they also go on to paralyse our imagination of possible happiness. The drawback of self-help books lies in their attempt to explicitly temper our worries and anxieties with a sense of primordial optimism, while subjugating our accurate views on life, they tend to falsely describe the world as one full of opportunities rather than one that is inherently depressing.

If we are to find a way to console ourselves in the midst of economic hardships and political disgrace, yet self-help books are unable to recast an old truth or wisdom into passable communal sentences, then perhaps we may need to turn to novels and literature in order to remind ourselves of how we should live. One valuable lesson from novels and literature is that they tend to mirror our experience. Rather than making false additions to an already muddied picture of life, their stories are generally founded on our everyday experience, harbouring in us a sense of belonging. But what's so special about mirroring our experience?

If mirroring our experience is essential to helping us to cope with our existence, it is because it sensitises our awareness of what we all have experience with. It allows us to pay attention to the minutest details what we may easily neglect. Upon reading a romantic novel, while we all may have experience falling in love, it transforms itself into a prism and forces us to adapt its content to our experience, allowing us to take on a different perspective that we may be previously ignorant of. It stretches to an ability to describe our emotions and our psychological make-up far better that we do. It guides our mind to pick up certain signals that initially bypasses our consciousness, and from that, cultivating our emotional sensibility and generating an entirely new experience of what we are familiar with.

What's more is that it allows us to understand experience that is not our own. While most of us tend to work in offices as ordinary white collars, seldom we are detectives, murderers, spies, and the like. Novels and literature present before us professions we are unlikely to have experience with and tell us what the world is like from their perspectives. Hence the business of novelists is also to enlarge our sympathy. They engage us into an experience we are unfamiliar with and ward off our bias and prejudice that might have been arisen through our conceptions of these professions as outsiders. This is also precisely one of the most admirable values of democracy. The virtue of tolerance lies not in respecting the differences in ideas and opinions, but, rather, in trying to understand them, through discussions and debates. How easy novels and literature may prompt us to understand others.

The limits of the modern form of self-help and finance books stem from an incompetence to portray our lives accurately and offer relevant insights to improve our wellbeing. In our current moral confusions, novels and literature are crying out to resume their importance.

Can Feminists Fall in Love?

2010-11-14T21:08:00.000-08:00

A slightly edited version from the Pub:

Wearing bikinis and lingeries may be considered the triumph of feminism. As we glance through the gossip magazines and sexually appealing images in calendars, we should bear in mind that nudity offers substantial female confidence. Instead of regarding their bodies as areas of potential shame, women are finally able to display their physical candour and identities through various styles of bikinis and lingerie, mitigating the tension of the equality between men and women. However equal they may get, feminism is in violation of the fundamental law of seduction, forcing us to give away a vital ingredient of love, namely, romance.

Seduction is an art that is never easy to master. The irony is that it seems easiest to seduce those we are least attracted to instead of the ones we actually like, because the ones we desire elicit in us a sense of inferiority as compared to the perfections we have located in our beloved. What makes seduction difficult is that it lies not in revealing our character as a whole, far from offering a sense of intimacy, it is founded on the display of our finest qualities, because the desirable versions of ourselves are often not ours to summon at will. But how may we carefully administer the correct dosage of our admirable virtues? How can we ever be sure this or that virtue may appeal to our beloved?

The usual solution, and often an effective one, is to be modest. But as long as modesty stems from our crippling sense of inferiority, we often appear to be extremely reserved, and on some occasion, have the need to lie. Hence the experience of seduction is inevitably bound up with that of an actor. It’s because we need to take on a self that is not entirely our own in order to seduce the angelic face we happen to be dining with. All of a sudden, we are stripped of a sense of individuality and reminded of the anthropological wisdom that we are all social animals, that our existence is critically dependent on the others.

But what does it mean to be modest? One common answer often comes from fashion. But it is often an ambiguous one. The traditional view of how to modestly dress aims to unearth the desirable parts of skin textures yet cover some of the most intimate parts to assure masculine blindness until one is, perhaps, granted intimate access to one of the most sensitive and softest tissues among our sensory organs. To be modest is therefore to temper our modern need to be nude. The evolution of fashion, however, suggests there is no proper distinction between nudity and modesty today. What is modest in women's fashion constantly involves with the active participation of a desirable form of nudity. Wearing bikinis and lingerie get on fashion runways as much as those who conform to the traditional dressing code.

Of course, modesty suggests far more than that. Aside from fashion, we may also need to be modest in our manners and behaviours. As for a man, besides a constant need to display his wit and humour, he may need to suppress his usual tendency to swear and engage into conversations regarding pornography and a rather superficial appreciation of feminine physical beauty, and instead be drawn to offer fine knowledge of various types of wine and the like. Whilst for a woman, she may refrain from being far too outspoken, though occasionally may be permitted to ventilate bits and pieces of her intelligence, and suggesting a belief in the openness in sex. How could one be oblivious to the fact that men are highly deluded by the concept of virginity.

The current trend of acclaiming feminine identity through nudity therefore risks harbouring an opposite sentiment that does away the romantic conception of love and inspiring an unfair neglect of the merits of being reserved and modest. Not only it ignores the vital role seduction has to play before embarking on a romantic journey, it also renders love impossible, because many are seduced just because of the absurdly reserved behaviours mentioned. Modesty is the mother of love.

Perhaps it’s time to readjust the values advocated by feminism. The limits of feminism make a case for the impossibility of romantic love and seek to destroy some of the best qualities possessed solely by women. One of the best parts of civilisation lies not in promoting the equality of both sexes, but instead in how to express their inequality in a desirable, democratic way.

On Ancestors

2010-11-06T00:44:00.000-07:00

In ancient China, it was not uncommon to witness signs of ancestor worship. If it was important in ancient China, it was perhaps because it was believed that people might be able to foster luck by tracing back their ancestral roots. Unfortunately, this tradition can hardly sustain in the modern secular world. It's not just because people no longer entertain the superstition of the blessing of their ancestors, but it's also because all sorts of new technology conspires to kill their ability to be alone and unstimulated, thus lacking the essential patience to study the tablets inscribed with the names of their ancestors.

But, of course, ancestor worship has deeper implications than just mere psychological value. In the west, people, unlike the Chinese, traditionally tend to lack the rigours to embark on the journey of extensive research into the origin of their families and trace them through successions of generations. They are instead drawn to an ancestral memory that is rather myopic, a curiosity that is quenched when they touch on the generation of their grandparents. The remaining work is left for the historians.

Though the people from the west generally exhibit a lack of interest in the origins of their own families, their love of ancestors is beautifully expressed in the modern form of biography. If we pay close attention to any biography, we can hardly pass their first page without a symmetrically constructed family tree. If family tree is essential to understanding the life of a great man, it is because it's interesting to follow a series of births and alliances which lead us to a chosen creature. The study of family tree not only suggests that greatness and genius may be passed on through genetic and cultural heritage of one's family, but it is also studied in the interest of ventilating a fantasy of how the ancestral experience of the recorded subject may mirror our own, so we may escape our financial assaults and the chatter of societies and aspire to greatness.

Whatever motives we may be inspired by studying the Chinese tablets or reading biographies, they wish to harbour within ourselves a distinctive sense of belonging and continuity. Just as our societies are formed by our past to establish their own identities, our need to understand the genesis of our own families is essential to knowing who we are. Biographies and the Chinese tablets offer a vision of a logical, complexly related world, that every generation of our family members must be traced and recorded in order to wage a war against amnesia, thus acquiring a sense of the self. It's because we will be nothing if we don't know who we are. Only through a sense of belonging and continuity, we may fortify our own identities within our souls.

But the majority are bombarded with the idea that not everyone is worthy of a biography. But to record the bits and pieces of ourselves is to foster a memory for our descendants to which their sense of the self is anchored. The creation of our own biographies helps unfold certain versions of themselves which are not theirs to summon at will, which cannot be arrested by mere experience. It is a sobering reminder that we will one day also become ancestors. So what must we do? Create a biography in either literary or visual form and assure a proper environment for our descendants so they may grow out of it without being lost.

On Memory

2010-10-24T19:51:00.000-07:00

My piece for the Pub:

It's always tempting to lay your eyes on Central in the morning. A trip to the Starbucks coffee may offer us the best scenario for sight-seeing. In any morning on the weekdays, we may be in solemn awe of the landscape of Central being carpeted by a flock of black suits, rushing into Starbucks Coffee so they may rejuvenate themselves for a long day of work. The endorsement of Central values cannot be more obvious. The adoption of the American middle class lifestyle hints at a refusal of local values, which hardly warrants a restaurant of local flavour anything beyond ordinary pedestrian appraisal.

If drinking Starbucks Coffee is a vital ingredient for Central values, it is perhaps because a paper or plastic cup that carries a familiar green logo suggests a vision of more international tone. Rather than straying into a local restaurant for a ham and egg sandwich along with a cup of coffee blended in a style of local flavour, a cup of Starbucks may actually align us with an upper level in the pyramid of social hierarchy. Small wonder why Hong Kong is an international city.

However much Starbucks coffee we may drink, what is interesting is the fact that our desire for a cup of Starbucks stems not from our tendency to cherish work values, but, rather, from our romantic fantasy to centre our values rooted in a traditional American middle class routine. Behind the Starbucks drinking ritual hardly suggests our effort to reconcile the kind of happiness typical of the bourgeois outlook with financial necessity, rendering the surface more superficial than it seems. A sip of Starbucks in the morning may offer solutions for our fallible souls, for it carries the correct dosage of our missing virtues that are only deemed discoverable in the West.

This is, perhaps, precisely the reason why such scenario provokes a feeling of distance. But everywhere is like this in Hong Kong nowadays. While many may acknowledge the notion of historical value, but hardly there is anyone who offers sympathy for sentimental value. We may learn how our society and identity are formed by the past and traditions in order to acquire a sense of belonging and community. Our government may venture to do away the Tsim Sha Tsui Bus Stop and deprecate anything of sentimental value, yet too seldom they realise the merits of most buildings in Hong Kong lie not in their historical value, but, rather, sentimental value. Having breakfast at a restaurant of local flavour may not summon back a range of old yet valuable traditions, but the fact that being sat there might invite us to attend to a collection of life-enhancing thoughts in order to acquire a sense of the self.

What originally furnishes our sense of belonging and community is not merely architectural styles that offer aesthetic relief which reminds us of the past, it is also the resemblance of style and taste that triggers our bondage to what we may call a Proustian moment. Promoting ourselves to remember something often leads to an undesirable result. It often requires the charity of a friend's patience for us to utter the bits and pieces that seem to stretch too far to recall at all. True memory is different. It can only be experienced only accidentally and occasionally. Instead of being forced on us by another intrusive question of a friend, our memories might have only been returned to us only by an incidental encounter of a similarly constructed fried rice six years later in a restaurant.

The key to harbour our sense of belonging is whether that particular restaurant or this particular street can grant us access to certain emotional textures that only memory can attend us to. The problem of Hong Kong is that the landscape and what constitutes its soul fluctuate too much. Only through memory, our origin of birth may not be muddied up to a point where soul-searching is impossible.

Both physical and metal landscape of Hong Kong fails to recover a distinctive sense of community, belonging, and continuity. It deprives us of an essential medium to express our need for communication and commemoration, an attachment which can only be registered through memory, which only our will can transubstantiate through a material medium. Not until too long, we may no longer be able to tell others who we actually are nor we can remind ourselves of it.

On Saying Thank You

2010-10-23T00:54:00.000-07:00

One distinctive feature that distinguishes the civilised from barbarians is good manners. If good manners are vital to civilisation, it is perhaps because manners cultivate all kinds of loving relationships. Good manners, unlike etiquette, lie not in dressing up the habitual with ritualistic behaviours, but, rather, in determining how we might treat others. Hence, to have good manners is not to know how to align one's forks and knives with the plate in symmetrical order. They are instead ultimately dependent on virtues such as friendliness and generosity.

The basis of good manners may be said from a mere utterance of "thank you", a phrase we hear too often that it sometimes sounds rather like a cliche. Though saying thanks may offer conclusive evidence of being friendly and generous, the muscular movement that prompts us to transubstantiate our virtues into physical actions may seem quite mechanistic. It's because saying thanks has been taken for granted, that what we actually utter through our mouth is just a matter of rehearsing our habits rather than an act that springs from spontaneous impulse. We are all at heart creatures of habits and there liable to be contemptuous of what is familiar.

However much we might say thanks to each other, there is a significant part of this that leaves largely unnoticed by our society, that is, our reluctance to offer a similar politeness to relatively minor instances such as drinking a glass of water or eating a meal. If we refuse to harbour within ourselves a feeling of gratitude towards trivial things in our life, it is because we may be in danger of resorting to a unpleasant sort of sentiment, namely, the feeling of vulnerability or unambitious. To be thankful to every trivial detail in our routine is to suggest that we rarely have control over what we do, giving weight to determinism instead of free will.

Traditional Christianity centres on the premise that happiness is impossible in the secular world. Rather than offering comfort to our existence, it assures us that perfection can hardly occur on Earth. Though modern Christianity no longer holds dear to this pessimistic bent of thinking, the usefulness of Christianity lies precisely in reinforcing a pessimistic worldview. The fact that we should be thankful to every sunset and every meal we eat, as suggested by Christianity, is that life is extremely unpredictable. We need to accept that there are times when our plans may suffer the irrevocableness of change, that things may not always turn out as what we expect them to be. It is the effort of never letting the thought of death slip away too easily.

Modern self-help books too often engage us in optimism. Not only it forces us to submit to excessive doses of illusions, it also muddies the true schema of ourselves. It harbours in us a great amount of false hopes to realise our potentials and overcome our limits. Only when we encounter the gloomy nature of the reality, we may learn how to be productively unhappy. Small wonder why many Christians say thank you to God all the time.

If we don't say thank you to trivial events in our life, it is because we have grown too optimistic. Instead of affording us a better sense of reality, optimism merely pushes us into a baneful direction where we are constantly met with frustrations. It is pessimism that allows everything in this world to begin to make sense and assume an air of reasonableness. Only through pessimism, we may learn to say thank you properly.

The Herd Instinct Revisited

2010-10-10T21:58:00.000-07:00

Here's my piece for the Pub:

The criticisms of the herd instinct might appear so common that they start to sound rather cliche nowadays. Though we are often reminded how it may strip us of our true identities, we still tend to be reluctant to detach ourselves from the bondage to the masses and establish our "i-confirmation". If the mass values are cordoned off questions, it is because they are deemed too implausible to be the targets of scrutiny. To start doubting the commonly accepted beliefs is to risk overthrowing the indisputable fact that great minds are scarce, that we are unlikely to be the pioneers of previously unknown truths.

Perhaps our tendency to follow the flock lies in the anthropological fact that we are all social animals. Rather than exaggerating the gravity of free will, our existence is actually critically dependent upon the existence of others. We can only be intelligent if others possess the same level of reasoning abilities. We can only be humorous if others are funny enough to get our humours. Small wonder why Aristotle remarked that friendship is essential to wellbeing.

However, humans are no machines. How seldom we may prefer to be obedient drones rather than creative originals. But how then might we solve the conflicts between the herd instinct and individuality? How might we discover our own identities if we are continuously forced to burden ourselves with the heaviness of inhabiting the same mentality? Is it impossible to reconcile mass values with our unique selves?

Mass values, at one level, might be easily regarded as deluded versions of truth, yet at another level they reveal something more than meets the eye. Mass values may be considered in the same light as fashion or wearing make-up. The quest to search for a decent pair of high heel shoes or a certain kind of mascara from Bobbi Brown provokes our philosophical sentiment to understand who we are. If we have a desire to understand ourselves, it is perhaps because identity is an inherently complicated, obscure notion, that one can bear various identities in different stages of life. Why do we have different identities? It's because we constantly succumb to new experience and are forced to harbour new visions about ourselves. Confused, we are therefore liable to adopt the suggestions forcefully made in the clothes and cosmetic section of a magazine to fit in a socially recognisable form. Similarly, the herd instinct works in the same mechanism. Unsure who we are, we need to surrender to the masses and begin our process of soul-searching.

Though I might have been charitable to the herd instinct, we should not deduce from my previous line of argument that the accusation against the flock is largely undeserved. To acknowledge the merits of the masses is not to legitimately consign them to respectability. Whatever sympathy we may have for the masses, it seems far from being inaccurate to generalise the herd between two acerbic notions commonly associated with them, namely, stupidity and ignorance. If stupidity and ignorance are the hallmark of social eminence, how might we tender the mass values as something valuable to justify the lifelong search for our souls?

The solution perhaps lies not in struggling to break free from the herd, but rather, in educating the masses. Much of the criticism has been focused on the individual self, but hardly there's any criticism focusing on the masses as a whole. What is valuable in educating the masses is that there are values perhaps the entire human race should hold dear to: democracy, science, emotional sensibilities etc. However democratic we may get, even in the most democratic society, there are never enough democratic participations, most notably, voting. To refuse to vote is to refuse to participate in the promotion of common wellbeing. Who could disagree freedom is desirable? Who could disagree science is the most reliable agent to civilisation? Perhaps only the exceptional few seem to suggest the otherwise.

The herd instinct might not muddy our identities as it tends to suggest. But the major criticisms against the flock push us into a baneful direction where we might hardly progress. What's important is the education of the masses instead of the other way round. How many years before the mass values might actually become praiseworthy?

W

On Love At First Sight

2010-10-03T19:17:00.000-07:00

A slightly edition version from the Pub:

Whatever consumerist ethics might be vigorously practised by modern women, they seem far from being able to escape from the customary female logic- that we should never fall for logical factors such as money and physical appearance. The whole language of love has been corrupted by the sound assumption that our falling in love is based upon a mixture of ignorance and desire, rendering us liable to make false additions to an already muddied notion of self. If we should never fall for first glance, it is perhaps because the reality is always in the habit of disappointing us. A partner with an angelic face who supposedly possesses the ability to read Oscar Wilde's works may end up pinning her interests firmly on an issue of Cosmopolitan and a Hermes handbag.

Hence, in the mature account of love, before we are granted legitimately the right to fall in love, we are apt to investigate in depth about what opinions our partners may hold regarding science, politics, morality, and even daily habits. Instead of strictly following the traditional concept of how two sexes might align together, which is that of money and social status, we should look for in our partners logically irreducible elements: intelligence, emotional sensitivity, talents in the arts and crafts etc. In short, the cliché concept of "inner beauty". How easy a natural archaic impulse might be transformed into an artificially designed empirical notion.

If maturity indicates the quality of truth, then we might be forcefully led to abandon the inherently presumed distinctive differences between men and women, for men are liable to surrender to a superficial romantic logic easily triggered by the invitations of the appreciation body forms, make-up, fashion, and facial symmetry. We are forced to re-evaluate the politically incorrect gender stereotypes: in the mature account of love, women paradoxically analyse their romantic experience according to reason, while men submit their thinking to intuition, emotions, and impulsive desire. Why is it paradoxical? It's because when dealing with other issues in life, these two sexes tend to be consigned to exactly opposite categories. The feminists might have been in the right.

However, our instinctive curiosity to understand who our partners are poses a threatening problem. If the mature account of love is threatening, it is because understanding too much destroys romantic fantasy. Perhaps the easiest people to fall in love are those whom we know nothing. Our attraction for our beloved ones stems not from our constant intimacy with them, but rather, our lack of understanding of them. People who bear angelic faces tend to be able to carefully administer doses of illusion and reality, that faces happen to be aesthetically constructed in Golden ratio should be able to collect evidence which indicates signs of intelligence, femininity, and innocence around the eyes, noses, and mouths, an utopian image that could only be destroyed when they pick their noses aggressively without a handkerchief and display an excessive interest in the prices of high heel shoes. How seldom we acknowledge the inherent normality in our loved ones; how easy we might slide into a romantic pathology when love reveals its insanity.

Moreover, the modern world, with the help of technology, is changing with an incalculable speed. Our lives are filled with various experiences which are deemed too implausible to be identical with others. Is it sane to think what constitutes our partners' souls will remain the same? Is it sensible to secure our love of regularity for those who operate within the same mortal coil? If our desires and opinions are susceptible to change as time varies, why, then, can't we expect the same from our partners? The same burden no longer inhabits the same soul. Most of us are in fact not aware of our blind submission to Platonic utopia where eternity is praiseworthy and change is despised.

Therefore, the art of securing a romantic conception of love lies in an understanding absenteeism- a conception that is only possible when we don't know who our romantic partners are, but rather, who we think they are. So should we fall in love at first sight? Yes, always fall for first glance. Love without its romantic elements ceases to be love. Apart from the exceptionally rare cases in the romantic history, most depressing endings of romantic affairs are likely to result from the ones rooted in friendship and the like. It's only the romantic experience that we are after.

W

On Dancing

2010-09-13T16:58:00.000-07:00

What is dancing good for? This is a question that has been asked by a few. It is not dancing, after all, that sustains the quality of life, the kind of life that is accompanied by Mercedes, a grand Georgian house, and a wardrobe that is compensated by Gucci, Prada, and Louis Vuitton. Though we may break down dancing into a range of categories, there is a long-standing prejudice against ballet dance and social dance formulated by the young, which are rather traditional, and perhaps, conservative, while break dance and hip-hop dance are generally considered stylish and hip.

What's more, certain kinds of dances, most notably, ballet dance, are exclusive to feminine interest, for if these dances prove more appealing to the masculine, the flock might unfavourably consign them to effeminacy, an implicitly constructed notion of homosexuality. If ballet dance is offensive to masculinity, it is perhaps because men supposedly favour mechanical beauty- the kind that harbours a sense of order and stability rather than chaos and flux. From men's prior interests in cars, computer, and science, we are tempted to collapse the masculine conception of beauty into an Apollonian dimension, that break dance and hip-hop dance are better suited for men, for the postures and gestures of these dances imitate those of robots.

But what is so un-masculine about the appreciation of ballet dance and social dance? If break dance and hip-hop dance are more masculine, why could women equally enjoy the beauty of these dances without being forced into some sort of gender stereotypes? Could this be blamed on a kind of masculine blindness that suggests one fails to properly substitute himself into a female experience?

In the late nineteenth century, when impressionism was still at its height, Edgar Degas suggested something quite contrary to the modern sentiment. Unlike other Impressionists such as Monet and Manet, instead of aspiring to look for inspirations from out-door scenes, Degas wished to draw our attention to ballet dance, affording us a better visual comprehension of space and solid forms. Degas was interested not only in the sophisticatedly constructed body forms, he was also keen to investigate the interaction between our bodily movements and space, forcing us to admire one's physical candour when in motion.

If Degas' works rejuvenate us with a sense of newness in the genre of women portraits, it is because he seems to care less about the physical appearance of women. But rather, his interests were critically dependent on certain particular postures of ballet dance. Of most of the portraits of ballet dance, many tend to avoid depicting feminine bodies as a whole. Rather than allowing us to appreciate feminine beauty at its fullest, Degas cut out in his works certain parts of human bodies, some only focus on legs, some only on bodies.

Within Degas' works lies an aesthetic vision to notice movements. How seldom do we display our attentiveness to beauty that motion has to evoke; how more easily we are drawn to portraits and photographs that bring out a rather cliché sense of stillness. Degas sought to capture a kind of stillness that only arises from motion and rendered its latent beauty visible. From his works, we sharpen our awareness in the aesthetics of bodily movements, despite of our physical appearance, despite of our fancy garments, we could articulate a sense of beauty through our physical limitations.

But the implicit value lies in Degas' works is somewhat more arresting. It's because Degas provides us a handful corrective to our customary notion of importance. To attend to our bodily movements is to cultivate the art of being still. Seldom we notice our daily habits to pick up a pen, cross our legs, get up from our beds. If we could appreciate the movements portrayed in dancing, can we not extend this appreciative quality to what we do in everyday life?

The existential brand of philosophy poses important questions about our own existence: What is the meaning of life? What is the meaning of individual existence? It suggests that philosophical enquiries have to ultimately deal with the problem of why we exist. If we are unable to answer this question, as Albert Camus remarked, we might as well attempt suicide. Interestingly, ages before Camus' provocatively threatening contemplation of life, Degas seemed to provide an answer. Degas forced us to notice our bodily movements as a sign of existence, through paying more attention to movements as complex as dancing and movements as simple as bending our knees, we may realise we are fully alive to things as they are. Moving our ankles might not need a particular purpose, but simply to acknowledge the flexibility of our muscular structure, that this arm or that leg is a part of our bodies, as fully alive as our minds.

We don't need a particular meaning for our lives. But rather, we tend to demand our trivial existence to take on a little value, so that it may not be neglected. The awareness of our movements cultivate in us a sense of stillness that differs from a posture of standing up, sitting down, and lying in the bed. It is the sort of stillness that is alive. It invites us to lay our eyes on a much neglected daily activity. It cuts away the clutter of our troubling thoughts of what it means be to be happy and meaningful. Existence itself is, perhaps, what we are liable to forget to merit.

The school curriculum regards music as compulsory rather than dancing. But what confuses me is that dancing often goes along with music. If music can cultivate our aesthetic sensibility, why not dancing? However, it is true, art classes in school may offer us opportunities to draw, paint, and sculpt. But dancing involves a much active participation of both our will and bodies. It requires us to work with what we are born with while our talents in drawing and sculpting are often quite limited. Dancing afford us a physical articulation of what lays buried in our hearts and a better visual comprehension of what is beautiful.

Dancing, regardless of which kind, should be open to all, both men and women. Dancing may help us to notice what surrounds us, convincing us that perhaps beauty is just within our grasp. It nurtures our sense of existence, thus correcting the mainstream preconceptions what there is to esteem and honour in this world.

W

Why We Photograph What We Eat

2010-09-12T19:17:00.001-07:00

A piece from the Pub:

There is no more ridiculed activity as photography. Admit that you constantly accompany yourself with a digital camera while heading out for dinner with your friends. In the digital age of ours, a profession that once belonged to an elite group with inspiring aesthetic vision has collapsed itself to the rigours of democratic virtues, where an unpredictable number of young artists emerge out of no where to establish their photographic talents, suggesting that youth always aligns with creativity, thus with art.

Their photographic interests are not merely exclusive to the grandeur of high-class restaurants which often appear in magazines and on television. They have violated the traditional code of honour that is often associated with western and Japanese cuisine; rather, they force us to sharpen our awareness of the usual yet neglected dishes in many local Hong Kong restaurants that carry a cocktail of more than three to four type of cuisines, for example, those of what we might call the "soy sauce western cuisine", or even a spectacularly ordinary drink of "milk tea".

However, many condemn such rampancy of photography. Not only it tends to destroy the aesthetic superiority that it has established itself for almost two centuries, it also wishes to persuade us artistic talents can be cultivated through trial and error, as opposed to the traditional perception of them being God-given. But to rashly condemn their adoption of a fetishistically reverent attitude to digtial cameras is to unfairly consign them to disgrace and us to respectability. What could account for such culinary, photographic obsession? In what sense might we arrive at a charitable assessment of such seemingly meaningless activity?

One possible answer is our need to record bits and pieces of our lives. To photograph is also to find a visual outlet for our philosophical sentiment to understand who we really are. Recording bits and pieces of what we wear, what we eat, how we decorate our homes, and the like may direct us to the correct direction to knowing our true selves, because what we do in everyday life is a largely ignored, yet genuine self-expression. It implies an inevitable link between our psychological make-up and what we do. And for the first time, we may think we have been returned to ourselves without excessive reliance on friends and lovers, for photographs cut away dead periods that often arise in conversations, which are often associated with the art of going with the flow, especially in the times when our friends are forced to say halfway unbearable truths about our somewhat deeply flawed characters.

Moreover, not only photography makes room for those who suffer from the rigid inability to write beautifully, it also helps articulate certain aspects of feelings which are far beyond the capacity of a word that can deliver. We are often in trouble to cultivate our verbal and literary instincts to depict a range of emotions and sceneries that provoke a certain mood or a state of mind. Photographs overcome the limits of words and afford us a better visual comprehension of what we feel.

Hence photography is the visual articulation of our own biographies. Through photography, we may be able to unearth certain sides of ourselves which we are reluctant to disclose, for our opinions might be moulded by the company we keep- our friends, relatives, and lovers, tempting us to fit in with the expectations of others. Only when we look through our photo albums, we may encounter our true selves, suggesting our usual behaviours are founded on mutual deceptions.

If we care to glance through the course of art history, artists might be thought as the ones who keep pointing out different objects that are worthy of our attention: Jean-Baptiste Chardin for peeling an orange, Rembrandt for portraits of ordinary faces, Marcel DuChamp for the fountain and broomstick, Andy Warhol for a can of Campbell's soup. If the young have a need to capture a Hong Kong local dish, it is perhaps because they have the unusual receptivity like the past masters. They want to sensitise us, inculcating in us an appreciation of once neglected beauty. Even a dish of local-flavoured fried rice might deserve our aesthetic attention.

If biography is the key to understanding ourselves, then photography is perhaps a better medium for them to serve its ends. A photo album is not complete without including the fullness of life. Why is a biography necessary for every one of us? It's because everyone is composed of unique experience, thus legitimately deserving the right to be the author of his own life. It comes the time we may have to revise the intellectual conscience of the young all over again, and perhaps, learn from them.

W

How To Take Your Time Through Public Transport

2010-09-09T15:34:00.000-07:00

Back in the days before capitalism has become a legitimate economic philosophy, many valued a person for who he was rather than what he had. Capitalism, however, reconfigures the evaluation process and lends the idea of success to physical possession rather than its spiritual equivalent. Owning a Mercedes is therefore an indication of the quality of life. How easy one's ethical integrity might be determined by one's physical properties.

Though taking public transport might have violated our social hierarchical identity, though it might suggest something contrary to the Protestant virtue of hard work, to favour private cars instead of public transport is to risk inspiring an unfair neglect of values that might have only been arisen from, say, taking buses and a misguided enthusiasm for values that are often assumed by owning a car. The former, a sense of silent immobility and novelty, and the latter, a sense of freedom and solitude.

If public transport is often regarded as inferior to a Porsche, it is perhaps because it is likely to inspire monotony, having to stay fixated on a same routine every single day. Riding on a bus also suggests that the notion of who we are is critically dependent on others, that our existence is of no value unless the passengers who sit next to us or behind us accord us with signs of respect. Moreover, having neighbours sitting next to us also hampers us to move our joints and limbs freely, thus bringing physical discomfort, that our decisions to articulate our bodies are actually determined by the external rather than the internal.

Driving alone, on the contrary, avoids rehearsing the same driving routine. It offers opportunities to escape from the everyday rituals, especially the traffic, and conspires to rejuvenate us with a sense of novelty. Driving also seems to restore the value of solitude. Rather than going along with the value that a densely populated city might tend to suggest, driving celebrates the virtue of being alone and acknowledges the prided status of individual, making allowance for meditation, and liberating us from the flock, for the herd mentality may unfairly consign us to disgrace and others to respectability.

However, to condemn taking public transport is to fail to place it in a proper context as to what it may offer in life. If public transport has to be given its due place in our monotonous lives, it is because it might prompt us to think far more easily than clinging ourselves to our computer desks in office or in our rooms. Though we tend to pass by the same sceneries in a bus, we are likely to be assisted by the flow of the landscape, which is susceptible to change, inspiring us with a sense of novelty rather than monotony. We are also forced to investigate human behaviours which we often easily ignore- the lady who is dying to get on a bus, the man who is rushing to the metro railway station, and the man who is exchanging business ideas on his mobile phone. The sense of novelty, therefore, lies in the diversity of human behaviours and the flexible exterior decor and the advertisements of shops, which help anchor new reflections to life.

Of all modes of transport, buses are perhaps the best aid to thought. They lack the monotony that planes and metro railway are likely to inspire, the unbearable quickness that a taxi might ferry us to the destination, and the slowness that a tram is insistent to offer. If riding on a bus nurtures our ability to think, it's not just because we are confronted with a scene of novelty, but it's also because we are reluctant to think properly when thinking is what we are supposed to do, just like we are forced to write a publishable essay on demand. Riding on a bus allows us to abstract all the headphones snares and the talking that surround us, through taking in the passing scenery, offers us a sense of silent immobility to observe the seemingly silent mobility of the external world. It retains a peace of mind in us which is essential to contemplation.

If we are inclined to forget the benefits of taking public transport, it might be because driving our own cars subjugates us with the illusion to recover a sense of freedom. Instead of leaving room for us for introspective reflections, driving tends to divert our attention to the roads, for the fear of car accidents or our absent-mindedness for the traffic lights, forcing us to focus on our self-preservation instinct rather than bringing us back into contact with ideas and emotions that are of importance to us. It can only foster a form of rather unwelcome solitude, namely, loneliness, which only wears us out with an excessive longing for love.

Hence our travelling to work correlates with our desire to travel. What is beneficial about travel is that it allows us to get away from the habitual and the tedium, and encourages us, through the unpredictable changes around us, to unearth the visions about ourselves that previously lay buried in our hearts. If public transport is able to inspire us through the moving sceneries, can we not conclude that our travelling to work or school follows a similar trajectory? If we travel because we need not only a break from our domestic setting, but also from ourselves, doesn't riding on a bus similarly allow us to reflect on our lives from a height we are unlikely to reach unless before and after work?

Public transport can also be a remedy for loneliness. It recovers a sense of community, that though we may be lonely, we are consoled by the fact that we are not alone in loneliness, that many are similarly lost in thoughts and emotions. It brings us back a tight city feel, as opposed to a feeling of soullessness, reminding us of the fact that a city should be dynamic and needlessly be condemned to silence. Humans are still at heart social animals whose existence is critically dependent on the external world.

Travel is not necessarily a luxury. Though we may not be able to afford a trip to Europe or Japan, we can certainly afford a few dollars to start our journey on a bus to appease our yearnings for change.

W

How To Take Better Photographs

2010-09-08T21:59:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the digital revolution, photography, along with the easily accessible platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and iPhones, is no longer a profession and restores itself to the lay public. The invention of digital cameras has ascribed photography to a proper democratic value. Instead of shutting itself out from the public as an elite profession, digital cameras encourage us to take on this practice through trial and error, as opposed to the traditional belief of inherent aesthetic sensitivity that comes with us, making allowance for the thought that perhaps everyone can be a great artist.

Though digital cameras allow easy access to the art of photography, within this glamour of democratic activity lies the danger of diminishing our genuine appreciation of beauty. If digital cameras hinder the development of our aesthetic sensibility, it is perhaps because we no longer need the conscious effort to understand the construction of what surrounds us. Rather than allowing us to discover what we may have previously neglected, digital cameras invite us to consider their assumed ability to automatically capture beauty. Hence we are more liable to pay less attention to details and the emotions beauty has to evoke, the paradox that what initially allows us to capture beauty more easily may end up desensitising us. Little wonder a beautiful sculpture hardly detains any of us for more than thirty seconds.

Aside from the invention itself, if we are inclined to forget the art of taking photographs properly, perhaps our habit of taking them is largely to blame, for we only tend to locate moments of happiness in photographs rather than those of melancholy. Flipping over our family albums and friends albums, it is deemed too irresistible to rest our assumptions about life on love and encourage, joy and peace. Instead of affording us a better sense of reality, these albums are in danger of pushing us into baneful directions of what life is supposed to constitute, harbouring illusions that utopia is just within our grasp.

The smiles that often appear in our photographs suggest that we are subject to the irritating American religion of primordial optimism, provoking our imagination that we may derive hope from even the most darkest moments of our life. But we all know that this is not true. Whoever has enough life experience may testify that grievances tend to outweigh happiness, that life is essentially founded on the initial sound premises of hardships and loneliness, strife and rage, despair and contempt. Therefore, the application of photography lies in integrating pessimistic elements into happiness. Which acknowledges our ability to be happily sad. It enforces the virtue of honesty. If a photo album is a photographic biography of our lives, does it not seem absurd to only include what is happy, not what is sad?

To photograph is also to find a visual outlet for our philosophical sentiment to understand who we really are. Recording bits and pieces of what we wear, what we eat, how we decorate our homes, and the like may direct us to the correct direction to knowing our true selves, because what we do in everyday life is a largely ignored, yet genuine self-expression. It implies an inevitable link between our psychological make-up and what we do. And for the first time, we may think we have been returned to ourselves without excessive reliance on friends and lovers, for photographs cut away dead periods that often arise in conversations, which are often associated with the art of going with the flow, especially in the times when our friends are forced to say halfway pessimistic things about our characters.

Moreover, not only photography makes room for those who suffer from the rigid inability to write beautifully, it also helps articulate certain aspects of feelings which are far beyond the capacity of a word that can deliver. We are often in trouble to cultivate our verbal and literary instincts to depict a range of emotions and sceneries that provoke a certain mood or a state of mind. Photographs overcome the limits of words and afford us a better visual comprehension of what we feel.

If biography is the key to understanding ourselves, then photography is perhaps a better medium for lay people to serve its ends. A photo album is not complete without including the fullness of life. Why is a biography necessary for every one of us? It's because everyone is composed of unique experience, thus legitimately deserving the right to be the author of his own life.

W

Parental "Love" and Friendship

2010-09-07T00:19:00.000-07:00

Here is the piece I wrote for the Pub:

If Chinese folk wisdom assures us that we should listen to our parents, it is perhaps because life experience is the anchor of the wisdom of life. Friendship is undoubtedly very important in childhood. It not only allows children to harbour a sense of friendliness and mutual equality, but it also tends to display versions of ourselves which we adults who are driven by financial necessity long to side with but can't, rendering cynicism unfavourable. Out of all parents from around the world, the Chinese parents are perhaps the best role models in this aspect.

Back in childhood, our parents clearly understood the importance of friendship. Rather than letting us select our friends based solely on our subjective criterion of what is favourable, our friends were often subject to the rigours of rational examination of who they really were. This exquisite enquiry heavily involved with a spirit of philosophical research, an endeavour to acquire a thorough understanding of the genesis of our friends, and most of the time, even their families. Our parents forcefully reminded us of the darker side of human nature, that things in the reality tended not to operate as what we used to read in those fairy tales. Therefore, a range of historical questions (that might trace far back to the time of their forebears) were necessarily provoked before we could legitimately open our intimate selves up: "Where do you come from?", "What do your parents work?", "Where do you live?", "What are your hobbies and interests?" and the like. How easily our autobiographical longing might find its outlet for the most genuine expression.

This tradition has been passed on down to this day. Behind the love of parents lies the art of how to select friends properly, inviting modern children to form a new coil of thought to reflect on what an ideal friend should be like: material success rather than its spiritual equivalent. Whenever they hit on a difficult problem in friendship, they are likely to be assisted by the possibility of turning to their parents, who offer them advice after they investigate the matter into the depth of waters, until the children can unravel their confusions without pressure.

Hence status and wealth are the promise of a good character which must necessarily nurture an ideal friendship. The young have been taught to value a friend for what they possess rather than who they are. It induces them to marvel at the belief that status and wealth can actually clear out the rough edges that one's character originally clings to, that people who come from such background are perhaps the best aids to bring them back into contact with emotions and ideas that are of supreme importance to them.

Moreover, Chinese parents also invite the young to harbour a feeling of suspicion at heart after they meet new friends. It's not just because they are too young to acquire the ability to separate illusions from the reality, but it's also because the Chinese tend to be critically cynical of the inherently good nature of the human species. Whenever their children meet new friends, they are likely to generate assumptions that throw their children on the negative versions of human nature, forcing them to suspect the unusually superficial friendliness displayed by their newly acquired companions.

Having analysed the Chinese parental approach to friendship, can we not conclude that parental "love" has enormous impact on how the young might deal with the one of the most complex elements of life called "friendship", that it actually helps shape the character necessary for the path children have to embark on in this commercial world? The French essayist Michel de Montaigne once remarked that "each friend has to give himself so entirely that he has nothing left for others." Chinese children are deprived of the chance to live according to this maxim. Small wonder why many Chinese don't want to be Chinese.

W

The Lessons of Manila

2010-08-29T22:44:00.000-07:00

Here is the piece I wrote for the Pub:

Thanks to Manila and its police force, we have come to the realisation that we are merely the play-things of luck and fate. Aside from the tragedy itself and the uselessness of the Manila police force, we are suddenly drawn back to investigate the tension between stability and chaos. The incident forcefully throws us on the presence, inviting us to question what it means to exist. It also enforces a moment of deeper contemplation and urges us to readjust our priorities in life. If lessons are offered through this incident, it might be the fact that it reminds us that we should never let the thought of death slip away too easily, even if happiness is what travel tends to suggest.

In this critical time, the survived victims and the affected families may seek help from psychologists. If they think psychologists have a power to console, it is perhaps because psychologists supposedly have clear-eyed investigation into the depth of different versions of human nature. However, besides psychology, there exists a discipline in the academia that can perhaps offer as much help as psychology, namely, philosophy. How might a philosopher console the victims of this incident? What can philosophy offer to fan their dim light of hopes?

Hence I wish to draw your attention to the Roman Stoic philosopher, Seneca. At one level, what Seneca has to offer might run counter to what a psychologist might commonly suggest, but at another level, it might actually prove more consoling. Rather than feeding the suffered with primordial optimism, what he offers is often of the darkest sort: "You say: ‘I did not think it would happen.’ Do you think there is anything that will not happen, when you know that it is possible to happen, when you see that it has already happened...?’ If what happened in Manila makes us sad, it is because we are most easily hurt by what is most unexpected. But Seneca tried to calm us by reminding us that disasters will always be part of our lives, however wise we are and however advanced our technology is. Therefore, we must bear in mind the wisdom of "we might possibly die in the next second" at all times. To refuse to acknowledge the inherent complexity of human affairs is to engage ourselves into a religion of comfortableness. Our actions are rarely determined by our free will. On the contrary, it largely depends on luck and chance. Our destiny is never in our hands. How easy the long-standing philosophical debate between free will and determinism is decided by the death of eight hostages.

If the incident makes us incredibly sad, it is perhaps because the human race never has quite the capacity to understand the value of pessimism, the inability to live our sadness fully. We often harbour in our hearts a religion of optimism that assures us the fact that history is always progressive, that humans must necessarily grow wiser as time moves on, that we must always invest our hopes in the future. We have been plugged into an ancestral memory of what is comfortable. Unfortunately, this incident suggests the otherwise. It illustrates the depressing fact that the reality is always disappointing. Happiness is never guaranteed, even during a trip in Manila.

The value of a pessimistic habit of mind lies not in making us cynical, but in a paradox that griefs actually cheer us up. It invites us to the thought that somehow we are not alone in sadness that everyone perhaps suffers from the same pessimistic equivalents like ours. Moreover, it alleviates our pain by reminding us there are things in this world that are profoundly sadder than this incident- the suffering of the Africans from poverty and hunger, the Rwanda Massacre, the women who are stoned to death in the Middle East. Pessimism forces us to dwell upon things that are even darker and gloomier, which in essence induces us to reflect on this relatively minor incident that things perhaps could have gone even worse.

But what deeply underlies pessimism is more arresting. It is because pain allows us to grow wiser. It helps enforce moments of contemplation, pushing us to acquire a better sense of reality and placing pain in a more proper context, just like only when we stump a nail on the ground, we may have the awareness of pain, thus becoming wise to the fact that human bodies are fragile. What is valuable about pessimism is that it puts us through a mental gymnastics which could not have been arisen without suffering. It strengthens our minds by producing a proper amount of cerebral activity, as opposed to the predominant trend of zero consumption of brain energy nowadays. It wards us off illusions and urges us to entertain vital thoughts that promote our intellectual adequacy and emotional sensitivity.

Therefore, we come together to acquire the capacity to be happily sad. There comes the time when we must put our darkness on the table and confront it, that we should embrace sadness and suffering to push ourselves towards a more correct direction of life. The lessons? The incident in Manila was undoubtedly a tragedy, but we should allow its dimension to be a part of life, as something to remind us of what life constitutes. It offers insights for our lives as to how to be properly and productively unhappy. Only through pain and suffering, we may learn to be the masters of life. May the victims rest in peace. But I hereby wish things would go badly for all of us from now on.

"To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities- I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not- that one endures." - Friedrich Nietzsche

W

On Wearing Make-Up

2010-08-19T18:17:00.000-07:00

For most women, wearing make-up is a daily routine. However, in the consumerist society where everything has the potential to be a tool of profit-making, many women seem to suffer financial assault on the cosmetic sector. Whatever differences there are between different types of mascaras and eyeliners, from a male perspective, it leaves us in wonder how women may easily be seduced to spend a large sum of money on what is seemingly the same products. Are the satanic genius of advertisers largely to blame?

There is a long-standing prejudice against women who spend an excessive fortune on cosmetic products in modern society. If the insistence on wearing make-up should suffer analysis, it is perhaps because it hints at a lack of women's inner beauty- their reasoning abilities, their artistic merits, and their capacity of knowledge. The fact that many women need to wear make-up stems largely from a lack of confidence in themselves, thus in hope of convincing others to collect intellectual evidence around their faces, noses, and eyes. How easily secular mortals may fall for angelic faces who bear inappropriate souls.

However true this accusation is, is it proper to judge a female experience merely because of masculine blindness? Though many social critics tend to condemn this particular female experience for its shallowness, how might we arrive at a more just and accurate, or perhaps charitable, assessment of the feminine obsession with cosmetic products if we are kept ignorant of what a facial routine is? Only after we are prompted by a spirit of philosophical research of what precise aspect each cosmetic item functions for, we may understand why women would chisel a dent in their bank accounts to purchase ten of those seemingly identical bronzing powder at the cosmetic counters of Bobbi Brown and Shisheido.

If we have the patience to investigate the minutest details of a facial routine, we may then unearth hitherto unknown truths about feminine beauty. We realise that some women may favour gel liner rather than pencil liner simply because it's smoother and that a light base is mostly used in summer while a heavy base is usually exclusively used in winter because of the humidity and the dryness these two seasons hint at. The study of a facial routine not only allows us to understand why women take so long in the bathroom, it also suggests that what seems so identical from a masculine perspective may actually help transform one's outlook, through employing different styles by using colours of minutest difference, depending on one's aesthetic taste of mix and match.

But what does all this mean? What do we learn from the in-depth investigation of a facial routine? If there is something valuable about wearing make-up, it is because make-up can reflect what one's psychological make-up is. A love for dark colour lipsticks may suggest one's character is of melancholy temperament, depending on what one's analytical inclination may be. But make-up is like fashion, liable to submit itself to trends rather than generate styles. Therefore, spending an afternoon at cosmetic counters is a process of soul-searching. Unsure who they are, they are prone to adopt suggestions offered in women's magazines in order to adjust themselves to socially recognisable forms.

But what underlies the feminine obsession with cosmetic products is somewhat more arresting. On contemplation, what is generally considered inner beauty is most unlikely to go through the test of time. However intelligent women may get, they are left with no choice but to surrender to the greatest enemy of youth, namely, aging. Our reasoning abilities are subject to decay as we are getting older. What's more, is that we tend to grow conservative as we age. Folk wisdom assures us that the accumulation of life experience allows us to grow wiser, but the reality often suggests the exact opposite. Rather than changing our minds as new evidence appears, our reluctance to adopt new ideas and opinions indicates a sign of the confirmation of prejudice.

Of course, women are not spared of the same destiny. Hence, if they strip away what is likely to vanish, they are left with nothing but a pure consciousness, some vacuous beings who are critically dependent on what others might think of them. Their consciousness, however, cannot be seen, but their casings can. So what's best for them to do is to enhance their physical appearance. Little wonder why women are attracted to fashion and wearing make-up.

Cosmetic products invite us to redraw the boundary between shallowness and profundity. What seems profound on the surface may end up being shallow, and vice versa. The two-hour ritual in the morning is no easy task.

W

On Dinning At Home

2010-08-15T20:19:00.000-07:00

An edited version from the Pub:

For those of us who have more than enough to eat, dinning out might be considered a culinary delight. However much we love eating, it seems we are reluctant to invest enough confidence in ourselves to lay down judgements concerning the quality of food. Rather than ranking a wide range of restaurants according to a subjective hierarchy of taste, we tend to sacrifice our free will and surrender to tyranny, namely, the authority of food critics.

If we can't trust our own tastes, it is perhaps because the judgement of food, like art, has been left to an elite group who supposedly possesses profound knowledge of food. However, our eating according to their ideals also suggests that we neglect our own preferences of what good food is and willingly to be deluded by the fact that what the food critics think are good must be of culinary delight. How easily our unaided minds might be seduced to surrender to the objective judgement of what are good and bad.

If we are easily tempted to like restaurants, it is perhaps because they are able to offer what home-made meals precisely lack- customer service, the grand displays of the dishes, the kinds of interior of decorations which inspire the feeling of awe, and perhaps a live band. Restaurants, therefore, harbour a sense of perfection, fooling us into thinking that utopia might be just within our grasp.

However, that's precisely the danger of going to restaurants because they are likely to enforce moments of distractions. Instead of salivating to respond to what the chefs offer, our moods of happiness are wedded to the table settings, the exquisite interior decorations, and what music the live bands offer. How easily the efforts of the chefs who collapse their delicate and complex feelings into a set dinner can be undermined by what anchors to their creativity in the first place.

This then brings to us the significance of dinning at home and our habit of dinning. If there is something intrinsically more valuable in dinning at home rather than dinning out, it is because what we eat often provides a far more accurate account of who we really are. Our love for, say, steak not merely hints at our willingness of vegetable self-sacrifice and unhealthy diets, it might also accede to the symbolic meaning of, perhaps, our inability to empathize or our distaste for natural environment, depending on what our analytical inclinations may be. If we consider food in a psychological light, we may then unearth the inevitable link between food and personality.

But what does that mean? What does it have to do with dinning at home? It's because only through our subjective evaluation of what good food is, we might know ourselves better. The process of eating is also a process of soul-searching. It provokes our philosophical sentiments as a means of self-understanding. If dinning at home has something to do with the analysis of the self, it is because home-made meals are endowed with self-love. We only cook meals based on our own criterion of what is good. The merits of home-made meals lie in a sense of belonging, not only to ourselves, but also to the reality, because it always runs contrary to utopianism (which restaurants are often assumed to suggest) and offers us a sense of imperfection. It drifts us away from delusion and urges us to focus on what is real.

What's more is that we like to dine with our loved ones. If restaurants tend to distract us like the internet, then it merely means we are unlikely to address what really matters in life, things that we often talk about in an intimate friendship such as "What is your dream?" or "What might love mean to you?". Dinning at home mitigates the probability of being distracted and recovers a sense of intimacy. It strengthens the bonding of all kinds of loving relationship.

Many kids now favour fast food. And equally, adults tend to celebrate their reunion in restaurants. Not only the value of supper has been largely neglected, what proper environment we should dine in has also been largely devalued. Only after we revive the value of home-made meals, dinners will never be the same again.

W

On Boredom

2010-08-12T16:57:00.000-07:00

In the modern technological civilisation, most of us probably get bored every day. If we get bored easily, it is perhaps because we at heart wish to escape from the monotonous everyday rituals. Exhausted by working in a compressed environment of corporate waters and engaging in the same orgies of gossip, we may realise there is something that needs to be changed, though we hardly know what precisely that "something" is. We need a break to get away from the habitual, not just from the tedium of the curtains and dinning tables our homes hints at, but also a break to get away from ourselves.

Aside from the everyday rituals, our sense of boredom largely stems from the web technology. Not only it conspires to kill our ability to be patient and unstimulated, it has also become the major anchor of distractions. One might be easily considered extraordinary if he could focus on a conversation with his best friend on MSN for more than five minutes, let alone the possibility of an intimate friendship. Moreover, bombarded with images and Youtube videos, the web has risked summoning our long-forgotten archaic suspicion of words and restoring our deep admiration for cave paintings. It hampers our semantic instinct. It's a miracle if you are still reading.

If we are suffering from the epidemic of boredom, it is because we can no longer possibly appreciate the value of being bored. Rather than making rooms for us to indulge in daydreams, boredom throws us back on the reality, the notion of the here and now, urging us to realise what is it that we really want in life. If we walk in any franchise American bookshops, most of the best-selling books are easily categorised into the self-help genre, normally about how we boast up our low self-esteem or how to become the next Bill Gates and Steve Job. The danger of modern society precisely lies in our ability to be overly optimistic because we can no longer derive pleasure from the darkest moods. If we could never endure loneliness, we might never understand the value of friendship. Likewise, if we could not entertain periods of boredom, we might not be able to understand the value of excitement and stimulation.

It is, perhaps, why we are more productive in the mood of boredom instead of the state of being occupied. Boredom allows us to realise what remains vacuous in our lives, reminding us that perhaps a change is needed. It drifts us away from a succession of well-known tasks and enforces a contemplative habit of mind. In the age of the internet, boredom is much needed.

W

Love or Tolerance?

2010-08-09T23:42:00.000-07:00

At the start of a romantic relationship, it is not uncommon to slide into what we may call romantic pathology- that our partners must be figures of perfection. Only after a period of time, along with the objective evaluation of our friends, we may be spared of all the romantic fantasies and forced to admit to the inherently normality of them. If we are consistently reading things into our partners which don't belong to them, it is perhaps because we often fall into the delusion that their physical beauty necessarily aligns with the quality of their souls- that they must be filled with delicate and divine thoughts. It is only in dialogue with loneliness we may justify the existence of love.

Whatever our fantasies may be, the reality is always in the habit of disappointing us. A partner with an angelic face who supposedly possesses the ability to read Oscar Wilde's works may end up pinning her interests firmly on an issue of Cosmopolitan. This opens up a range of interesting yet dangerous questions: Why would she prefer to listen to Britney Spears rather than Mozart? Why would she favour a PC rather than a Mac? Why would she admire a pair of Converse's instead of Jimmy Choo's?

If there is a danger regarding our conflicting tastes, it might be because most of the arguments we have largely stem from a subjective hierarchy of tastes rather than nationality, class, and the likes. Yet we often hear the saying "I love you for everything you are." However many pages of the romantic diary we have contemplated, all of us seem more than happy to cherish the conventional wisdom of "everyone makes mistakes". Hence we should tolerate whatever flaws deeply clung to our partners' characters because what elicits love in the first place is that we love them for who they are.

But again, reality cannot be more unpromising. It seems we are often too unfortunate to see such reasoning applied to a romantic relationship. Rather than exciting our admiration for the political virtue of liberalism, most of us secretly harbour an idea that our partners must behave according to our ideals. If only we pay more attention to the nature of love, can we not conclude romantic love bears the same coercive structure of dictatorships in our political history?

From a distance, politics seems unrelated to love. But on closer inspection, we may easily arrive at a more charitable assessment of the relationship between both of them. The nature of romantic love might be easily seen as a contrary pull away from one of the highly praised democratic values, namely, tolerance. Though we may openly agree on the notion of diversity of ideas and opinions, romantic love is by nature fascist, that our partners should appreciate or depreciate certain things based entirely on our preferences. The fact that their tastes differ from ours suggests that their aesthetic logic is somewhat superficial which is in need of much edifying. But should we not respect their tastes?

If we think romantic love is coercive, it is perhaps because we often misunderstand what tolerance truly is. British philosopher Karl Popper suggests that tolerance is not to leave each other alone, but rather, to desire to understand each other. Rather than taking pride on being ignorant of what we are tolerating, we should understand what we are tolerating by enforcing an open dialogue. Therefore, the value of tolerance lies not only in permitting diverse ideas and opinions, but in the democratic virtue that all opinions should ultimately decided by discussions and debates even when they conspire to offer unhappy endings.

Hence to argue is to tolerate our conflicting tastes. But however democratic we may be, a constant argument over what a perfect sofa should be like or how leggings should be worn will result in a romantic revolution, namely, the threat of breaking up. If our aesthetic opinions and habits can no longer relax with a sense of humour, it is because we are in danger of understanding each other too much, a realisation of the inherent incompatibility between us and our partners. Each party stands firmly on the ground of doing what's best for the other. Though the truth is often depressing, it seems perhaps a stable relationship can only be founded on the contract between absolute authority and absolute obedience.

If romantic love makes no allowance for the idea of tolerance, then perhaps we may legitimately conclude that there is no "true" love at all, for everyone is unique, especially in the aesthetic realm. Our romantic fantasy is merely a naive romanticism inspired by novels and films. Romantic love, often mistaken as the same thing as marriage, should only be considered as stops rather than lifelong journeys. It is only intervals between loneliness. After all, we all have to die alone.

W

Why Architecture Matters

2010-08-08T20:01:00.000-07:00

An edited version from the Pub:

From a distance, one might be in awe of the modernist beauty offered by a metropolis. But from up above, a landscape full of skyscrapers, surprisingly, evokes a sense of architectural pessimism. Rather than presenting to us the aesthetic equivalent of what Le Corbusier once envisaged , an overwhelming number of skyscrapers invites us to the possibility of reconciling two values that seem to be inherently incompatible on one single landscape, depending on how one views it.

If our appreciation of architecture has been hampered, it is perhaps because it runs counter to the ideals of a financial city. To care about a field that achieves so little, yet consumes so many resources, is to risk harbouring in us an idea that artistic merits don't always necessarily align with economic reward. However, there is a long-standing argument in aesthetics that beauty implies moral goodness. Hence if we live in a beautiful work of architecture, we will eventually become better. Unfortunately, in reality, a beautiful work of architecture, whatever its moral messages are, doesn't always nurture such naive romanticism. How six million of Jews could have been spared of their lives if beauty could command Hitler to emulate its spirits of what an utopia might be like.

If architecture has failed to change us, it is because there is hardly an objective criterion for beauty. The beauty of a work of architecture is largely based on persuasion, instead of forcing us to adopt the values it suggests, it only offers suggestions, rather than laws, which we are not obliged to follow. But in the age that only makes room for certainty, that only gives birth to people whose thinking is critically dependent on traditions, customs, and taboos, it seems architecture lacks the authoritative status to order how we should live.

It is, perhaps, why the property developers, whose minds only bear the notion of profit, are carpeting the landscape with utilitarian style of buildings, office buildings and apartment buildings alike, whose every window is of the same size, whose every floor offers no improvisation, and whose the exterior displays a lack of the use of a variety of construction materials. Though we rarely wish to be blown away by novelty, their obsession of order provokes in us not a feeling of admiration, but rather, a feeling of condemnation, as a proper response to their tedium. How much I feel sorry for the moderns who always work in the compressed environment of corporate waters, and after a long day of work, come home to see this. How easily our wish to escape from the monotonous everyday rituals may be wiped out by their insensitive aesthetic logic.

If the power of architecture only lies in persuasion, it doesn't necessarily mean it lacks the power to change us. What is valuable about a work of architecture is precisely that it only offers suggestions, rather than exciting our admiration with indisputable evidence, it merely suggests a way of living that might differ from our own, about how we might live and what we might become. To learn to appreciate persuasion is to understand the art of entertaining doubt. Our reluctance to be sceptical largely stems from an exaggerated sense of what we can achieve and that the world must be composed of black and white, nothing more. We are most hurt by what is most unexpected because we have obsessively clung to the idea of absolute certainty. Our frame of mind is either endowed with undue optimism or undue pessimism which makes no allowance for the idea of probability, rendering inherently complex human behaviours so simple.

The most precious value of architecture therefore lies not in its functionality, but in allowing us to speculate what may on the surface seem so certain and promising. It equips us with a rather pleasant form of cynicism, the sort that wrests us out of delusion instead of destroying all our hopes in human nature. It won't pull us away from taking sides, yet leaves us to remain fresh open to new evidence.

Architecture tends to redraw our perspective on what the world might be. Far from being composed of black and white, architecture acknowledges the existence of a grey area. It blurs the distinction of complete belief and complete disbelief, forcing us to suspend them properly. It requires us to open ourselves up to the idea that our opinions are susceptible to change as our experience accumulates, even our ideals of happiness.

If we are to escape such intellectual naivety, we may have to arrive at a more charitable assessment of architecture. It is not necessarily an indication of self-indulgence and our social status. Many great religions understand the significance of architecture and use it to subordinate people to attend to certain beliefs that depart from the norm in light of persuasion. If architecture aligns with our personal ideals of what a good life should be, it might help plant the seeds for creative originals rather than obedient drones.

W

Do We Still Have Friends?

2010-08-02T02:37:00.000-07:00

I wrote a piece for the Pub:

One of the most obvious benefits of the internet and mobile phones is perhaps that it draws us closer to each other. Though we discover ways to connect with our friends no matter how far apart we are, it seems deep friendship, as Aristotle suggests, does not come easily. We may have more friends than we used to, but paradoxically, our relationships with each other have grown increasingly shallow. How many of our text messages involve with the promotion of intimacy? How many of our tweets seek to cultivate our friendship?

Perhaps, it is true, many of our text messages and tweets force us to pay attention to the minutest details such as our breakfasts and dinners. Though our grand enquiries about what we eat for breakfast at one level allow us to acquire the necessary knowledge of what a proper breakfast should be like, at another level they hint at our lack of emotional intimacy that suggests the modern society is suffering from the epidemic of superficial talks.

Imagine the following conversation on MSN between me and my mother:

"Hey mom!"
"Hi Will"
"Just to tell you, B is becoming a MT"
"What is that?"
"Well, MT means management trainee."
"Oh see, good for him."
"Anyway, gtg. ttyl."
"What?"
"What?"
"I know gtg means got to go. What do you mean ttyl?"
"Oh, ttyl means talk to you later."
"Really?! I didn't even know that!"
"So got to go. Talk to you later!"

Thanks to iPhones and Blackberries for making us text and chat easily.

The original intention of inventing the internet was perhaps to bring convenience to the general public. If the above conversation suggests the contrary, it is perhaps because the web technology conspires to give birth to confusing short phrases. It leads us to suspect the virtue of patience, rather than confining us to the tradition of writing accurately, it undermines the importance of spelling and generates a perhaps rather innovative style of writing. Though the internet, which is the origin of the "culture" of haste, is essential to our economic reward, it has risked inspiring a paradox- that we write more by writing less. In this technological civilisation, a message that is supposed to take a much shorter time to deliver ends up taking twice as long now.

Moreover, the internet also urges us to cast aside patience and favour a trust in distractions. It is no longer uncommon for us to chat with our friend while watching YouTube at the same time. The screens on our mobile phones only make allowance for cliché questions such as "How was your weekend?" or "How was your dinner" rather than what really matters in life, thus fooling us into thinking that we have already cultivated our friendship. What the world needs is technology absenteeism- that a lack of electronic devices and the internet might actually draw us intimately closer to each other.

Dropping our devices might be the best idea, but no one can survive without either mobile phones or the internet in the modern society. What seems to pull us together might actually prove detrimental to friendship. In our busy days filled with futile bustle, we need breaks that that allow us to articulate what lays buried in our hearts. We need to open up our minds and accept the diversity of human minds, that a Google search engine won't fulfil our desire for a true human interaction. Because we are not just CPU's that just process data.

If the internet makes us less human, what should we do? Rather than texting messages and tweeting, we should call up our friends. We need to make our words count. After all, it does not take much time to greet our friends face to face.

W

On Streets

2010-07-26T02:02:00.000-07:00

Here is the piece I wrote for the Pub:

Think of the connecting bridges that ferry our consumerist souls across Central. Rather than enduring the intense sunlight, these bridges suggest that we can take an alternative route in order to steer ourselves away from the crowd and traffic lights. We may embark on our journey from Landmark where it allows us to see a more enchanted world through the shop windows of Paul Smith, Marni, Dries Van Noten, and the likes, wandering towards Alexander House where we betray none of the rituals and sacrifice our credit cards to Dolce & Gabbana, then taking a stroll to the Prince Building, hovering a variety of products, among them expensive mattresses, incense sticks, and Nigella Lawson's kitchenwares, through the hallway surrounded by Giorgio Armani's, passing by The Exchange Square, and finally settling for a film at IFC Palace. How one might easily be seduced to be the victim of consumerism through the human invention of what we call the air-conditioning.

Between the intervals of these bridges, there lies a modern invention called mall, an architecture endowed with a form of utilitarian beauty that conspires to offer all the possible solutions to the human conditions. Though malls may be able to satisfy all our material needs, why are we carpeting the landscape of Hong Kong with works of architecture that only allow us to perform the necessary shopping rituals?

If we are prone to shopping in malls, it is perhaps because we have been inspired by an American sentiment that suggests we could fix our somewhat deeply flawed lifestyles in a compressed environment through consumerism. Our obsession with malls hence reveals our distaste for streets and favours a succession of identical shops rather than fashionable boutiques. It ceases to give birth to what is special and unique and limits our physiological behaviour within a narrow range of already known items, thus once we examine the shops in Tsim Sha Tsui, it might be deemed unnecessary to venture into Causeway Bay.

Streets, on the contrary, tend to surprise us, rather than asking us to circle each floor and encounter the same sets of escalators in the same manner, the main street will deviate itself away and send off many other possible streets that take their own ways. They never cease to surprise us of what is around the next corner or what may be unfolding after our next left turn, as opposed to the predictable nature of malls. Moreover, though with the same type of rubbish bins that devour our used bottles and cans and the same design of traffic lights residing rigidly in the corners, streets could colour the area which makes no allowance for shops, which are identical to those in the malls, but rather, boutiques, which indicate style, that are designated to suit this particular area only, as part of the landscape, instead of being independent of it.

It is, perhaps, easier to draw wisdom from the metaphorical war between nature and technology. Though the modern era seems to have proved that technology has triumphed and that technology and nature are inherently incompatible, but through all works of design, we seem to discover ways to reconcile both, a balance between free will and tyranny, love and civilisation. To extend the analogy, the difference between malls and streets could easily be seen as the difference between what is inside and what is outside. While malls disconnect us from the outer world, namely, the reality, streets seek to reconcile utopianism with realism. Streets may act as a medium, rather than strictly confining us to the utopia where perfect figures are modelling the summer collection, they draw us back to the reality in the midst of delusion that may fool us into thinking that we could carry the clothes as perfect as the models. They create the discrepancy of entering and walking out, allowing us to invest our hope in what is perfect, yet stopping us from losing sight of what is real.

The American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson once in his essay "The Poet" introduces us to a succession of alternative forms of beauty, that is, the beauty of warehouses, railways, and factories. The American artist Edward Hopper also portrays a succession of paintings about cafe, gas stations, trains, and cars. Rather than laying down their judgements of beauty and ugliness according to a traditionally superficial aesthetic logic, they have redefined what is beautiful, ascribing a more "just" and "accurate" aesthetic value to what is common.

I wish to imagine one day which we could appreciate paintings and poems that could portray the same spirit as those made by Emerson and Hopper. We need art that could function for our times, that it could remind us of the gravity of streets, that how the rampant creations of malls may soullessly destroy our love of novelty and steer us away from the real world. We need art that could remind us that our ancestors had once caressed the nature and how malls will shut us out from the reality and damage the value that should be preserved within the human hive.

W

Wine and Friendship

2010-07-20T16:15:00.000-07:00

"One reason why I don't drink is because I wish to know when I'm having a good time." - Nancy Astor

Few activities promise us as much happiness as love. If love is the anchor of our happiness, it is because it renders our trivial individual existence unique and allows our life to take on a certain value. Though there are many kinds of love, many seem only to cling obsessively to one specific species of love, namely, romantic love. Undoubtedly, romantic love is of supreme importance in our everyday life. It helps to connect the private spheres of our heart to the ones who could articulate the same feelings in the same degree of sophistication. It encourages a sort of intimacy that may render other forms of love incomparable. However important ideals of a good life romantic love may seek to inspire, does that mean we could reduce other forms of love to a status of inferiority?

Aside from romantic love, friendship may be easily seen as an equivalent of romantic love. Friendship, like romantic love, is based on a contract of mutual equality, rather than evaluating the importance of our friends according to the pyramid of social hierarchy, it conspires to strike a balance between what is good and what is bad within us- that neither any of us is better or worse than the other. Moreover, what puts friendship on the common ground with romantic love is that it conspires to impute similarities rather than differences though it is essentially a mixture of both. Whatever the differences we discover through the process of getting to know each other, a loving relationship is more founded on things which we find agreement on that would seem too churlish to deny that we are not made to understand each other.

Unfortunately, however important friendship may be, few of us conduct deep thoughts on it in the same manner, let alone the questions why we need it and how we should enjoy it and the likes. Speaking of friendship, what Nancy Astor says perhaps deserves our attention and invites us to reflect on the relationship between wine and friendship.

The precise nature of friendship might be hard to pin down, but perhaps the most difficult part of a deep friendship is not about whether one can open up his intimate self to other, but rather, how one might enforce the necessary atmosphere for others to submit the secrets about themselves to our scrutiny. If there is such intrinsic fear of transparency, that is, the fear of our secrets being known, it is because we are not courageous enough to venture alone into the assumption that we might no longer be loved after the secrets have been revealed. But behind this fear of transparency, there lies a more deep-seated fear- that is the judgement on our secrets that will follow, that we are no longer the masters of our own disclosure, that we are ignorant of our own selves. Little wonder why most of us are reluctant to pay a visit to psychologists.

However, to allow our friends to rationally examine our characters is not to take pride on our own inability to fathom ourselves. The idea that we may know ourselves better than others may fool us into generating egoistic and self-centred assumptions about ourselves. But what could inspire us to open up the private spheres in our hearts?

If there is something that may prompt us to risk exposing our unlovable elements to others, then perhaps we should not undermine what the role of wine has to play in a deep friendship. Though at one level, as Nancy Astor remarked, drinking wine may prevent us from having a good time, but at another level it also suggests that we could relax ourselves with the liberty to express what holds true in our hearts. To get drunk is to disregard social etiquette. Social etiquette is founded on the assumption that we must only reveal what is best within us, requiring us to live up to the expectations of others. If getting drunk runs counter to social convention, it is perhaps because its unaesthetic quality stems not from offering what is best within us, but rather, our whole selves, among them our good and bad qualities altogether. It is also precisely because of this unaesthetic quality that may require the charity of others to be generous towards what is usually cordoned off as private. It is premised on the assumption that others always suffer from the rigid inability to integrate the good with the bad.

But perhaps Nancy Astor has forgotten how to get drunk moderately. Oscar Wilde once said, "A true friend stabs you in the front." If friendship is about opening up our intimate selves, then wine might be the essential catalyst to deepen such friendship. It urges us to break free from the bondage of social convention, so we can be stripped of defences and follow what our hearts say. It takes off the jacket of our consciousness and liberates what lies deep in our unconsciousness.

But one might wonder, "Why specifically wine?" Because to use the word "wine" is to exclude other alcoholic beverages including cocktails, shooters, and beer. If wine is the catalyst rather than other alcoholic beverages, it is because these drinks have no patience for deep talks. They fail to enforce the required atmosphere for deep friendship to develop and deprive us of the ability to command our minds with fluidity to articulate what is intimate. Cocktail and the likes only assure us that we have a good time, but are unable to provoke the question why and how we should have a good time. It sides with relativism- that how we should enjoy friendship is of no significance because all methods to enjoy it are equally valid. Wine, on the contrary, endeavours to make friendship better and offers us the time for slow thought. It allows us to express who we are in precision, delicacy and sophistication under the rigours of rational examination. It gives weight to our feelings rather than emptying our soul to ensure us a sense of lightness.

Aristotle once told us to eat salt together, meaning we should cultivate our friendship in a face to face conversation. But what is better is perhaps we should drink wine together. The deeper implication of drinking wine is that while one may not have to devote all his passion to study the history of wine, one should acquire a basic knowledge of wine in order for a deep friendship to flower. If an education of friendship is deemed necessary as the ancient Greeks suggested, wine studies should be included in the curriculum.

W

SuperPennie's Response To "On Wearing Less"

2010-07-19T16:43:00.000-07:00

SuperPennie has written a piece in response to me entry "On Wearing Less" concerning the taboo of nudity. Check it out here. Also feel free to check out her blog "A Broken Nihilist".

Thanks to Pennie.

W

On Travel

2010-07-19T16:36:00.000-07:00

Here is the piece I wrote for the Pub:

This particular time of the season, though accompanied by a severely hot weather, often draws many of us away from what is familiar and invites us to harbour a wish to get a decent massage in Bangkok, give a boost to the Japanese economy during Tokyo's sale season, or ease ourselves in a Hokkaido's hot spring. Though we frequently venture to explore on a different continent once in a while, few of us bear in our minds the notion of travel once we get off the plane, let alone the questions why and how we travel.

If we are kept ignorant of the art of travel, it is perhaps because we are often in muddle of the distinction between travel and tourism. Tourism invites us to set foot on a place where our actions are often governed by guidebooks and leaflets offered by the hotel which suggests that there are churches, museums, shopping malls, statues, and the likes that are in need of our company, conspiring to give weight to our vacuous schedule. While museums and churches might fulfil our spiritual needs, the very essence of tourism also seduces us to lend a fair portion of the schedule to the sacred shopping rituals. It seeks to remind us that our homes are the anchors of identity and products that are remote from our homes can fix us to a version of ourselves we want to side with. It urges us to take pride on our current identities. It refuses to evaluate the fundamental values that are in ourselves, so that we can acclaim with confidence that our very selves rest firmly on what is lovable, that they can be perfected merely through material possession.

Travel, on the contrary, disobeys the guidance of what we should be curious about in guidebooks. Rather than submitting our geographical interests to what tourists should like, travel suggests we should rank the city's offerings according to a subjective hierarchy of interest. Though the Tokugawa Castle in Kyoto should be the highlight of our trip, a neighbourhood restaurant or even an ordinary backstreet might trigger our curiosity far greater than a well-known aesthetically constructed architecture. Though we are expected to appreciate the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the absence of our necessary receptivity to such architecture prompts us to admire a violinist who plays Beethoven's on the street instead.

If a neighbourhood restaurant proves to be more fascinating than a work of architecture, it is because one can venture alone into the very root of the city's culture at its fullest rather than a place where it is easily spoiled under the threats of massive tourists. It takes away what is habitual from us and encourages us through the changes around us, forcing us to form a new vision to look within ourselves. Because only through something that is completely foreign to us, we start to generate new assumptions that allow us to appreciate things in a different and a possibly more honest perspective.

Though travel is distinctly different from tourism, there lies a common ground for both activities- that we long to change ourselves. We get fed up with the monotonous routine of our everyday life and frustrated at the heaviness of inhibiting the same bodies again and again. Behind the same mortal bodies that bear our different torment souls, we tend to harbour a confused faith that there is yet another part of us that remains undiscovered, that our going away from home might summon the long-forgotten selves within us.

However similar the motive behind travel and tourism, while tourism rests on an optimistic attitude towards our practising lifestyle, travel favours pessimism, inviting us to change our ourselves in a more fundamental way. It strives to challenge the very essence of identity, the notion of "i". It confronts us with a complete opposite scenario which the values we inherently uphold might be fallacious, that these values that precisely identify the "i" have surrendered to a fundamentalist logic which ought to be corrected. It suggests that we should forget ourselves once we get on the plane. We need to unburden ourselves before we can fully enjoy the food offered by a neighbourhood restaurant and appreciate a beautiful work of nature because we are no longer critically dependent on the previously known assumptions about ourselves.

Unfortunately, many have clung obsessively to tourism rather than travel. They refuse to see themselves as travellers to twist their curiosity contrary to guidebooks. If life is defined by a succession of lightness and weight, why can't we say the same for travel? Only we get on the plane with a sense of lightness, we can come back full of weight.

W

On 'Useless' Knowledge

2010-07-12T17:07:00.000-07:00

I wrote a piece for Philosophy Now, here is a taster:

"The immediate benefit of curious learning is perhaps the pleasure of thought itself. There is too much readiness to act in this world, and too little reflections. The speeches of politicians are often charged with emotions, manipulating our minds with soundbites made by spin doctors. The media and masses determine our ideal of happiness, and our failures are deemed absolute if we don't live up to their expectations. Yet the pleasure in mere thought not only allows us to enlarge our sympathies and diminish our human folly, it helps us to ward off such bias and prejudice, thus making a way for us to see ourselves in a proper or honest perspective. It also comforts us with peace of mind among worries and misfortunes."

On Wearing Less

2010-07-11T23:31:00.001-07:00

Originally published on the Pub which I am one of the contributors:

If teen models are denied entry to the book fair, it is perhaps because the notion of wearing less centres on a peculiar moral landscape that differs from the one the majority uphold, hence rendering the book fair a bit more "cultural". Behind such condemnation, there lies a tension between nudity and modesty, a boundary which teen models have endeavoured to obscure. However distinct the boundary between nudity and modesty, the majority have risked inspiring an unfair neglect of the inevitable connection between nudity and fashion and a misguided enthusiasm for coverings. Is wearing bikinis or lingerie more morally offensive than a virtuous McQueen's dress?

While many consider bikinis offending garments, women are also denied the liberty to admire their own physical candour. Rather than allowing them to take pleasure in their physical forms, a naked body should not be conceived as something to unnecessarily parade in public areas or in front of the media as if showing oneself naked is to reveal an area of potential shame. The body must therefore be viewed in a self-hating mood that suggests a state of vulnerability where one is stripped of defences and susceptible to exposing one's weakness, thus rendering the most unfavourable judgement on oneself.

If there is a long-standing tension between modesty and nudity, it is because the notions of covering and revealing are often examined in a paradoxical light. Contemplating the history of fashion, it is not uncommon to recognise a tendency to both reveal and shield our body. Particularly in women's fashion, it strives to maintain its aesthetic side on partly uncovering the body. The modern pioneer of wearing less was perhaps Rita Lygid who was the first one who wore a dress that was bare at the back to the waist in public. As the feminist movement was gaining its gravity in the 70s, the sizes of female clothes shrunk accordingly. We are living in a previously unknown skinnier era where women wish to bring out their feminine side by means of diet. Small wonder why stripteasing is always appealing.

If bikinis and lingeries and the likes are included in the realm of fashion, then perhaps they are often worn to bring out the virtues latent within women: the masculine side, the feminine side, women emancipation etc. They might as well suggest values that women uphold, the kinds of values that they wish to express privately in public. It is a material articulation of who they are or what they want to become. Instead of considering part nudity in an erotic light, it is a manifestation of the "i-confirmation", carrying with them an assurance of their own identities. They are not afraid to reveal their more intimate selves and reluctant to cover up all the weaknesses we ascribe to the species of what we call human, hence fearlessly collapse a private life into its public dimension. Aside from this process of self-actualisation, there also lies the courage for not being laughed and afraid of their bodies being used as physical evidence against them.

The evolution of fashion suggests there is no proper distinction between nudity and modesty today. What is modest in women's fashion constantly involves with the active participation of nudity. It once again invites us to consider the paradox of seduction and intimacy. Bikinis, like other forms of fashion, aim at uncovering the best of women yet retaining a distinctly confusing part of them to be uncovered only by their most intimate partners. They wander at the interval between seduction and intimacy that harbours what is most attractive within a person.

The teen models are not as morally offensive as the majority suggest. Rather than challenging the views of most women's rights organisations, they actually embrace them. Bikinis offer substantial female confidence. They are the epitome of the greatest female achievements. Teen models are feminists in the deepest sense of the term.

W

On Sex Education

2010-07-04T23:47:00.000-07:00

Originally published on the Pub which I am one of the contributors:

Enforced by the government, a great many teachers have to exchange roles with parents and impart sexual knowledge to the young. However, sex education not only reveals the government's underestimation of their physical maturity, but also renders the teachers' sexual knowledge insufficient, hence making them more liable to embarrassment. This situation invites us to the idea that perhaps the age-old ethical question "Should one have sex?" is no longer appealing to the young. In the modern era, the sexual openness of the young has enforced an atmosphere not of whether when one should have sex but rather, what brands of lubricants might enhance one's most pleasurable gratification or how long one has to endure in a romantic relationship in order to legitimately enter a sexual relationship.

But what could account for such openness? Other than the "culture" of haste and the excessive sexual suppression, what element has been at play? If sexual openness has become a necessity, it is perhaps because there lies a tendency for the young to think of sex as automatic assurance of intimacy. Skimming over the sex section of an online forum, some of the questions that have been frequently asked are whether how one can lure his girlfriend into bed and the more problematic one that why one is still denied the opportunity to rightfully explore the realm of complete privacy after being in a relationship for two weeks. The common ground of these difficult questions suggest that there is a problem without sex in a relationship and that the length of time to endure before one can make allowance for access to one's private sphere implies a significant romantic obstacle. Which ultimately suggests that intimacy can only be acknowledged by means of sex.

If the young anchor the notion of intimacy to sex, it is because they are often in muddle of the distinction between physical intimacy and psychological intimacy. What makes physical intimacy different from psychological intimacy is that the former is predominantly founded on the art of seduction. Rather than revealing one's character as a whole, the art of seduction lies only a need to reveal version of oneself one wishes to side with because it is founded on the display of one's finest qualities. Psychological intimacy, on the contrary, risks inspiring one's unfavourable judgement on his partner because love is about communication and understanding. Understanding involves not only with one's finest qualities, but also with one's vulnerabilities which one at times may be too ashamed of revealing. Therefore, while physical intimacy is based on revealing what is most attractive, psychological intimacy may involve with picking one's nose before one's beloved which must be considered in a complex, paradoxical light.

The young have hence mistakenly forged an inevitable connection between sex and love, thinking of sex as catalyst for longer conversations on more profound topics which consequently initiates an exactly opposite scenario. The relationship between sex and love has a need to be revised. The tendency of confusing sex with intimacy not only fools them into thinking that they have understood each other after a night in bed, but the danger lies in thinking sex as love. It destroys the clarity of love and sex and fails to attach a proper boundary between the two, prompting the young to make false additions to an already muddied picture. In the adult world where grand enquiries of love may often be easily avoided owing to the confusion of its nature, how one might suppose a twelve-year-old having the ability to accurately separate the the desired and the loved without guidance.

Though the question "Should one have sex?" is no longer appealing, perhaps we can revive its contemplative value by adding a "how" before the question. The question "How should one have sex?" not only preserves one's natural right to have sex, but also suggests that there is an art involving how one should do it. The young have often assumed their inborn ability to have sex, but if that is the case, why do bookstores carry countless versions of "Kama Sutra" to advise on positions to enhance our orgasmic appreciation? In the technological civilisation of ours, we are living in the era where one can legitimately skip the introduction of porn stars and scenes of foreplay in a pornographic video to the scene of what might be considered the most sexually arousing. How one can easily conclude that sex does not have to be taught?

But what is far more important is that sex education should not limit itself to its practical side, but rather, it should pay more attention to its psychological implications because we no longer have the need to submit our thinking to the traditionally dualistic separation of the mind and the body. What seems to be most intimate to the body might turn out to be intimate to the mind as well. Therefore, sex education is directly linked to the education of feelings. With the inability to distinguish sex from intimacy, there is a need to ensure one's desire should be well-directed so as to avoid confusing the yearnings of the body with the yearnings of the soul. Which leads to further investigation into sex, rather than just enquiring how one should have sex, perhaps it is equally appropriate to ask when, where, or even why one should have sex.

Sex education in Hong Kong is a failure not merely because of its limit on practical realm, but also the frame of mind when we approach the notion of sex. If sex education is to exert influence upon the young, it may include its deep psychological influence as well as a new attitude to see it in a proper perspective. In the days where the young change their partners as often as they change underwears, perhaps one should be taught to see the difference between one night stand and a stable relationship.

W

To Be Loved For Money Again

2010-06-30T21:03:00.000-07:00

A slightly edited version from the Pub:

Traditionally, people might embark on a relationship not for one's sophistication or one's ability to share the private spheres of our hearts, but simply for one's financial and social status in order to promote the family's status in the social hierarchy or mitigate the competitive nature between aristocratic families. Not until the eighteenth century, the romantic conception of love has emerged where one wishes to harbour romantic sentiment by means of poetry or a piece of exquisite music. It was not long before the pecuniary attachment to love was denied the opportunity of expression. We are living in the era where one easily arrives the conclusion that money will necessarily nurture shallow relationships.

However, owing to the similarly constructed notions of romantic love and marriage, we are often in muddle of what distinctions between them ought to be made. Our failure to distinguish romantic love as archaic impulse and marriage as social institution easily leads us to forge an inevitably connection between them, that marriage is an extended contract of the vows we have once made in a romantic relationship. If these two sentiments are inherently contradictory, it is because marriage is founded on our financial struggle to keep the family in condition, the essential element which our romantic sentiment is deeply opposed to.

Consequently, emerging there are two schools of thought in love. One school proposes that one should find in her partner logically reducible elements: money, fame, social status etc. Where traditional conception of love may require us to sacrifice for our partners, self-love, as opposed to selfless love, ought to be raised to a status of superiority. The other school, as obvious as it seems, condemns this pecuniary culture. It insists that money will ultimately nurture shallow relationships. A similar trajectory can hence easily be drawn for one's obsession for one's body, outlook, or even sexual candour. One should find in her partner some sort of inner beauty, elements that are critically independent of change and decay, things that might not be easily washed away by misfortunes such as intelligence, compassion, and sophistication.

In the midst of choosing sides, for the fear of being shallowly condemned, a great deal of social critics and groups of people whose thinking is submitted to the predictable brand of the mature middle class nonsense wish to draw their moral landscape from the latter school as the sole criterion for true love. Is our quest to find true love must necessarily be based on one's quality rather than one's material possession?

Perhaps it is shallow psychology to think that it is impossible for genuine affection to grow out of the love of one's money. Though the instinctive root may be self-interest, through the assistance of money, one may have felt for the help, namely, an expensive cosmetic set or a McQueen's dress, which she owes to his male counterpart that easily develops into sincere love. In the cynical world of ours, most of us severely condemn those who decide matters measured in money. However, the fact always runs counter to what is considered noble. It is precisely money or other superficial elements which one's attractiveness is based on. The fact that people are rich or look beautiful easily fools us into thinking that some sort of mysterious schemas are deeply attached to them. It is ignorance that muddies our objective judgement on them. It leaves room for a reflective delight which our imaginative vision flowers.

We are often told that we should not fall at first glance or for qualities that are unable to bear the verdict of time, that we should give a clear-eyed investigation into the depth of waters before we can testify for our romantic destiny. If we are prone to falling in love with people whom we know nothing, it is because they defy our ease of understanding. We are creatures of habit and therefore liable to grow contemptuous of what is familiar. If knowing each other means deviating away from the romantic conception of love, then perhaps we should cut away our effort for psychoanalysis and fall for merely superficial elements like money or physical beauty. The quest to find a true love is hence critically dependent on understanding absenteeism, that a great deal of affection is based on the paradoxical fact of less understanding.

Social conventions have prevented us from anchoring our criterion of love to money. But we should not be condemned merely on the ground of self-interest. Because things that invoke our promotion of self-interests are the ones that generate our desire of love. Therefore, love can be seen as a direction, not a place, and burns itself out with the attainment of its goal.

While the romantic sentiment has been at play, it seems unjust to rule out the possibility to summon genuine love out of superficial elements such as money. Nevertheless, wealth can purchase the reality of love. It may be undesirable and less noble. Unfortunately, it is a fact.

W

To Be Loved For Money

2010-06-28T15:37:00.000-07:00

Originally published on the Pub which I am one of the contributors:

Traditionally, we wish to embark on a relationship not for one's financial status, but simply to find a companion who is able to open up the private sphere of our hearts in our torment souls and avoid contemplating romantic dramas on TV in evenings alone. In the world of the twenty first century, however, the romantic conception of love has undergone a paradigm shift. The definition of love, depending not on being curled around and talked to with infantile, affectionate language after making passionate love in bed, but rather, on whether the male counterpart can afford an overly priced apartment or whether he can financially allow his female counterpart to wage an exhausting wardrobes competition with her female friends. What precisely damages the clarity of this traditional romantic conception of love? What heartlessly reduces the abstract notion of love to a couple of Louis Vuitton handbags or an fetish obsession with high heel shoes?

If love is getting commercialised, it is perhaps because capitalism has succeeded in exploiting human greed as an instinctive root of human nature. Driven by such pecuniary culture, we are often liable to worry at length about whether our financial status will allow us to sustain our living. Therefore, it is not uncommon to see money being regarded as an object of worship which ultimately leads to the innovatively capitalistic formation of love.

Consequently, emerging there are two schools of thought in love. One school proposes that one should find in her partner logically reducible elements: money, fame, social status etc. Where traditional conception of love may require us to sacrifice for our partners, self-love, as opposed to selfless love, ought to be raised to a status of superiority. The other school, as obvious as it seems, condemns this pecuniary culture. It insists that money will ultimately nurture shallow relationships. A similar trajectory can hence easily be drawn for one's obsession for one's body, outlook, or even sexual candour. One should find in her partner some sort of inner beauty, elements that are critically independent of change and decay, things that might not be easily washed away by misfortunes such as intelligence, compassion, and sophistication.

In the midst of choosing sides, for the fear of being shallowly condemned, a great deal of social critics and groups of people whose thinking is submitted to the predictable brand of the mature middle class nonsense wish to draw their moral landscape from the latter school as the sole criterion for true love. Is our quest to find true love must necessarily be based on one's quality rather than one's material possession?

Perhaps it is shallow psychology to think that it is impossible for genuine affection to grow out of the love of one's money. Though the instinctive root may be self-interest, through the assistance of money, one may have felt for the help, namely, an expensive cosmetic set or a McQueen's dress, which she owes to his male counterpart that easily develops into sincere love. In the cynical world of ours, most of us severely condemn those who decide matters measured in money. However, the fact always runs counter to what is considered noble. It is precisely money or other superficial elements which one's attractiveness is based on. The fact that people are rich or look beautiful easily fools us into thinking that some sort of mysterious schemas are deeply attached to them. It is ignorance that muddies our objective judgement on them. It leaves room for a reflective delight which our imaginative vision flowers.

We are often told that we should not fall at first glance or for qualities that are unable to bear the verdict of time, that we should give a clear-eyed investigation into the depth of waters before we can testify for our romantic destiny. If we are prone to falling in love with people whom we know nothing, it is because they defy our ease of understanding. We are creatures of habit and therefore liable to grow contemptuous of what is familiar. If knowing each other means deviating away from the romantic conception of love, then perhaps we should cut away our effort for psychoanalysis and fall for merely superficial elements like money or physical beauty. The quest to find a true love is hence critically dependent on understanding absenteeism, that a great deal of affection is based on the paradoxical fact of less understanding.

Many Hong Kong girls anchor their criterion of love to money. But they should not be condemned merely on the ground of self-interest. Because things that invoke our promotion of self-interests are the ones that generate our desire of love. Therefore, love can be seen as a direction, not a place, and burns itself out with the attainment of its goal.

The problem in Hong Kong is that this ideal is being enforced to be a norm rather than a choice. Nevertheless, wealth can purchase the reality of love. It may be undesirable and less noble. Unfortunately, it is a fact.

W

On Consumerism

2010-06-20T21:45:00.000-07:00

Originally published on the Pub which I am one of the contributors:

If the dominance of consumerism has been severely criticised, it is perhaps because consumption cannot be justified without need. Aside from its environmental issues, consumerism condemns us as mere robots, easily manipulated by advertisements on what we truly need. Shopping is, therefore, a secular sin, that fools us into thinking we need an excessive amount of ornaments and decorative items to exemplify our self-indulgence, a manifestation of what we want rather then what we need. It encourages temporary satisfactions. However, to be fully human, the anti-consumerist maintains, is to only buy what we need. Why would one need an expensive cardigan when a cheap one can equally serve the exact same function? Why should we follow the trend when we can have our own styles? After all, we all, in essence, should long to be admired for logically irreducible elements: intelligence, excellence, integrity, compassion etc. No matter how chic we can get, death will still come and haunt us, threatening to turn our worldly possessions into ashes and dust. Whatever arguments may be brought up against shopping without need, should we not allow shopping a part of our guilty pleasure in the private sphere of our heart?

If shopping has to be subject to rational scrutinisation, one may perhaps find its root in our rampant pecuniary culture, however, rather than accusing our economic system of the capitalistic formation of unnecessary desires, perhaps magazines are largely to blame. If magazines take up their part in triggering our commercial minds, it is because magazines have to make us unhappy. Flipping over pages of lifestyle magazines, how an ordinary unaided mind might be able to resist the seduction of the satanic genius of the editors.

Though a great many magazines on the surface may offer solution to the human conditions, though they may help us to discover ways to materially manifest certain good ideas of life, it only leaves us miserable in the end. In the clothes section, it reminds us of how many new garments have to be compensated for our wardrobes. In the decor section, it informs that our homes probably have no style. Lastly, in the cleansing, cosmetic products and perfume section, it enforces a message that we are far from being able to keep our skins in good conditions and may lead us to lose temper over a flask of limited edition perfume.

Therefore, magazines are not mere the gospels of what a good life means, but rather, they are instruments of psychoanalysis. Because the fact that they leave us miserable is only a reminder that we should suffer aesthetic analysis. Learning how many clothes are missing in our wardrobes and how many decorative items are missing in our homes attend to us the idea that perhaps our tastes have to be refined or even unlearnt and that our sense of fashion has to be sharpened in order to love life. These magazines invoke in us a succession of questions: why don't I have this particular handbag to harmonise my Anna Sui's cosmetic sets? Why am I unable to wear long loose shirts correctly over leggings? How can I neglect purple is the colour of this summer? Why am I ignorant of certain cleansing product that may neutralise the dermatological disaster on my face? Little wonder why our tastes deserve scrutiny.

However much pain these magazines have inflicted on us, looking over images of a world of perfect beings, we are still stripped of defences. We still find pleasure in contemplating pages of unhappiness in our beds alone and devising a detailed shopping list to make sure that we follow the "correct" social logic of tastes and styles. All this, unfortunately, is an illusion. The editors of these magazines have successfully fooled us into thinking we are actually the models ourselves, that once we put the clothes on, we will be under the illusion of possessing the stylishly posed figures who are modelling the summer collection and being photographed under big spot lights. Only until we return home, we will realise our lack of physical candour and therefore are liable to avoid the verdict of a full-length mirror. We mistakenly confuse the mirror with the lens skilfully placed in the sophisticated design of a camera and overestimate our own ability to see through the photographer's eyes.

The problem of these magazines inevitably leads to the problem of shopping. Shopping invites us to cast aside our reasoning abilities and favour a trust in mindless consumption. However, to condemn shopping is to fail to ascribe to shopping a proper value in our psychological make-up. Shopping is not just about buying what we need, but rather, it reflects a deep question of who we are, a question that might provoke us to search for the answer for a lifetime. The reason why we always shop for what we want instead of what we need is that we are often unsure who we are or what we want to become. Confused, we are then liable to adopt the suggestions made in magazines that provide a justifiable defence for our shopping rituals.

Our search for a decent camera, a pair of jeans, a Hermes handbag, or a pair of Martin Margeila's represents a process of soul-searching. Since we are unsure who we actually are, then we might as well figure that out by fitting in the current trend through the workings of shopping, anchoring ourselves to a more socially recognisable forms. It is also precisely because trends and styles endlessly fluctuate that allows us to abandon identities that may not inherently belong to our selves. Shopping, like science, is piecemeal. It leaves open for the possibility that we are susceptible to change and therefore open to revisions when necessary. It conspires to test itself against mental evidence. Which means our tendency to switch styles may suggest that our identities are always subject to change due to accumulation of new experience.

While we often deprecate the consumerist ethics, we ought not to neglect the unmentionable gravity of shopping in our philosophy of life. So rather than just buying what we need, we might as well buy what we want as long as it is financially affordable. Because shopping is not merely about consumption, but rather, it is a means to self-understanding. It allows us to see through the shop windows to a more enchanted world, a part of us that lies beneath our skin that remains undiscovered until a considerable amount of money is chiseled in our bank accounts. Shopping is no trivial task.

W

Should We Sleep With Someone On A First Date?

2010-06-13T19:26:00.000-07:00

Originally published on the Pub which I am one of the contributors:

Driven by pecuniary interests, haste has become a hallmark of virtue while patience would count as a prelude to unproductivity. This culture of haste, unfortunately, has not just effected the world of business, but also integrated with our social life. If haste is considered a norm, it is perhaps because it allows us to get numerous things done in a day, and we may therefore cut away our unnecessary concentration on the minute details which may slow down the process to attain our goals.

If haste has become part of our daily habits, then it is not surprising to see how our romantic life becomes more like a fastfood meal rather than a decent supper at a restaurant. If a man wishes to take a lady out on a date, rather than pleasing her with humours, etiquette, and his intellectual candour, he only offers show off his wealth in front of the lady, while the lady in return harbouring a financial respect, evoking a sense of commercial optimism as well as romantic pessimism. What is worse is that his true aim is not amorous possession, but rather solely physical possession. How easy a sentiment that has been praised in literature, novel, poetry, and films is reduced to a mere mathematical formula. How easy money can savour a woman's body.

If the sole criterion of love is based on how good we perform in bed, it is because sex becomes a legitimate substitution for love. Sex has become an ends rather than a means, just like money has become another substitution for happiness. Traditionally, aside from prostitution, love was thought to go before sex. It was believed that it was not a good idea to engage in sex before the consideration of falling in love. Sex was therefore a supplement to love. That is why the first kiss and the foreplay were important. Because the performers of these acts wished not just to hold and savour the physical realm of the other halves, but also the spiritual realm, in order to make sure that they were sharing the bed with someone who could fathom their souls. However, in the world of twenty first century, where it conspires to kill our power of concentration, the young have become compulsive sex addicts. On the surface, they may all seem willing to risk everything to attain their beloveds, but what lies deep in their hearts is a night in bed generating pleasurable sensation of rubbing their receptors under their skins against each other.

But is sex really our ultimate desire? Are we forever condemned to follow a Darwinian approach to love? But this is an illusion of what we want to attain. The problem of this illusion lies not in the tolerance of easy sex, but rather in failing to entertain the benefits of delay. An easy access to a woman's body is precisely why it is most unlikely to encourage love. At one level, sex may grant us the most pleasurable sensation ever known, but at another level, it may fool us into thinking we have acquired what we truly want. Because the woman is unable to foster doubts in us. What is most attractive about a woman stems not from her submission to the dominance of men, but rather the difficulty of attaining her. If she is not as easy to possess as a prostitute who can be possessed by commercial means, then it suggests that there is something mysterious about her and makes allowance for us to perform a clear-eyed investigation on her.

Upon the interval of desire and gratification, it prompts us to study our beloved on a closer examination. We are allowed to study her tastes for dance and music, her opinions in politics and science, and her characters. Moreover, in the physical realm, we may be able to pay closer to attention to what initially attracts us the most. We could study his facial structures, her indentations, and the curves of her body which may enhance our appreciation and love for her. A prostitute, on the contrary, will sooner or later cease to generate desire in us, because she is always available, ready to reveal her naked truth, and gives us what we want to attain beforehand.

So why do we want sex on a first date? Though physical intimacy may put us in direct contact with the object of desired, it does not guarantee us intimacy of souls. If sex can substitute love and women fail to please us in beds, or vice versa, we may risk laying down judgements falsely on their characters only based on the sexual gratification we have received. We must therefore realise the limits of sexual contact and revise what possession truly means.

W

Should We Write?

2010-06-11T15:06:00.000-07:00

Traditionally, books have been known as one of the most popular tools to transmit ideas to change lives and fill minds. Small wonder why the Bible and the Koran can appeal to a great majority of the population in the world. However, looking back to the early history, there existed a time when some of the greatest moral teachers had a distaste for books and took pleasure in the art of conversation. I have in mind Socrates, Jesus, and the Buddha. Why were they so reluctant to articulate their ideas across pages of blank sheets? If books are inferior to speeches, why would their disciples go against their teachings?

If these moral teachers found books offending, it was perhaps because the problem of books lies not in their inability to offer knowledge, but rather in its lack of responses. Unlike discussions and debates, books can only be accompanied by solitude that one can only contemplate pages of thought-provoking ideas in his bed alone. Discussions, on the other hand, are mutual. The rhythm of a conversation makes no allowance of dead periods, because the presence of our companion prompts us to offer a response, therefore making us more liable to suspect the value of silence. Even one of the greatest poets John Milton deprecates the value of writing,

"... many books
Wise men have said are wearisome; who reads
Incessantly, and to his reading brings not
A spirit or judgement equal or superior,
(And what he brings, what needs he elsewhere seek)
Uncertain and unsettled still remains,
Deep-versed in books and shallow in himself."

However paradoxical Milton appears, he conspires to cast aside our intellectual faith in books and favour a trust in conversation. Reading would become pointless if our minds fail to submit to the rigours of rational examination. He seems to suggest that a book, like religion, might eventually reveal itself as an authority, that it must be immune to challenges and criticisms, hence closing our minds off to new ideas and opinions.

Milton is not alone. The French philosopher and essayist Michel de Montaigne severely condemns writing as well:

"The most fruitful and natural exercise of the mind, in my opinion, is conversation; I find the use of it more sweet than of any other action of life; and for that reason it is that, if I were now compelled to choose, I should sooner, I think, consent to lose my sight, than my hearing and speech. The Athenians, and also the Romans, kept this exercise in great honour in their academies; the Italians retain some traces of it to this day, to their great advantage, as is manifest by the comparison of our understandings with theirs. The study of books is a languishing and feeble motion that heats not, whereas conversation teaches and exercises at once."

What Montaigne suggests is that books, unlike conversation, fail to exercise our minds. It deprives us of the ability to think and enforces us to take in whatever we read, removing us from the weight we necessarily confront during a conversation. Montaigne goes on further,

" and who can do nothing but by book, I hate it, if I dare to say so, worse than stupidity. In my country, and in my time, learning improves fortunes enough, but not minds; if it meet with those that are dull and heavy, it overcharges and suffocates them, leaving them a crude and undigested mass."

Books, according to Montaigne, belongs to the tradition of learning. It allows us to be able to recite verses of poetry and literature without being subject to rational scrutiny. It undermines our independence of thought and imaginative vision, inculcating in us a sense of obedience rather than a spirit of free thinking. Most authors are easily taken as objects of worship, rather than reserving our right to scrutinise what they say, we naively condemn our own intelligence and marvel at the difficult texts they are capable of delivering, falsely seeing them as hallmark of wisdom and excellence. Only through conversation, we are able to articulate sophisticated ideas in ordinary everyday language which allows us to offer criticisms and prompt others to give back direct responses.

Little wonder why teenagers, who thoroughly investigate Milton's The Lost Paradise and inherit the wisdom of Montaigne, refuse to read nowadays. It becomes obvious why Plato only agreed to write in the form of dialogues because it is only through dialogues that leave room for free enquiry and unbiased evaluation of evidence. Are we then to abandon the tradition of writing and diligently master the art of conversation? Does reading make us obedient drones rather than creative originals?

But Montaigne and Francis Bacon offered us a solution. They invented the form of essays to articulate what was previously thought unknown, difficult philosophical ideas, because essays aim at appealing to a wide range of readers in the most passable language. They allow us to expose to what is rigorously discussed in the academia and read it with fluidity and clarity. Moreover, essays also ward off all the unnecessary academic jargons which lay impassable to us. They mitigate the tension between writing and conversation and compensate what can only be originally achieved by conversation.

Another benefit of writing is that writing is largely based upon rewriting. It cuts away all the dead periods which occasionally happen in conversation. It gives us room for reorganisation, presenting our ideas in a coherent, logical manner, and articulating them in beautifully balanced phrases. Those who condemn writing may be due to their ignorance of the inevitable link of persuasiveness and beauty. One of the reasons of why most great quotes and poetries do not suffer loss of our memory is because these great masters compose them in such an aesthetic logic that pleases our minds. They are aware of the commonly neglected value of beauty. Logic and reason alone cannot convince our intelligent minds. It is through beauty that wisdom can penetrate through our souls and liberate us from the dullness and boredom of most intellectual arguments which might otherwise slip away from us easily. Moreover, writing does not suffer from the limitations of corrections and additions which one ought to make even in front of the most patient companion.

So why didn't Socrates, Jesus, and the Buddha write? Perhaps because they were aware of the insufficiency of writing. But writing should not be condemned merely because they didn't do so. Though conversation promotes active participation in rational enquiry and unbiased evaluation of evidence, writing allows a different way to present arguments which conversation is no match. For those who write, please write beautifully. As for readers, read not just with logic and reason, but also with an aesthetic eye.

W

How Should We Treat Our Guests?

2010-06-07T21:52:00.000-07:00

Originally published on the Pub which I am one of the contributors:

Embroiled by excessive working hours and the necessity of moonlighting, it is no surprise to witness a great many Filipino and Indonesian maids ferry to Hong Kong for working opportunities. They seek to replace the traditional role of women and become masters of handling domestic affairs. If the customary female identity has not been offended, it is perhaps because the feminists have gained the upper hand and brainwashed modern women to become financially independent rather than submitting themselves to male dominance. How indefensible the traditional responsibility of women has become in front of a flock of Filipino and Indonesian maids.

Whatever much convenience these maids have brought us, there is one drawback. Rather than fulfilling our obsession with cleanliness and order, they threaten to undermine the virtue of hard work and inculcate in us a sense of laziness, rendering us liable to take everything for granted. What is worse is that they have a tendency to deprive us of the ability to be good hosts. Upon welcoming guests to our homes, instead of harbouring a respect and warmth for them, we command our maids with fluidity, as if slavery has been reinforced on legal grounds, to articulate from the most trivial art of serving drinks to the most annoying dish washing. How thoughtful of us, who are the masters of our homes, to treat our guests who offer us bottles of wine and flowers with our lack of hospitality.

A real story might help to emphasize my point. The Queen of England Elizabeth II, while having excessive numbers of maids on duty in the Windsor Palace, insists on welcoming her guests by herself rather than relying on her maids. She serves them drinks and supper, does the dishes, and finally makes tea for them all by herself. But why does she insist on doing these by herself instead of asking her maid to do them? Because the Queen herself believes it is a matter of etiquette.

The role of a master is to offer the possibly best hospitality to his guests. To ask his maid to perform all the tasks is to violate the identity of him being the master of his home. It not only reveals the fact that his guests do not deserve any respect, but it also condemns their presence as trivial that their visits cannot mean much to him. It robs his guests of dignity and self-respect in front of a maid who may silently ridicule and mock them over the collecting of the dishes and her puting them in a sink.

A good host should insist on his guests doing nothing but eating and drinking. When they offer to help, he should tell them, with a friendly yet masterly tone, to keep out of the kitchen area. Aside from this, he should tell his maid of her redundancy, to take the rest of the day off, and serve the guests at his best.

W

On Loneliness

2010-05-31T23:31:00.000-07:00

If we are getting lonelier in a modern metropolis, it is perhaps because we can no longer find someone who can unburden ourselves. In almost every metropolis, there lies a paradoxical, inverse role which runs counter to what a densely populated city might suggest. But why are we feeling lonely?

Our sense of loneliness is generally an expression for our longing for love. Perhaps it stems from the fact that we always have a high-minded sense of the gravity of what we are doing. As we grow up, we realise the cruel characteristic of the universe that our existence is actually of little significance. Whether we exist or not does not demand a slightest degree of change in the universe. This might be the reason why we often harbour a confused wish to embark on a relationship so our trivial existence may take on a certain value. After all, we are still at heart ordinary human beings who embrace narcissism and hope that someone in this world is able to feel what needs to be felt and understand what needs to be understood.

In this technologically innovative era, friendship takes on a new form. It conspires to kill our ability to be patient and nurture shallow relationships through platforms such as facebook, twitter, blogs, and forums. While we are aware that our personality traits are as diverse as the glittering stars across the sky, these online platforms choose to define us with the mere categories of religious views, nationality, genders, political ideologies, and the likes. They refuse to give a clear-eyed investigation to what might constitute our souls and the depth of our sentiments that wish to provoke. The world of the internet has led us to provoke a doubt in the depth of relationships with those whom we, by definition, call friends who are unlikely to bear the same mental bonding as those in the past.

We no longer know how to be good friends which suggests that we no longer know how to love. Most internet relationships (especially those whom we know in reality) are often based on the past. Online bonding stems not from what is distant, but rather from the happy memories that can only be obtained through retrospect. But real friendship should also look forward to what might happen to us. It should not only enforce a common ground for nostalgia, but also it should also offer a guidance to the future, be it a goal or a dream. Our memories are often unreliable. What we can dig up is only bits and pieces. In order to sustain friendship, we need to realise its place in the future.

However, loneliness is not at all times bad. It brings out a pleasant form of melancholy. Friendship is more agreeable when it is accompanied by intervals of separations and reunions. Only through the endurance of loneliness, we might realise the true values of friendship. Human beings are creatures of habits and liable to grow contemptuous of what is familiar. A pleasant degree of loneliness may serve as a temporary cure to boredom and intensify the bonding between friends. It evokes in us a sense of respect for others.

Technology undoubtedly makes our lives more convenient. The problem lies in how we can reconcile technology and the traditional face to face conversation. Aristotle once remarked that a life without friendship is no life. In the current educational system, we seem to neglect the fact that an education of friendship is much needed. Our lonely souls won't be at peace until we revise the place of machines in the modern world.

W

Technology and Love

2010-05-30T23:35:00.000-07:00

An edited version of the Pub which I am one of the contributors:

Many will agree that technology has revolutionised our lives. While many of us remark that technology brings us closer with each other, it seems to dehumanise our sentiments. As technology leads us to harbour an urge for keeping pace, there lies a paradoxical, inverse role for technology to commit the exact opposite, just like a sense of loneliness is overly exaggerated in a densely populated metropolis. If technology runs counter to its original intention, is our technological obsession largely to blame or rather technology itself?

Glancing over our friend lists on MSN, facebook, and twitter, however close we are with them in reality, the profile pictures and names, be they pseudo or real, might prompt us to provoke a doubt in the depth of our relationships with those whom we sentimentally call friends. There seems to lie a high wall, namely, the computer screen, that renders our souls unfathomable. If technology is to offer what it originally suggests, why doesn't it ferry our wounded souls to a state where intimacy is celebrated?

If technology pulls us away from each other, it is because technology, with our glorified inventions of mobile phones, the internet, and aeroplanes, renders us too easy to reconnect with each other, just like photography is thought to assure us automatic possession of beauty. Instead of seeing the internet as a device to enhance friendships, we use the medium as a substitution, seducing ourselves into thinking that technology can always allow us to exchange our inner feelings with each other. But what this frame of mind actually does is not only that it draws us apart, while persuading us to take pride on multi-tasking, it also invites us to pay less attention to the minute details of our feelings. It follows a similar trajectory as photography, thinking that technology also assures us automatic possession of friendships.

Moreover, while our longing to express panic and despair requires an act of charity from our friends to be heard, the chatting message box closes itself off from other possibilities of communication and invites us to undermine how a hand gesture, a speaking tone, a facial expression, and body language might urge us to articulate emotions which are deemed implausible to deliver in mere words. It deprives us of the ability to empathise and express what torments our souls.

In a romantic relationship, it is not uncommon to hover our declarations of love and our determinations to end a relationship through text messages. Aside from the insincerity due to the lack of face to face conversation, what technology undermines is how beauty matters in expressing our longing for love. Texting messages induce us to say what we want to say in the most convenient ways. That is, by simplifying our ordinary language into some sort of inexplicable technological language such as "I luv u" rather than "I love you".

Moreover, since technology is about keeping pace, many of us are unable to bear the patience to appease our romantic yearnings as fine prose stylists who articulate our hands to jot down beautifully balanced and poetic phrases. If we do not feel the need to write beautifully, it might be because we tend to think that our romantic partners can easily take in the message in whatever style, even when it suggests vulgarity, regardless of the link of beauty with its effectiveness. But that is precisely the reason why our romantic sentiments are accompanied by intervals of vacuum and fulfilment. They slip from our minds too easily. Small wonder why our female counterparts repeatedly challenge us with questions such as "how much do you love me?" or "what do you love about me?" or the likes.

Other than friendship and romantic love, technology also wishes to destroy our relationships with strangers. It must be borne in our minds that connections with strangers have become almost necessary in the world of internet. We communicate with them through emails, twitter, and forums. However, our reactions to strangers have become dehumanising as well. Rather than leaving our responses as humans, behind every avatar or profile picture, we tend to condemn it as machine rather than as a human being. Skimming through posts regarding politics and ethics, one can find the most imaginable insults in the most vulgar language against the thread starters. Most of them, often as anonymous or some pseudo-identities, are insulting as if they are stripped of responsibilities as humans. They are reluctant to accept themselves as grown up adults who need to accept the consequences for what they have done. If they happen to suffer criticisms which seem too churlish to deny, they could just disappear by not replying at all. How easy marked qualities of human beings can be wiped out by the invention of the internet.

Is it our technological obsession or technology itself? In the technological civilisation of ours, at one level it would be foolish to avoid the necessities of technology, but at another level technology may pull us away from the human values which ought to be preserved. In our modern educational system, while urging us to integrate technology into classrooms, there seems to be a lack of education on how to use technology properly. In the world where haste is praiseworthy, we often recall the question of why but neglect the question of how. The online world nurtures shallow relationships. The education of technology and love is much needed if the world is to be sane.

Next time, spend your time over meals with your friends rather than chatting on MSN, write love letters to your lovers rather than texting messages over mobile phones, and most importantly, try your best to avoid using anonymous and pseudo-identities as names and respond as a human.

W

On The Permanence of Love

2010-05-29T00:27:00.000-07:00

Upon securing a romantic conception of love, we all tend to seduce ourselves into romantic optimism, that the creatures we have successfully located are the ones from our dreams. Though countless novels and films often remind us of instances of breaking up, though thousands of songs often warn us how unstable love can be, though experience confirms us how fragile it can be, deep inside we all still wish to appease our romantic yearnings with our unshakable faith in its indestructibility and stability. If our longing for love seems so inevitable, would the heavens smile on us and ferry our wounded souls to a place where it can promise us with the perpetual existence of love?

During the first few months after we fall in love, we are often left with no choice but harbour a wish that she must be the one we are going to spend our rest of our life with. If love aims at communication and understanding, then it suggests that there lies a paradoxical, depressingly inverse goal in love which completely runs counter to its original intention. Perhaps the easiest people to fall in love are those whom we know nothing. Our attraction for our beloved ones stems not from our constant intimacy with them, but rather our lack of understanding of them. Though our close acquaintance with them at one level brings us closer with each other, but at another level it suggests that they are also stripped of defences and subject to physical and mental scrutiny. Whether they do not look as good without makeup, whether their tastes in fashion and books conflict with ours, whether they pick their noses vigorously without using handkerchief, what are previously thought as angels are immediately condemned as material beings, susceptible to cold light of criticisms. How easy our fantasy can be interrupted by our need to fathom one's soul.

If our expectations of love are contrary to what the reality suggests, it is because we naively think the ones we are with now are those whom we fell in love with at first glance. While most of us consider life a process of becoming mature, we seldom think our partners submit themselves to the same process. The modern world, with the help of technology, is changing with an incalculable speed. Our lives are filled with various experiences which are deemed too implausible to be identical with others. Is it sane to think what constitutes our partners' souls will remain the same? Is it sensible to secure our love of regularity for those who operate within the same mortal coil? If our desires and opinions are susceptible to change as time varies, why, then, can't we expect the same from our partners? The same burden no longer inhabits the same soul. Most of us are in fact not aware of our blind submission to Platonic utopia where eternity is praiseworthy and change is despised.

Until this point, it seems we are necessarily driven to the conclusion that love cannot last. Our romantic fantasy is only an illusion. But does that mean we are enforced to endorse the view of romantic pessimism? That our journey of love must inevitably be accompanied by intervals of happiness and despair? If love can offer conclusive evidence of our existence, perhaps it suggest that we look at love from the wrong perspective. Love often conspires to impute similarities rather than investigate differences. However much our tastes and opinions conflict with theirs, there are always great numbers of things we find agreement on that have caused us to fall in love in the first place which seems churlish to deny that we are not meant for each other. The impossibility to reject the invitation of romantic fatalism urges our minds to be full of wonder why a person who is seemingly a different species can command her mind with fluidity to articulate our opinions and tastes in the same sophistication or even better. If love is about bonding us with what is identical, then perhaps romantic love should be seen as a process of self-understanding. Our partners are like full-length mirrors, forcing us to reflect our verdict of them on ourselves, delivering us knowledge of who we are and what we want to become. Our despair at romantic love comes from the fact that we see it as an ends rather than a means, a destination that we have longed for rather than stops in our journey of life.

But if we have to insist on making love last, then we may be compelled to take Marcel Proust's advice, namely, infidelity. However, he does not encourage us to actually perform the act, but only through the threat of it. So long as we are creatures of habits and liable to grow contemptuous of what is familiar, the only hope to make relationships last is to induce our partners to believing that they might suffer the loss of their beloved. Jealousy may serve as a temporary cure for boredom which leads our partners to realise they may not appreciate us at its richest and fullest. In return , they may do things in order to assure themselves amorous possession again. The only drawback is perhaps the repetitions of infidelity whenever boredom kicks in.

If our longing for romantic love has to be excused from sorrow and grief, we must revise certain notions of it and attach it to more a "correct" and "just" value. We need to learn to entertain the inevitable incompatibilities of love and construct a new philosophy regarding its nature. However much love can torment our souls, it makes our mortality bearable. It makes our life take on a certain value which is not trivial. Love can offer as much optimism if we learn to love properly.

W

On Self-Understanding

2010-05-25T23:04:00.000-07:00

Upon a leisurely stroll in a bookstore, in spite of our prediction of the commercial future of books, it immediately throws our focus on the self-help section. If most readers favour self-help books, it is perhaps because deep down we all long to fathom our souls. The modern world has enforced us to abandon optimism of everyday life. Bombarded with financial concerns and romantic affairs, we often find ourselves in muddle of what solutions can be offered to fulfil our psychological needs. We start asking ourselves: What am I? Where can I find my own vision of happiness? What do I really need in life to sustain happiness? Questions about ourselves evoke in us a lack of self-understanding that perhaps we must consult self-help books for treatments designed accordingly to adapt to our different selves.

Folk wisdom assures us that we are the only ones who are capable of understanding ourselves. Thoughts and inner feelings are only confined within ourselves. They are only private affairs and granted access under psychological scrutiny. How could a stranger penetrate into our minds when he does not belong to our selves? How could he perform a clear-eyed investigation when he is physically distracted by our appearances?

Unfortunately, folk wisdoms do not always bear scientific scrutiny. Our faith in the ability to understand ourselves has risked inspiring a misguided narcissism and an unfair neglect of the people who surround us. In this scientifically progressive world, it seems sensible to cast aside societal conventions that have been left unsaid and favour a trust in science. Modern psychology reminds us of a contrary fact, that perhaps our friends, our lovers, or even strangers may know us better. If the people who surround us allow us to see ourselves in a proper perspective, it is because we seldom submit our own introspection to the rigours of rational examination. Instead, we tend to rely our judgements on intuition and emotions. All too often we tend to think of ourselves as admirable and consistent in thoughts. Rather than paining ourselves with truth, we like to seduce ourselves into the realm of psychological optimism, rendering us insusceptible to flaws.

As long as we are biased towards ourselves, the people around us often offer a more objective judgement about our characters. Our awareness of existence stems not from being able to perceive what is around us, but rather from what others think of us. The reason why friendship and romantic love are important is that we need them to legitimise our existence so they can ascribe to us a more "correct" and "just" identity. People allow us to be beautiful only when they look at us with an aesthetic eye. They allow us to be funny only when they have a cultivated sense of humour. They allow us to be compassionate only when they are as well compassionate. Without friendship and romantic love, we are stripped of the ability to realise who we are. Only through the recognition of friends and lovers, we find confirmations of our existence and identities.

Our identities are perhaps most exaggerated in a romantic relationship. In "The Symposium", the Greek philosopher Plato remarks that our familiarity with lovers stems from the fact we were originally joined as a whole. Which is why we constantly look for another half in order to complete ourselves. Love, according to Plato, conspires to impute similarities rather than investigate differences. It allows our opinions and tastes to be articulated with fluidity in our lovers. It suggests the possibility of us allowing intimacy with our souls. It offers consolations of the fact that someone actually understands what we think needs to be understood and feels what we think needs to be felt within us. Therefore, romantic love is not an ends, but rather a means to self-understanding because it enforces us to open up ourselves to someone who may know ourselves or even better.

In order to understand ourselves, we should consult our friends and lovers because they can evaluate us based on observation of our past behaviours. They will not be clouded by our tendency to make up terrible excuses to defend our deeply flawed psychological selves. Real friendship and romantic love are based on a pessimistic nature of being able to stab us in the front, paining us with the truth. But in this technological civilisation that wishes to destroy the most precious human sentiment, will we still be able to appreciate love?

W

Our Cravings For Technology

2010-05-23T22:22:00.000-07:00

An edited version from the Pub which I am one of the contributors:

Our demand for electronic products, most notably mobile phones, has become increasingly stronger. Just when we are considering whether we should get an iPhone, Apple will start bombarding us with newer versions of it. Just when we are struggling whether we should get a Kindle, Apple will remind us of the release of the iPad. In the technological civilisation of ours, technology never ceases to generate our previously neglected material needs and conspires to escalate consumerism and our financial necessity to a newer level. If technology, as we have been told, is to simplify our life, why, then, does it create more problems rather than solutions?

Our prediction of technology is generally way ahead of our time, but typically frighteningly true. Our unaided minds can no longer ward off the thrills these devilish technological products wish to generate. These products enforce us to lose our power of concentration. Rather than letting us take our time to read the instruction manuals, new products emerge to assure us possession of even more sophisticated machinery.

Take, for instance, mobile phones. It is not uncommon to see them being dumped before they deteriorate. Driven by the free market economy, the life span of a mobile phone is artificially reduced from five years or longer to a merely half a year. Upon our contemplation whether we prefer touch pad or traditional buttons, technology will have already moved on before it reaches the market, suggesting that perhaps using our inherent linguistic instinct is better than our traditional reliance on bodily movements. How much easier a phone call can be made by mere utterance.

If any criticism, aside from the environmental issue, has to be made for the undue progressiveness of technology, rather than blaming it on businessmen who are legitimately testing the limits of capitalism, perhaps it comes the time our human nature should suffer analysis. Though the internet invites us to render them redundancy, new models of fax machines never cease to appear. Though the iPhone is pretty much capable of handling everything, there is a rising trend that using an outdated mobile phone which was once popular in the 70's is considered stylish and hip. Though pressing buttons is generally regarded as a more convenient way to dial phone numbers, one might preserve his own aesthetic obsession by perfectly fitting a rotary telephone into his vintage home. Therefore, the undue progressiveness of technology has owed much to the market, that is, the consumers, rather than the morally confused businessmen. Our desire for novelty is gaining its unmentionable gravity.

Are we then eternally condemned by our desire of novelty? Are we, as the philosopher Karl Marx predicted, destined to be obedient drones under the capitalist society? Technology may perhaps put us in a passive role and deprive us of what it means to be human, but that does not suggest that it is impossible to reverse the role. Most world religions realise that there lies an archaic suspicion of the changeability of human nature, so rather than modifying God's work, they seek to suppress desires by sending us off to churches and reading scriptures every hour or every weekend. However, all this is too pessimistic about the human race. We should, on the contrary, direct it to outlets that are less harmful.

Our longing for technological products is largely based on magazines that tell us what the current trend is. If we are to liberate from the bondage of Marxist accusation, we should look for style that suits us rather than what advertisements tell us. All works of design tell us about the kind of live we wish to live in. They tell us about certain ideals we wish to sustain in ourselves. While helping us in practical ways, they should also reflect on us certain ideas of good life and what we want to become. Therefore, we do not just need a mobile phone that can help us connect with others and allows us to browse the web using Wifi and 3G, but we also need a mobile phone that speaks to and for us. It should suggest the values that we uphold and console our longing to express panic and despair.

We are not necessarily led by technology. Our conscious selection of styles allows us to strike a balance between tyranny and free will. It articulates the idea that we all long to preserve the values that are nearly destroyed by our mechanical civilisation but at the same time we can no longer refuse to realise our technological needs if we are to survive in the modern society. So instead of submitting our taste to iPhone and Blackberry, we should find mobile phones that are perfectly moulded so as to represent who we are.

W

On Leaving Home

2010-05-17T15:59:00.000-07:00

As a student studying abroad, summer encompasses a special meaning for me. It reminds me of certain long-forgotten virtues which a capitalist society disapproves of: friendship, the love of family, and perhaps romantic love. It comes the time when my loneliness and nostalgia are finally consoled. In the intense heat of this summer, glancing upon the cloudless sky and the austere sun, I still recall the moment when I departed from Hong Kong in the previous summer. If leaving home is to have any profound psychological impact, it is perhaps because I am enforced to temporarily cut off my sentimental bond with what is familiar.

I woke up on the day of my departure, staring at the cloudy sky, dark clouds kept blowing in from the west, confronting me with a thunder which was about to tear through the sky. Depressed, I washed myself up in the bathroom and got dressed. Before I left my apartment, I wandered around it for the last time and farewelled to the familiar inanimate objects.

As my mother and I went downstairs, we took a taxi to the Airport Express station. During the fifteen minute trip to the station, the preponderance of conversational poverty, to my surprise, did not enforce a sense of loneliness. If silence were not directly linked to loneliness, it might be because we were all inwardly consoled by the presence of an analogous feeling. The fifteen minute of stillness would only often be punctuated by the occasional electronic command to turn right or left until the taxi reached glass-fronted building. It was the Air Express station.

It made me feel a bit optimistic towards the human race when the taxi driver summoned a long-forgotten virtue that scarcely exists among human beings and helped us pull the luggage out. It prompted me to think there was at least a portion of human beings caring to display the unusual friendliness and generosity. As we restored the value on our Octopus cards, after we passed through the gates, we decided to check in first. After checking in, I felt as if I had lifted off the burden on my shoulder so I could carry with a sense of lightness to travel to the airport, and ultimately, Houston.

However many material goods I had lifted off, my feet felt unbearably heavy as if my mind could not command with fluidity to articulate them towards the Airport Express. If I could not feel the slightest degree of lightness, it might be because material goods were extrinsic to my existence. At this precise moment, I felt like I had a sudden awakening that I finally realised why the French philosopher Rousseau history was regressive rather than progressive. In the technological and material civilisation of ours, we had unconsciously slipped away from the state of nature. We no longer cared for the love of family, friendship, the arts, compassion, and romantic love. Our tendency to latch onto material goods is the mere product of civilisation and commerce, suppressing human nature at its best.

My minimalist reflection perhaps urged me to study the setting of the station with a bit more imagination and attention. The setting gave weight to the feelings that it wished to provoke. It reminded me that life, aside from its material aspect, centred itself on psychological needs which our capacity to draw happiness was critically dependent upon, among them our longing for love and expression. How I wished I could stuff my backpack with the best moments being with my friends and family and the love they had been vigorously giving me.

Perhaps my biggest mistake was my inability to escape the bondage with my own self. I realised that my own existence was defined by my experience. My psychological dispositions were worn out by countless instances of grief and sorrows, with small intervals of happiness. However advanced our technology had become, it failed to console the core of my misfortunes and difficulties. While standing in front of the Airport Express awaiting its doors to be opened, I feel frustrated at the heaviness of inhabiting the same body and soul over and over again. How could we strike a balance between lightness and weight? How helpless a human being could be.

Seated in the train, looking at the small TV screen on the back of every seat, I heard of the announcement telling us we would arrive in twenty eight minutes. Though I was truly grateful of what technology had done for our civilisation, I could not help but wished the train could extend its travelling time perhaps up to an hour or more. During the trip to airport, there were often exchange of phone calls and texting messages. Never was a moment technology gave me so much warmth. I often glanced through the window and took in the passing scenery. All buildings passed by mercilessly. The sky was getting dark and seemingly seeking revenge of my leaving. It conspired to render me a sense of melancholy and a sad suspicion that happiness was not attainable.

In exactly twenty eight minutes, we arrived at the airport. If the airport were so different from other commercial buildings, it was perhaps because it was the centre of civilisation where freedom, tolerance, and diversity of cultures were brutally celebrated. People from across different continents were stuck in a long queue awaiting to get their boarding passes. Restaurants were filled with people having their last lunch before boarding the plane. My mother asked me whether I wanted to grab something to eat. I looked around and examined all the American fast food chain stores. After moments of contemplation, I sighed and replied no. What sort of restaurant I could set my feet on when these restaurants highly resembled those which I would encounter after twenty fours hours on a different continent.

We walked into a bookshop. I glanced over the familiar covers of magazines and decided to get a copy to read on the plane. After I got my copy of the magazine, I started to wonder why most airports everywhere in the world had to have bookshops and what precise aspect of their aeronautical identity would have been violated without them. If bookshops were important in airports, it might be because it served as a prelude to catastrophe. However modern technology amazed us, we would still be stripped of defences in front of the destructive forces of nature. Science was still unable to assure us absolute certainty in machines. At this moment of helplessness, we might as well take refuge in the wisdoms of philosopher and all the great religions. But this was where I find these bookshops puzzling. In spite of my prediction of the commercial future of books, the death of philosophy, literature, and holy scriptures were overly exaggerated. Because it was precisely these books allowed us to maintain dignity in the face of death and if we were lucky, what frame of mind we should possess when we fell back on Earth.

Yet the bookshop was just a prelude to the emotional climax of the day. It was time to set my feet on the restricted area. At this critical moment, what dignity should I possess, while my tears were reluctant to burst out, in order to neglect my hesitation and bring out my best courage to pass by two austere looking bodyguards to get my ID and fingerprints scanned. At this point, I started to think how airports prompted us to display the delicacy of our emotions at its best. They offered us unceasing chances to express our longing for love. They created moments where we were comfortable to expose our emotional vulnerability. They also put our minds at ease with the thought that there was actually someone who would give more than a minute's thought to our absence. So much hugging and weeping, it was almost as if the airports were designed to honour these activities. I then said goodbye to my mother and walked into the restricted area.

In the restricted area where I got my ID and fingerprints scanned, there were only a few counters dedicated to the traditional staff to assure us interaction with human beings in this technological world. I then got to the security line. I had to put my shoes, my belt, my jacket, and all my belongings into a plastic box in order to assure my lack of possession of explosives and weapons. Before crossing through the X-Ray machine, I had, for a moment, worried about my absence-mindedness whether I actually possessed weapons in my backpack or pleaded to serve the extreme Islamic terrorists months ago. Fortunately, the X-Ray machine restored my confidence in my memory.

After going through the security section, what was in front of me was a great variety of shops which suddenly made the airport a shopping centre. There were high-end fashion shops like Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Chanel and the likes and duty-free shops that were composed of flasks of perfumes, bottles of wine, and packs of cigarettes. Aside from those, there were more bookshops and luggage shops. At this point, I recalled that there was a long-standing criticism against the dominance of consumerism at airports. If travelling through the sky rendered us susceptible to catastrophe, then perhaps we should spend the moment before boarding the plane as our last moment rather than shopping.

As I walked along, deriving pleasure from window shopping, I thought to myself whether shopping should really be severely condemned by the critics. On the face of it, shopping might only seem to satisfy our material longings. But on closer examination, our capacity to draw happiness from material goods was critically dependent upon our psychological needs. So what we shopped for did not merely just fulfil our vanity, but rather it was a material manifestation of what we loved. They helped to sustain our moods and reflect back to us certain ideals about what we might become, something that served as a silent protest against pure meditation on death and pessimism.

As I approached my gate, I was surprised to find Muji there. Muji was a Japanese chain store that articulated the ideal of minimalism by selling a variety of products such as furniture, food and drinks, stationary, home goods, and clothes. I walked in, urging to buy something, be it a drink or a travel kit. If I had an urge to buy something, it was because it provoked in me a sense of sentimental familiarity which reminded me of Hong Kong rather than Japan. Though there was nothing to buy, I got a drink which might help to mitigate my nostalgia.

I was announced that I was allowed to board the plane. Standing in line, waiting for the staff who worked for United Airline, who displayed no sign of friendliness, who spoke to me in English when they clearly knew how to speak Cantonese, to check my passport. After passing through a narrow corridor, I boarded the plane.

On the plane, before taking off, I made some of my last phone calls which on the other end all the familiar voices consoled me that another year would pass by quickly. Nevertheless, this moment on the plane conspired to generate anxiety and fear in me. If I felt anxious, it was because these phone calls were perhaps the last ones I could ever make. After saying perhaps the last goodbyes, I turned my mobile phone off mercilessly, wishing myself all the best. As the plane was projected up into the sky, I took my last glance at the city where I grew up in as if I was looking at it for the last time. From my backpack, I took my sleeping pills out. While upon looking at my neighbours, the way they read and watched movies reinforced a sense of self-pity on me and led me to admire the courage in them for they were able to fiercely confront darkness and surrendered themselves to our technological inventions which were susceptible to errors. I had witness human confidence at its best. For my part, I took one sleeping pill and determined to go to sleep. Because if any plane crash were to happen, I would not wish to wake up.

From our home all the way to the airport to boarding the plane, we should not forget what lessons departure has to offer.

W

On Anti-Idolisation

2010-05-16T21:12:00.000-07:00

Originally published on the Pub which I am one of the contributors:

If celebrities have become less respected nowadays, perhaps the process of anti-idolisation is largely to blame. In the entertainment business of Hong Kong, there hover various forces contributing to this process: the paparazzi, karaoke, our love of physical appearance, and celebrities' active participation in various industries. We are now living in an era where we show no expression of fear when we ask for autographs and photographs. Being a celebrity no longer restricts to a group of professional elites. It is no longer necessary to raise celebrities to a godlike status. If the entertainment business is no longer a closed shop, what does that suggest about anti-idolisation?

If an uprising of artistic movement in Hong Kong has become necessary, it is perhaps because karaoke is a contributing factor. It successfully invites us to bring out the artistic part of us and harbour a confused wish to become pop stars. It induces us to believe that singing does not require any God-given talent, that it can be practically mastered by anyone from any class, that we can surprise the audience by bursting our lungs out and memorising lyrics. How easy a once privileged business can be wiped out by the courage to utter in front of microphones.

It is not uncommon to see that celebrities are stripped of defences in front of the paparazzi. They allow us to spend time on scurrilous gossip about them over cups of coffee and packs of biscuits by articulating their pens over ambiguous images that hint at something about their immoral habits and relationship status. Their divine images can suddenly degenerate into the profane which suggests that they are just as secular as us.

If blogging is to have any benefit, then perhaps it provokes in us a democratic vision to be writers. Though it is hard to determine what might be so attracting about writing, what precise aspect their celebritarian identity would be violated without writing, celebrities always find it irresistible to take their precious time out to participate in this unpopular industry. A leisurely stroll in a bookstore confirms my point. In spite of our prediction of the commercial future of books, though most sections of the bookstore are dedicated to loneliness and the death of literature is exaggerated, a specific corridor that is crowded with people always gets our hopes up about people's literacy in this society. From a sufficient distance, this corridor seems to be filled with notable novels and essays. On closer examination, those are actually journals written by different celebrities who wish to strip off their mysterious appearance and expose their personal lives to their fans, therefore successfully downplaying their artistic superiority.

Perhaps the most decisive blow of celebrities is the emergence of second-rate imitations of Britain's Got Talents and The American Idols. The preponderance of these shows seem to allow easy access to the entertainment industry. It inspires in us a democratic outlook that we all can see ourselves as stars. Being a star is not as unapproachable as it used to be. It helps to defend the fact that our society is based upon meritocracy that the system is fair and just. It draws a sharp contrast with the tedious working routines of laymen. Who would want to work a job that has us deal with insincere handshakes and work overtime that does not guarantee any extra pay while success is highly rewarded if we get to win a prize in these shows?

What we are witnessing here is the emergence of what the British journalist Toby Young calls a celebrity class, namely, the "celebritariat", which places itself between the rich and the middle class. This industry is no longer controlled by a few professional elites. It shortens the gap between amateurs and professionals. Unfortunately, this is all illusion. Just as meritocracy is a tool to justify economic inequality, it also creates an illusion that it constantly needs new blood so as to make it seem we are allowed easy access to it. It does not guarantee a long-term fame, but rather just to satisfy our vanity. It follows a similar trajectory as meritocracy to endanger its existence by closing off to new members. If meritocracy is a system that is critically dependent upon personal achievements and talents, why, then, can't people use the same reason to expel us out of the top of this hierarchy?

Moreover, the celebrity class has devalued the notion of stardom. It destroys our fantasy to become pop star because it becomes as easy as breathing. The charisma of a celebrity lies not in a longing for expression, but in how to defy the audience's ease of understanding, creating a sense of ambiguity as something secular yet unreachable, just like a prophet who acquires human characteristics but at the same time a messenger of God. If the easiest people to fall in love with are those whom we know nothing, it is because we are creatures of habit and liable to grow contemptuous of what is familiar.

The "celebritariat" has risked inspiring the delusion of meritocracy and an unfair neglect of stardom which is entirely destructive to the show business. It has made us lose our hopes in perfection. It has made us realise truth is always painful. Next time when we gather around meditating on gossips about celebrities, rather than concentrating on topics whether who is married to whom or whose breasts are bigger than whom, perhaps we should contemplate the place of celebrities in our lives.

W

On Education

2010-05-14T17:28:00.000-07:00

If we are asked what good is education of, it is perhaps because education offers us what we need to know for life by the early 20's. However, there exists a tendency in our modern educational system that it has dedicated itself to examinations rather than learning. Our ordinary school life has been increasingly spammed with tedious study lists, tutorials, and field trips to libraries. Education no long aims at what we should care for life. Instead, it goes on to blur the distinction between studying and learning, assuring us survival in the examination system.

If examinations are raised to a status of supreme importance, it might owe its origin to businessmen who have foreseen the necessity of the commercial future of education. In the commercial civilisation of ours, education should be designed to equip us with techniques for marketing, dealing with insincere handshakes, and bureaucracy. It seems Aristotle's maxim "Man is the measure of things" is no longer valid. Rather, "money" should be a substitution for "man". They constantly remind us that money is an object of worship, that it should be considered ends of life rather than means, that it is the sole guidance to happiness. The death of the arts and humanities are exaggerated because they are generally economically unproductive. The commercial future of education therefore evokes a sense of intellectual pessimism, cramming our skulls with lots of useless business case studies and facts that supposedly celebrate the glory of capitalism, something which we will soon forget after receiving our report cards.

But perhaps the fundamental danger of the modern educational system lies in offering an objective criterion of what success is. Rather than acknowledging different individuals may nurture different talents, our educational system suggests that we are likely to amount to ultimate failure if we are unable to get our hands on a Porsche. If the idea of success can be defined in a single, precise definition, it is perhaps because we are reluctant to realise our limits. To realise our limits is to hamper the potentials that lay beneath us. But if an architect can work with the materials available to him, why, then, can't we accept our own limits and explore our potentials within them? Why can't we place focus on ourselves rather than the herd to understand who we really are? We need to realise where we belong to. To discard what our nature limits is to become self-indulgent (because forgetting our limits may seduce us to be overly optimistic about our own abilities). Understanding our limits not only allows us to become humble, it also allows us to discover what we are actually good at, urging us to be specific instead of being generic, hence nurturing our own potentials at their best.

Does that literally mean that we all too indulge in the absurdly romantic fantasy of education? Does that suggest schooling is no longer as important as we assume it to be? Are we all destined to suffer financial assault on the university sector just to learn how to use human greed appropriately to get on the top of the social hierarchy? All too often we realise we learn much more after we get out of university. Modern education no longer offers what we need to know for life: the kinds of friendship, romantic love, and a taste for dance and music. It cannot teach us how to be a good friend or how to console our broken heart after breaking up with our loved ones. It only intends to integrate minimalism with our anticipation of what life should be. It neglects the fact that our capacity to draw happiness from material possessions is critically dependent on our psychological needs. But learning can go alongside with what we do in everyday life- shopping, bathing, eating etc. Only after our feelings are furnished, we might start to learn how to cope with life.

Our education is getting demoralising. Tedious study lists and examinations are only fit for obedient drones. They do not work for creative originals. It is always better to devise our own study list rather the ones given to us. To think that we will have learnt everything we need to know for life once we get out of university is simply naive romanticism. Small wonder why Bill Gates and Steve Jobs dropped out of school.

W

On Horoscopes

2010-05-09T21:11:00.000-07:00

An edited version from the Pub which I am one of the contributors:

Do you believe that being born in a certain place at a certain could determine your destiny for the rest of your life? Would you believe that your personality, your class, and your taste are all set from the day you were born? It is no surprise for astrologists to answer yes for the above questions. They assure us, with strong conviction, that it really matters whether we are born under the sign of Libra, Cancer, or Germini. While some may laugh these questions off as mere superstitions, astrologists have nevertheless succeeded in inducing many of us to harbour a sense of awe for the solar system, that planets and satellites are the decisive factors of what we do, that we ought to bow to necessities greater than ourselves.

In the technological civilisation of ours, our eyes should be full of wonder what science is capable of by a mere glimpse through the windows of electronics shops that offer countless choices of digital cameras, mp3 players, and mobile phones. Unfortunately, science has not triumphed. On the contrary, we derive consolation from a system devised in the second century A.D. which has not changed much ever since then, neglecting further astronomical discoveries and changes. Flipping over pages of women's and gossip magazines, particularly women's magazines, we may consult experts in astrology for a deeper sense of self-understanding and to know what may happen to us beforehand in months or weeks or even in days.

Perhaps there lies a seductive power for female readers in horoscopes. Women, conforming to their customary female curiosity for inner selves, unlike men who are only fond of physical appearance, tend to submit their thinking to the rigours of astrology rather than that of rational examination. In light of horoscopes, they are able to determine who can be their good friends or who may appease their romantic yearnings. On getting to know a stranger, rather than wasting time enquiring his background history, a simple question of his horoscope offers a woman well-grounded reasons to verify or dismiss his merits and qualities, based on an encyclopedia of astrology she bought in a commercial bookstore a while ago.

But does astrology assert absolute truth as it suggests? If it sounds right to us, it is perhaps because of its lack of precision. It may predict on which day we may encounter good luck or what kind of personality we may unknowingly possess. But it fails to tell us at what time what sort of good luck may happen to us. Moreover, what is good to someone is not necessarily good to us. Why, then, should we endorse the authority of astrology and proclaim it a supplement to a scientific branch called astronomy?

The belief in astrology also evokes a sense of fatalism, that human beings are mere slaves of cosmic energy, that the existence of free will is an illusion invented by countless philosophers and Christians, that at moments of melancholy and frustration we could only be consoled by wearing specific colours of garments or specific flavours of perfume. It has risked inspiring in us the most dangerous form of tolerance. It has justified Social Darwinism that being poor should be seen as deserved rather than as an outcome of the ills of capitalism. It condemns all our struggles for a better future, while placing us in a passive position, it only tells us to wait for things to improve naturally.

At times of suffering, we may perhaps need to enlarge our capacity to endure suffering like the Stoics did in ancient Greece and Rome. But there is an alternative solution. Just like the British philosopher Robert Rowland Smith said, "To write your own horoscope for the week, and then do your best to make it come true."

W

On Reincarnation

2010-05-04T16:08:00.000-07:00

In the modern scientific civilisation, at moments of melancholy and frustration, it seems sensible to cast aside religious beliefs in favour of a trust in science. If science can remedy the abuses in our psychological selves, it is perhaps because the development of psychology has grown to be one of the most respected branches in science. However, on witnessing instances of suicide due to bereavement and failure of locating creatures to appease our romantic yearnings, it is deemed too implausible not to forgo scientific assurance and dedicate ourselves to meditating on volumes of biblical and Buddhist scriptures. At moments of uncertainty, especially when one has near-intimacy with death, religions can often serve as guides to advise us how we should lead a good life.

In most Indian religions, there exists a tendency to believe we are going through a cycle of rebirth, namely, reincarnation or samsara, after our death, depending on our karma- an accumulation of all the good deeds and evil deeds that we do in this life, until we achieve liberation from this cycle. If, for example, our evil deeds are weighing over our good deeds, we are likely to be condemned to be an animal or insect in the next life, or vice versa. The concept of reincarnation suggests an egalitarian value in most Indian religions, that human beings are not necessarily the masters of nature, that as trivial as an insect may one day transcend to be human. However egalitarian reincarnation may seem, there lies an unresolvable paradox that it inspires.

If the cycle of rebirth offers equal opportunities for every living being to go upper or lower, then it invites us to face the cruelly confusing characteristic of lower beings: their lack of ability to reason. What should a cow do in order to become a human? What karma can it accumulate in order to liberate from reincarnation? Perhaps one might be tempted to think of its faithful submission to humans as objects of religious sacrifice or as nutrition to enhance our physical health as reasons of being able to move higher. But are we too overly optimistic to think that a cow is able to summon a long-forgotten human virtue named compassion up to a level that is comparable to that of humans? Are we allowed the superstitious faith that a cow could one day evolve to possess our moral capacity? Most lower beings, with the possible exceptions of primates and apes, will eventually end up finding themselves in a situation of being restricted to a process of never being able to transcend higher.

Most Indian religions are not as egalitarian as they suggest after all. The distinction between higher and lower beings suggests that humans are the only ones who are capable of finding their way out of reincarnation. Perhaps in the most unmentionable, the most familiar form of social hierarchical order, we always have a high-minded sense of the gravity of what we are doing. We are still at heart subject to an unforgiving logic which we ignore at our peril that we can feel free to disrupt the food chain and chisel the wood forests for pecuniary purpose because of their ecological insignificance.

But not all religious concepts are to be taken literally. Most of the time, on the contrary, they should be taken as thought experiments. The fact that we dwell upon on what would happen after death drags us back to the present. If reincarnation has us worry about what life we may have after death, it suggests that we are not as satisfied about our life as we think we are. Reincarnation invites us to focus on the present. It cuts away the unnecessary distractions of the past and the future. It liberates us from our overly indulgence in the past and our illusionary faith in the future. It enforces us to give weight to the feelings that the present provokes which we seldom elaborate upon during the tedious routines of our life. It reminds us of having to live our life as we want to rather than as we should.

In our secular world, as religious beliefs have become more subject to scrutiny, we often neglect the implications of life they have to offer. Rather than superficially condemning them as triggers of our tendency to be superstitious, perhaps we should take a few moments to contemplate the texts with our impartial minds.

On Style

2010-05-02T20:50:00.000-07:00

An edited version from the Pub which I am one of the contributors:

Coco Chanel

Fashion fades, only style remains the same. - Coco Chanel

If we had to pick a single characteristic that defines the people who live in a metropolis, that would be our deep love of high-end fashion. In a society where money becomes an object of worship, there exists a belief that style in fashion can also be purchased. Stalking from shops to shops in malls, walking out of them carrying bags that are printed with recognisable logos, that does not just suggest we are only followers of certain trends, it also suggests that we have style. In the modern world where consumerism becomes predominant, being stylish simply means wandering around on the streets with a monogram pattern Louis Vuitton purse, or if you have a subtler taste, a pair of Jimmy Choo's moulded so as to fit a woman's feet elegantly. But do we necessarily have to follow trends in order to be stylish? Do high end fashion brands necessarily offer us style?

In 1910s and 1920s, one of the most revered fashion designers Coco Chanel invited women to escape from their bondage to beaded, flower-patterned dresses. Rather than associating the customary female sensitivity in colours with fashion, some black modernist rectangles of cloth were designed to fit the contour of a female body perfectly. This is how Coco Chanel thought fashion should go. If we lived in the 20s, would all women be deemed too implausible to not follow what Chanel said? Would Coco Chanel become our authority of what they should wear? The answers seem to be quite obvious.

Perhaps for those who manage to get out of the herd instinct may criticise our blind submission to fashion designers, that trends are not necessarily wedded to styles, that clothes are merely for the protection from severe weather, since fashion does not embody implications of our intelligence and who we might be. Their problem, however, lies not in criticising our obsession with worldly possessions, but rather, in undermining our need of fashion to speak to us.

If fashion can suggest who we might be, it is because it works in the same way as a work of architecture does. A work of architecture talks to us about certain kinds of ideas and opinions that would most inappropriately unfold within our socially oriented society. The surroundings that we are comfortable with may sustain our moods, while they might not wholly mitigate the pressures of life, they certainly console. It remains true that for those who have suffered depression and bereavement that beauty can help relieve their pain.

Fashion follows a similar trajectory. It does not only suggest some kind of our aesthetic fondness which we are able to put on our bodies, but rather it is a material articulation of certain good ideas of life. It invites us to summon some of our long forgotten virtues that we may be reluctant to express but still wishfully hold on to: freedom, eccentricity, delicacy, elegance, etc. Behind its practical function of the protection of our bodies, fashion should also try to reflect back to us certain ideals as responses to the reality.

Hussein Chalayan "2010 A/W Mirage"

If fashion designers can serve as guides of who we can be, why, then, do we have to follow the trends that they lay down for us? If fashion can speak to us and for us, why can't we just wear what we would like to wear, instead of submitting our thinking to the tyranny of fashion designers? Fashion, like architecture, should reflect some of the modern ideals that we cherish. We, as adults, can no longer indulge in daydreams like those back in our school days. That is delusional. Rather, we should stand tall and accept the reality. The fact that we wear what was once popular in the 80s or what we think is appropriate is the expression of our reluctance to face the reality. Perhaps the reality is always so disappointing that we need to take refuge in something that shores up our states of mind. But the act of following trends reminds us of not forgetting some of values that we ought to preserve in the modern society.

Of course, to follow trends is not to say we are stylish. However, within every single trend, fashion designers leave room for free play. Rather than standardising our tastes, styles can still be given birth depending on how we devise our mix and match and how we entertain colours. In the sphere of fashion, it is no longer significant to ask why we should wear it, but rather, how we should wear it. Fashion, in essence, allows us to appreciate what we admire in our hearts without being overwhelmed by them, while at the same time it remains contact with modern ideals which are essential for our survival.

Jean Paul Gaultier "2010 Matriachi Tequila"

We look for style not in Vogue, but in ourselves. Style always goes with people rather than money. One group of people may naively think money can purchase style while the other is convinced that fashion is a mere excuse for consumerism. They are both wrong. Fashion speaks of our ideals and at the same time enforces us to actively participate in our society. To refuse to follow trends is to refuse to respond to the society. But not everyone is fit to carry a Louis Vuitton purse. Not everyone's body can afford to carry Jean Paul Gaultier's. High-end fashion cannot guarantee us style. But following trends should remain our supreme guidance. Being in the trend, we can still change daily and be stylish. Until fashion is given its due place, we are unlikely to have style.

On Comets and Stars

2010-05-01T00:33:00.000-07:00

Think of the skyscrapers crowded with artificial lights that fill up the skyline. Think of a beautifully designed lamp seated at the corner of a modernist architecture. Think of the optical invitations of lightings during Christmas. Think of a Japanese Casio watch with its signature blue light.

What do they tell us about our society? In the age of science and technology, we are routinely drawn to the glory of artificial lights and an unfair neglect of the occasional appearance of comets and the perpetual existence of stars. Our society is having trouble perfectly reconciling two opposing virtues of technology and nature. On promoting this material manifestation of fire and the starry night, what lesson can the appreciation of comets and stars offer? Are we confident enough not to be seduced by the satanic genius of Edison?

If the appreciation of comets and stars are able offer us moral lessons, it is perhaps because it invites us to summon our long forgotten virtue called "patience". The gospel of technology enforces us to associate productivity with haste, rather than conforming to the rigours of immobility, we tend to think the virtue of haste is the only possible way to give birth to civilisation. Technology has made us lose our powers of concentration. It has risked inspiring our inability to be alone and unstimulated. Even the most beautiful painting can barely detain us for more than thirty seconds.

But through the appreciation of comets and stars, we may be able to revive a form of previously neglected beauty. The starry night invites us to derive an aesthetic satisfaction wholly different from that of artificial lights. Though technology may make us easier to obtain beauty, but it does not simply the process of appreciating it. It seems to deviate away from its original purpose, instead of enhancing our attention to the minutest details, it urges us to use it as a substitute and therefore distracts us by offering an overblown variety of choices of artificial lights and an automatic possession of beauty without any conscious effort. The starry night, on the other hand, has us focus on one particular element, namely, stars, cutting away all unnecessary distractions, making us aware of the distinction between gazing and looking. Only through patience, we may begin to notice things which we previously neglect, taking up our vision to a higher level.

Another benefit we may derive from the appreciation of starry night is perhaps an occasional encounter of a comet. But seldom we even catch a glimpse of a comet. Is that because they seldom appear or is it because we no longer look up to the sky? If a comet is to offer any idea of life, it is because it suggests that most of the things in our life are in constant flux. It invites us to live with a sense of never letting the thought of death easily slip away.

All too often we may not appreciate the value of things while we are in the process of doing them. But only through retrospect, we may realise this is where happiness is fully acknowledged. As products of natural selection, our possession of memories enforces a nostalgia tendency. When we reflect on our worries and anxieties of work and our state of loneliness, we are pressured to think of our school days which are relatively stress-free and the reunion with friends months ago. Our happiness stems from the existence of long-lasting memories. But we are always too late in noticing the fact those days are long gone because we are often obscured by the optimistic thought that tomorrow will be much like today and the cruelly pessimistic thought of an unexpected event that will rupture our refuge in stability. A comet allows us to come clean with the fact that calm is only an interval between chaos, that almost everything is susceptible to change. Nothing is guaranteed. A comet prepares us a mind-set to accept the reality and expect the unexpected.

The most important lesson we may learn from the starry night is that we are remotely ignorant of what our universe is happening at the moment. The appreciation of stars is a mere excuse for our imperfect eye visions, something invented to make up for the lack of optical evidence, therefore falsely seen as objects of beauty rather than horror of cosmic explosions which happened million years ago. How easy a scenery of calmness and peace is disrupted by the unseen reality. But our ignorance of cosmic explosions suggests we often neglect the present. Our life comprises two confusing characteristics: our deep longing for the past and our wish to hope for a better future. Our happiness is acknowledged from the past but at the same time we entertain the uncertainty of possible happiness in the future. But these two characteristics distance us from the present. The present is where we live in at the moment. To indulge in the past and the future is an expression of our fear to face the reality. But this is delusional because yesterday is long gone and tomorrow never comes. In order to enjoy life, we ought to live in the present. In order to understand what constitutes happiness, our soul-searching starts from today rather than the past and the future.

In the dominion of technology, men have become mad and arrogant. Technology may be a material articulation of certain good ideas of life. But in the prehistoric part of our mind, there is always a deeper longing for the nature. To be a civilised being is not to be devoted to blind worship of technology, but rather, the harmony of nature and technology.

On Decoration

2010-04-25T12:00:00.000-07:00

An edited version of "Decoration and Happiness" from the Pub which I am one of the contributors:

If we are to talk about the different between men and women, one marked difference is perhaps women's decorative instinct. Aside from fashion, women have also prided themselves on being victims of decorative objects. One of the conflicts in a romantic relationship often stems from the unmentionable gravity of what surrounds us: the kinds of curtains, sofas, tables, and chairs. The female obsession of what and how to decorate confirms the frequent complaints of men who think the matter is as useless and fugitive as what to wear. Why does it matter that a lamp should stand against this side of the wall rather the opposite side of it? How is it possible that the colour of the cupboard is able to threaten to end their relationships? Don't these objects fulfil their purpose as long as they are functional?

It is not uncommon to see skyscrapers, the symbol of modernity, are tightly packed on the streets of metropolis like New York City in an disorderly manner, just like what the renowned French architect Le Corbusier remarked when he visited the city in the 30's, that it is the sign of an "illogical city". They fail to integrate individual liberty with collective behaviours. If the urban planning of the city evokes a sense of architectural pessimism, isn't it sensible to retain our liberty to construct the interiors of our homes?

The female insistence on decoration may lie in their clear-eyed understanding of how decorative objects can influence us. Imagine the life of an ordinary businessman. His daily routines of work are compromised. His days are dense with meetings, insincere handshakes, gossip, and bureaucracy. He may pride himself on saying things that he does not believe to win over the opinions of his colleagues. He may only work towards goals that he essentially doesn't care much for but only to please his boss. Driven by financial necessity, he may have to work overtime or even moonlight to ensure the acquisition of a status that is not inimical to the developments of friendship.

A visit to an ordinary home offers conclusive evidence of why many people are so miserable and anxious. Many times when I visit a home I find a certain reluctance to precision and order by the home owner. The home is usually in a mess. Of course, it is a mistake to assume the home owner champions the French aesthetic obsession of ease and playfulness rather than the Japanese aesthetic ideal of orderliness and stability. He has no intention to establish an argument over the intellectual debate on beauty between the two schools of thoughts. Rather than encouraging aesthetic sensitivity, his selection of furniture as well as his disoriented perception of colours hint at a psychological distress of what business and finance account for.


Emotion

Logic

All of a sudden, the awareness of how to select decorative objects to be placed in our homes is raised to a status of supreme importance because these material objects, often described as representations of vanity and self-indulgence, often, like a psychological mould, hold up our moods. The art critic John Ruskin once remarked, "A building must do two things: it must shelter us and it must speak to us of the things we find important and need to be reminded of." If it is true for the case of architecture, why, then, can't we say the same for decorative objects? There exists a tendency in our human nature to associate inanimate objects with human sentiments. What strikes us beautiful is often in accordance to what we feel about it. Through the promotion of a chair, a table, a door, and a bookshelf, we may find a material articulation of certain good ideas of life, of what we think is precious, just like a chair with a straight contour may imply logic and rationality as much as one with a curved contour may imply passion and emotional sensibility.

Why is it important that we find such evocation through decorative objects? All too often we harbour different selves through the tedious daily routines of work. We are stripped of the chance to reveal our authentic selves. However, after a long day of work, coming home to the objects that express what we seldom publicly express, that feel what we whole-heartedly feel, may strip away the worries and anxieties that we confront during work. We need something that shores up our moods because much of the world is opposed to our allegiances. After all, we long for a home, a home that speaks to our inner selves.

Many men have blamed women on their decorative instincts. The male worship of mechanics renders our society unimaginative and dull. Women, on the other hand, invite us to become aware of certain values which most of us always neglect. Science is always accounted for the promotion of civilisation, but perhaps through our minutest observation of the daily habits of women, we may find the most intelligent kind of happiness.

W

On Shopping

2010-04-20T16:51:00.000-07:00

For most women, perhaps the easiest way to escape from worries and anxieties is shopping. They never hesitate to abandon the Marxist philosophy, rather than consider shopping a way to encourage capitalism, they derive their emotional satisfactions from worldly possessions instead of an academic discipline called "philosophy". In the modern society where shopping is the major leisure activity, men are no longer immune to this disease. While women are often the victims of fashion, men tend to submit their desires to electronics. However delightful shopping is to both species, this activity is practised quite differently.

When men and women engage in a romantic relationship, the first conflict of interest often arises from shopping. Shopping has to make men unhappy. They easily grow impatient with the customary female curiosity. Rather than just target at the items they previously read in a fashion magazine, most women consider shopping a never-ending adventure, harbouring an excuse for their constant exploration tempted by different window displays. Most men may also be annoyed by the fact that they have to wait outside the dressing rooms laying down aesthetic judgement every time women put new garments on, a process that would only be interrupted by a confused look at their watches. What is followed is the customary ritual of having to take their credit cards out and have them slide through a machine which will chisel a considerable amount of fortune in their bank accounts at the end of each month. What is more embarrassing is the aftermath of the ritual. The role of men in a romantic relationship is easily redefined. Having carried different shopping bags in their hands, along with their usual displays of gentlemanly behaviour and their unwillingness to be slaves, one might wonder how the degree of equality of men and women can be diminished in a such a democratic leisure activity.

If both men and women are prone to shopping, what is it that makes men so unhappy? Why can't men equally inflict the same painful procedure on women? The answer lies not so much in their differing interests, but rather, in their habits of shopping.

Men would exercise the activity of shopping as originally planned. After flipping over pages of magazines, they would carefully select the items they desire and go to the destined locations, without the intention to wander around, to get just what exactly they want. If the shop happens to be out of stock or not carry the item, they may as well just go home disappointed.

Women, on the contrary, consider shopping a process of generating new desires. Though a great many fashion magazines already remind them of how many garments their wardrobes are missing and how they should be ashamed of their own physical candour in comparison to that of models, however miserable these magazines leave them at the absence of thousands of items, they still harbour a belief that behind every shop window, there are always things that go uncover by magazines. Rather than just shop for what they read in magazines, they never only confine themselves within the carefully selected choices. Though a nicely knitted cardigan may have been their original target, they may end up discovering a pair of high heel shoes which are deemed too pity to miss, a dress that is on sale which seems too silly not to buy, or a flask of perfume which its aroma is too hard to resist.

The difference of men and women is probably the former have a weird obsession with planning and the latter fond of surprises. There exists a tendency in human nature a deep love of certainty and a deep-seated fear of novelty. We always anticipate the future as what we wish it to be and neglect the obstacles it may bring to us. However optimistic we wish to be, the reality always offers conclusive evidence of the sad fact that it is always disappointing. A wish for novelty, on the other hand, may cut away all the unhappiness inspired by our undue optimistic anticipation because it prepares for us a mind-set of expecting nothing and happiness is only best enjoyed when it is accidental.

Many have blamed women on their unpredictable behaviours. If they are obsessed with shopping, it is perhaps because they are unsure of who they are or what they want to be. But aren't all of us unsure of who we are? Don't we spend our whole life figuring out who we are? If we are unsure of what we want to be, doesn't it seem too silly to stay fixated on certain principles rather than admit the possibility of new things? While we all deceptively attack consumerism, perhaps, from a female perspective, some wisdoms can be drawn from something as trivial as shopping.

On Reading

2010-04-14T17:13:00.000-07:00

If reading has become a less practised activity, it is because the technological revolution in the late 90s has introduced us to a new way of representing ideas. As the internet comes to dominate a great portion of our life, drowning us with videos and images, there exists a need to confess we no longer have complete faith in words. The internet, on the face of it, seems to want to inculcate in us an ability of visual appreciation, rather than submit our sensory pleasures to the monotony of words and the tedious structure of sentences, it suggests we should learn how to appreciate the diversity of colours and the beauty of movements rather than serenity. Perhaps it won't be long until a man who makes videos on YouTube and posts images in his blog may be able to replace an essayist like Francis Bacon or Michel de Montaigne who was able to change minds and fill lives.

What, then, is wrong with videos and images? The problem lies not in videos and images per se, but rather, in what gives rise to the uprising of this visually oriented artistic movement. In the age of the internet, artistic talents are no longer confined within a group of carefully categorised individuals. Everyone can be artists. Encouraged by this democratic vision of being directors and photographers, it is not uncommon to see they are spamming the internet through social platforms such as Facebook, blogs, and Youtube.

Unfortunately, however democratic art may be, it is precisely the reason why such commonly valued behaviour undermines beauty. Instead of employing the art of photography and filming as conscious efforts of seeing and of noticing the minutest details of something beautiful, many use them as a medium as substitution something that can assure them the possession of beauty. Therefore, quantity, rather than quality, is raised to a status of supreme importance.

Moreover, the spamming of images and short films on the internet may as well deprive us of the ability to appreciate beauty in words, the inability to appreciate a beautifully composed essay by a fine prose stylist. For those who are accustomed to the art of reading, it is not hard to understand how words can shape our thinking. Our pleasure in thought, on most occasions, arises from our intimacy with words. It is almost as if it is deemed too impossible to indulge in the noble act of thinking without our inherent semantic instinct. Visual images give free play to ambiguities while language gives it to precision. Small wonder why philosophers write books.

Another benefit of reading is perhaps escapism. Short films and images may deliver genuine messages as profound as those in literature, however, our desire for subtle meanings is easily interrupted by other emotionally provoking things such as music, costume, and a beautifully designed scenery. But in reading a book, we can, without the interruption of other art forms, abstract ourselves from current surroundings and enter a more agreeable world, being able to concentrate on one medium, namely, words, and therefore recognise the beauty they are able to offer at full force.

Reading also leaves room for for better imagination because writers are able to portray inner experience and behaviours in their minutest details which most directors and photographers fail. A book will have sensitised us, stimulated and refined our aesthetic and emotional senses, and elevated them to a level comparable to that of artists. We are easier to be sexually aroused by a erotic novel instead of a pornographic film.

Taking photographs and directing short films are as equally praiseworthy activities as reading. But in the age of technology, our attention to both becomes unbalanced. So while devoting most of our days to browsing Facebook and YouTube, let us not forget leaving some time for a leisurely stroll in bookstores.

W

On Happiness

2010-04-09T20:48:00.000-07:00

If we are asked what our ultimate goal is, we are often driven to the conclusion that we all want to be happy. As we become more mature, we realise the reality is not as promising as what we hope to be. We are always confronted with repetitions of misfortunes and worries. Therefore, it is not uncommon to ask how we can obtain an abstract notion of what we may call "happiness". In the world of philosophy, from Plato to Bertrand Russell, they suggest what constitutes happiness as if it is in the control of our own hands. However strong our faith in the existence of free will, empirical evidence suggests the possession of happiness depends on mere sheer luck. But does that mean it is impossible to obtain happiness except to submit ourselves to the mysterious force of what we call "luck"?

Happiness is not possible if we do not know what we are looking for. But there comes the paradox. What makes us happy is often not the notion of 'happiness" per se, but rather the process of pursuing it. Alain de Botton makes a similar case for love in his "Essays in Love",

"There is the old joke made by the Marx who laughed about not deigning to belong to a club that would accept someone like him as a member, a truth as appropriate in love as it is in club membership. We laughed at the Marxist position because of its absurd contradictions: How is it possible that I should wish to join a club and then lose that wish as soon as it comes true?"

The easiest people to fall in love with are those whom we know nothing because they defy our ease of understanding. Our longing to possess someone lies not in a clear-eyed investigation of one's personality, but in knowing it as less as possible. Familiarity breeds contempt. We ought not to forget the fact that men are creatures of habit and therefore liable to grow contemptuous of what is familiar. Only through someone whom we know nothing, we are able to secure a romantic conception of love.

Similarly, the case for happiness follows this trajectory. If happiness is stripped of its idealisation, we may be taken away what gives meaning to our life because it is no longer out of reach of our hands. Happiness should be considered a by-product of what we do. It is merely a direction, not a place, and burns itself out with the attainment of its goal. Happiness is perhaps something contrary to the spirit of scientific inquiry, namely, the attainment of truth, rather than expose it to nudity at full force, we should learn how to entertain a bit of ignorance.

Perhaps most philosophers have been wrong. The more their analysis goes in depth, the more happiness flees from us. Like Robert Rowland Smith puts it, "happiness can only be known in retrospect." We often never enjoy much of the time we spend with our friends, but only through the process of backtracking, friendship bears fruit. It is precisely when you are not aiming for happiness, you become happy.

It is time to retract our thoughts on happiness. Rather, we should do what we love and submit our thinking to the Marxist position that we should always keep our dream in the realm of fantasy. Happiness cannot be obtained by our conscious effort. It is only through not obtaining it we can be happy.

"Ask yourself whether you are happy and you cease to be happy."- John Stuart Mill

W

The Need of Philosophical Taoism For The Modern World

2010-04-06T21:57:00.000-07:00

If philosophical Taoism has been largely ignored, it is perhaps because Lao Tzu, the founder of Taoism, was not as fond of acquiring disciples as Confucius. Out of all three major religions in Chinese culture, only Confucianism and perhaps a modest degree of Buddhism have remained supreme down to this day. The reason partly, of course, lies in Lao Tzu not having any disciple, but what has made Confucianism supreme lies in the peculiar act of the burning of the books by the Qin Emperor. The outcome of the burning of the books was not quite what the Qin Emperor envisaged to be, rather than eliminated the category of the literati, it had risked inspiring the desire of revenge in them, an unfair neglect of philosophical Taoism, and a misguided enthusiasm for Confucianism. Along with the burning of the books, in the latter part of the twentieth century under the Maoist regime, there was the Cultural Revolution which sough to destroy the three religions altogether. Not until recently the Chinese have started to moderately scrutinise the Cultural Revolution and felt the need to revive Confucianism.

But are we to only draw wisdoms from the Analects but not from the Tao Te Ching and other Buddhist Scriptures? Does only Confucianism deserve our immediate attention? Is Confucianism the only product of an at least three thousand years of civilisation that is worthy of our honour? The merits of Confucianism may have perhaps been overlooked. Confucianism seems only to painfully inflict pre-modern ethical codes upon us, while presuming morality has an objective criterion, it enforces our mind to submit to tyranny rather than autonomy and therefore is falsely raised to a status of intellectual superiority. Philosophical Taoism, on the contrary, may find its place in the liberal school of thought. Rather than acknowledges itself as a gospel of how we should live, it wanders at the intervals between tyranny and autonomy, doing and non-doing, talks and silence.

In a world where it is commercially driven, most of the minutes of our days are devoted to production rather than consumption. Everything that counts as economically unproductive is severely condemned. Futile conversations become more praiseworthy than agreeable silence. Driven by financial necessity, men have become mad, arrogant, and dogmatic. Perhaps it is time to turn to philosophical Taoism and see what it can offer for our modern life.

All too often we are inclined to think industrialisation, by virtue of scientific technique, strives to reduce human labour. The reality, however, is always disappointing. New skills derived from scientific technique have always been monopolised by the minority. Rather than benefit the majority, our financial destiny are in the hands of the few to promote the ills of capitalism and ensure their status is at the very top of social hierarchy, filling our lives with worries and anxieties. As soon as money has become the prime mover of everything, it is not uncommon to run into workaholics on the streets exchanging business information with laptops and setting up meetings with clients on mobile phones even in the most unworkable period of the day. Almost all electronic devices suddenly seem to be designed to bring the office back home rather than for the sake of leisure.

It didn’t take long for such habit of mind to penetrate to the core of our life. Just when we decide to take off our shoes and lie in the grass to let the grass caress our feet, the herd condemn us for being idle. Just when we wish to devote some time to reading poetry, they carefully advise us to spend time reading self-help books about how we can be as successful as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs or techniques that are required to invest in stock markets. Just when we harbour a confused wish to do what we like and become what we want to be, the peers remind us of the scarcity of great minds and tell us, with an elderly and experienced tone, that we are better off pursuing a life in making profits. Let alone our dreams. But does happiness necessarily have to be confined to pecuniary terms? If Lao Tzu were still alive today, what would he suggest to remedy our anxieties?

In the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu shows us there exists a danger if we devote too much of our time to productivity:

“Banish wisdom, discard knowledge,
And the people will be benefited a hundredfold.
Banish human kindness, discard morality,
And the people will become dutiful and compassionate.
Banish skill, discard profit,
And thieves and robbers will disappear.
If when these three things are done they find life too plain and unadorned,
Then let them have accessories;
Give them Simplicity to look at, the Uncarved Block to hold,
Give them selflessness and fewness of desires.”

Lao Tzu believes that we were all born into a certain harmony that we should all naturally abide by the Way of Tao. To instil in us artificial desires is to violate the fundamental law of nature, to run counter to what Tao confers. If we need to banish skill and discard profit, it is because these things will plant the seeds for human greed and jealousy. Lao Tzu urges us to be humble, rather than comply to the modern gospel of work at full force, we should realise what we naturally need, warding off unnecessary dangers inspired by the dark side of human nature. It is not worthwhile to devote all our time to pursue what is profitable because men are emotionally vulnerable and liable to grow jealous and feel unease of those whom we take to be our equals who have superior achievements. We ought to, Lao Tzu suggests, strike a balance between self-preservation and our love of money.

Aside from the possible dangers triggered by the dark side of human nature, Lao Tzu also intends to show us how economically unproductive behaviours can be beneficial:

“We put thirty spokes together and call it a wheel; But it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the wheel depends.
We turn clay to make a vessel; But it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the vessel depends.
We pierce doors and windows to make a house; And it is on these spaces where there is nothing that the usefulness of the house depends.
Therefore, just as we take advantage of what is, we should recognise the usefulness of what is not.”

Lao Tzu suggests something that is contrary to what the majority are committed. Rather than affirming the value of material objects with our imperfect senses, he invites us to consider the value of being vacuous, the usefulness of the space that we normally neglect because it is precisely the space that allows us to move objects around.

But what does that say about our modern society? There exists a tendency in the modern educational system to think the arts and humanities are worthless while business and finance are the gospels of promoting economic development. Universities, rather than being places for the liberation of mind, they have become more like training schools. Subjects are becoming more vocational rather than emphasizing the cultural elements. However useless the arts and humanities may seem, Lao Tzu compels us to look at what is not and revise certain notions of what we commonly suppose as useless, hence attach it to a more “just” and “correct” value. Take, for instance, philosophy. Knowing certain philosophical theories may not compensate for the missing garments in our wardrobe nor allow us to get a brand new Mercedes, but it enforces us to submit our thinking to the rigours of rational examination, instead our common tendency on intuition, emotion, and custom. It helps us to break free from the bondage of herd instinct and broaden our minds so we can comprehend the world differently. British philosopher Bertrand Russell is also in favour of the Taoist thought,

“I have enjoyed peaches and apricots more since I have known that they were first cultivated in China in the early days of Han Dynasty; that Chinese hostages held by the great King Kaniska introduced them to India, whence they spread to Persia, reaching the Roman Empire in the first century of our era; that the word "apricot" is derived from the same Latin source as the word "precocious", because the apricot ripens early; and that the A at the beginning was added by mistake, owing to a false etymology. All this makes the fruit taste much sweeter.”

What seems so useless on the surface may not be so after all.

If Lao Tzu is able to offer us the reflective delight of what is useless, why, then, can’t we say the same for unproductive acts such as sunbathing or enjoying the beautiful scenery of starry night or even doing nothing? Lao Tzu’s role lies in opening our eyes, in sensitising our awareness of what is around us, and in inculcating in us an appreciation of objects with previously neglected qualities. These unproductive acts produce in us a contemplative habit of mind. There is in this world too much readiness and too little reflections. The pleasure in thought not only allows us to enlarge our sympathy and diminish human folly, it also comforts us with a peace of mind among worries and misfortunes. It helps us to ward off taboos, bias, and prejudices which makes way for us to see ourselves in a proper perspective. Moreover, it provides us the appropriate aesthetic mindset to admire beauty. We are unable to derive the appropriate pleasure from our leisure if we attend ourselves to haste. In the absence of serenity, the roses will lose their hue, the fruit its flavour, the star its splendour, and the perfume its aroma. Fifteen minutes of concentration at least are needed to appreciate a sculpture, but even the most beautiful sculpture rarely detains anyone for even thirty seconds.

In the culturally extroverting United States, there hover various virtues associated with being talkative: good communication skills, optimistic, friendly, and outgoing. For those who may appear rather introverted, they are generally categorised as silent, lonely, and sometimes even melancholic. And it is often the case this society condemns the latter rather than the former. If introverts are undesirable, it is because the assumption is premised on the fact they lack good communication skills. When they are viewed politically, one may suggest they often opt more for individualism rather than collectivism. Introverts seem to aim at violating the fundamental law of human nature, rather than recognise the value of friendship, they are liable to grow contemptuous of what most anthropologists suggest. But why are they so quiet? Why can't they enjoy companionship?

Perhaps the Tao Te Ching has something to offer:

“The Way that can be told of is not an Unvarying Way;”

“Those who know do not speak;
Those who speak do not know.
Block the passages,
Shut the doors,
Let all sharpness be blunted,
All tangles untied,
All glare tempered.
All dust smoothed.
This is called the mysterious levelling.
He who has achieved it cannot either be drawn into friendship or repelled,
Cannot be benefited, cannot be harmed,
Cannot either be raised or humbled,
And for that very reason is highest of all creatures under heaven.”

Lao Tzu suggests Tao cannot be grasped by the ordinary senses nor describe in words. Rather than go through the process of learning, Tao is what we naturally obtain and desire. Silence, from a Taoist perspective, is not a mere excuse for inarticulacy. Instead of thinking language as something to transmit ideas, Lao Tzu condemns it as an artificial invention obstructing the Tao, something invented to make up for the lack of audible evidence, rendering us too reliant on language to attain truths. Silence does not even prevent or perhaps even enhances our understanding of Tao.

What, then, is wrong with language? Is it a strategy that Lao Tzu tries to cover up his conversational poverty? Our society presupposes good communication is all talk. It is virtuous to be outspoken and talk is often the catalyst to mark the start of an intimate relationship. Whenever we are feeling down or depressed, friends and even psychologists urge us to talk it out. When deciding on a matter of utter importance, our peers often like to engage us in day- long discussion or brainstorming that usually no solution can be offered except undue fatigue. Nevertheless, it is important for matters to be decided by discussion and debate. But we should never forget the stories of Socrates offered in Plato’s dialogues. While often inducing strangers to scrutinise commonly accepted notions near the gymnastics, he also often engages himself in silent meditation alone.

If Socrates finds value in silence, it is because “public opinion”, as Chamfort put it, “is the worst of all opinions.” The herd tend to rely their judgement on emotion rather than reason. It is foolish to decide on matters that are of nationally or even internationally importance just by a shrug of the shoulders. With every minute of our life is directed towards the virtue of hard work, we scarcely have time for slow thought out of which wisdom is distilled. Only through the aid of human thought, we may conduct human affairs more sanely. Lao Tzu’s wisdom echoes with the western saying, “The wise listen, the fool chatter.”

It is not hard to understand why people who have achieved the status of silence are “neither drawn to friendship or repelled.” In certain academic spheres, particularly in philosophy and social science, laymen seem to develop distaste for clarity and respect for unfathomable texts. No one ever wishes to wonder what "post-modernism" or "post-colonial constructivism" means. No one wishes to think that Hegel's "The Phenomenology of Spirit" is composed of intolerable nonsense. Rather than condemn it as contorted tangles of language, a sensitive reader may start to worry at length about his intelligence. The fact that a text which is impassable to lay reader may actually be regarded as profound and wise. Yet a text that articulates with immense clarity and fluidity that can be easily understood by an untrained mind may be condemned as invalid because it is more susceptible to criticism.

Lao Tzu’s thought follows a similar trajectory. There exists a peculiar yet paradoxical attraction from the majority for the silent. People who are prone to silence, like those unfathomable texts, defy our ease of understanding. On the face of it, they appear mysterious and offer well-grounded reason for our curiosity. If friendship aims at communication and understanding, however a pause of silence may on the surface suggest the contrary, it compels us to talk. Silence arouses our curiosity and urges us to pursue the matter further. In result, we may get people to talk by not talking, so we can easily go with the flow of conversation, rendering us master talkers.

Isn’t it true of what Lao Tzu says about friendship? We may provoke a sense of silence to get our friend to talk, while satisfying a modest degree of his curiosity, at the same time we may use it intelligently to once again defy his ease of understanding. Hence we are “neither drawn to friendship or repelled.” It also suggests this is an agreeable form of relationship because our curiosity for one another never fades away. It is precisely we entertain between the intervals of knowing and not knowing, closeness and distance, which friendship bears fruit. Masters of silence are therefore at heart talkative. Lao Tzu has successfully redefined what good communication is and delivered a lecture on the art of conversation.

While the virtue of hard work is praised, there is hardly any leisure and our leisure has become as strenuous as work. Our lives are dusty and harsh and filled with trivial self-assertions. Most minutes of our days are given to futile bustle. But the wisdom of Lao Tzu allows us to once again appreciate what is commonly ignored, promote pleasure in thought, and admire the beauty around us. On the other hand, it allows us to revise the notion of silence and, through reflection upon it, we may come to value silent immobility which is essential for meditation and contemplate the nature of human relationships by reconsidering what good communication is all about. Before philosophical Taoism is given its due place, the modern world is unlikely to be sane.

W

P.S. This is one of my homework assignments. Some parts of the essay may resemble what I wrote in previous blog entries.

On Being Talkative

2010-04-01T21:49:00.000-07:00

People are of two sorts. Some are born extroverted and some introverted. "Men are born free and equal", suggested the French philosopher Rousseau, but does this maxim illustrate the reality? So much attention has been drawn to issues regarding gender, few of us bother to confront the inequalities between extroverts and introverts.

Extroverts are by definition usually very talkative; they love sports; they acquire excellent communication skills; they are generally happier. Introverts, on the contrary, are quiet; they prefer solitude; their allegiances are to the arts and books rather than outdoor activities; very often they are of a melancholy temperament.

In modern society there exists a certain tendency which people condemn the latter rather than the former. If introverts are undesirable, it is because the assumption is premised on the fact they lack good communication skills. When they are viewed politically, one may suggest they often opt more for individualism rather than collectivism. Introverts seem to aim at violating the fundamental law of human nature, rather than recognise the value of friendship, they are liable to grow contemptuous of what most anthropologists suggest. But why are they so quiet? Why can't they enjoy companionship?

If being introverted is deemed offensive to the societal convention, it is perhaps because they clearly understand value of silence in the art of provoking agreeable conversation. There exists a peculiar yet paradoxical attraction from the majority for the silent. In certain academic spheres, particularly in philosophy and social science, laymen seem to develop a distaste for clarity and respect for unfathomable texts. No one ever wishes to wonder what "post-modernism" or "post-colonial constructivism" means. No one wishes to think that Hegel's "The Phenomenology of Spirit" is composed of intolerable nonsense. Rather than condemn it as contorted tangles of language, a sensitive reader may start to worry at length about his intelligence. The fact that a text which is impassable to lay reader may actually be regarded as profound and wise. Yet a text that articulates with immense clarity and fluidity that can be easily understood by an untrained mind may be condemned as invalid because it is more susceptible to criticism.

Similarly, why, then, can't we say the same for introverts? The fact that an introvert smiles without uttering a word in the midst of a serious political discussion may suggest there is something inherently inferior about the others and therefore raise the silent to a status of intellectual superiority. Because all introverts defy our ease of understanding. On the face of it, they appear mysterious and offer well-grounded reason for curiosity. Introverts are capable of getting people to talk by not saying a word, so they can easily go with the flow of the conversation, hence become masters talkers.

Silence, when used intelligently, compels others to speak. Introverts urge people to talk without doing the effort themselves. They are all at heart talkative. It is time we should do them justice.

W

On Stating Our Opinions

2010-03-30T22:32:00.000-07:00

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."- Voltaire

The modern democratic system encourages the freedom of speech, but seldom we exercise this virtue at full force. If we are reluctant to speak freely, it is perhaps because we think etiquette is more of a necessity than freedom. All too often it seems our society has inculcated in us an inability to take verbal offence, rather than directly present to our companion with well-grounded audible evidence, we like to engage in a pause of silence and entertain nonsensical phrases such as "no offence" or "this is my personal opinion".

On the face of it, stating a opinion that is personal is a mere tautology. Because every opinion has to be stated by a person. Does anyone seriously think he can objectively state an opinion? Does anyone really think a genuine opinion can be devoid of bias and prejudices?

But there lies at the heart of these phrases a paradox, especially when we choose to go with such phrase as "no offence". If such phrase is rendered offensive, it is because the phrase in itself suggests the otherwise, something invented to demean our integrity, therefore is falsely raised to a status of polite superiority. The offence lies not in stating the tautological, but in condemning us as something lower than human beings, that we are deprived of the scientific attitude to opinions, namely, the ability to accept new criticisms and hence consider them as means to improving our characters when they are sound.

What makes human beings differ from animals is the ability to reason and the ability to indulge in imagination. However, this cannot be done without the required scientific spirit which is essential for self-criticism. We are not animals that live on spontaneous desires and unregulated passions. If our ability to accept verbal offence makes us less human, what are we more of?

W

On Love: Art and Life (Revised)

2010-03-28T15:00:00.000-07:00

What is the relationship between art and life? Or more precisely, what is the relationship between art and love? Is art the imitation of life? Whatever it is, the conception of art nevertheless offends the renowned Greek philosopher Plato. According to Plato, there is a world of Forms that bears all the ideal Forms, from the most physical to the most abstract, of everything in the physical world. From a Platonic perspective, the reality as we live in is therefore an imitation of the world of Forms. If art offends Plato, it is perhaps because art is the imitation of imperfection, namely, the illusionary reality, which is deemed destructible. But is art as an imitation of life as commonly supposed?

Out of all artistic movements, what strikes me as one of the most interesting is perhaps Dadaism. Dadaists rebels against all traditional conceptions of art, rather than articulate their hands to exercise their craftsmanship at full force, they draw materials that are usually found in our homes such as a broomstick or toilet, giving them their due place in art museums, hence rendering our aesthetic sensibility vulgar. One of the most celebrated works is Marcel DuChamp's toilet which he fancily calls it "The Fountain".

Confronted by such avant-garde conception of art, it is not surprising to be full of wonder at the display of such an exceptionally normal sanitary system can be compared to the works of masters such as Mondrian's and Matisse's or Rothko's and Klee's. What is so artistic about a toilet?

Contemplating what it meant to be beautiful, we may perhaps be drawn back to Plato's theory of Forms. In the world of Forms, according to Plato, there exists an ideal From of beauty, made up of ideal symmetry between parts. Up to this point, one will be compelled to inquire, "Is "The Fountain" built upon the Greek obsession of the law of the Golden Ratio? Does it offer a necessarily mathematical basis of beauty which ought not to be determined by our subjectively aesthetic mindset?

Perhaps there is something peculiar about DuChamp's conception of beauty. For most of us, the work creates in its aesthetic horror the feel of a tastelessly furnished sanitary system located in a bathroom. If we allow ourselves to follow DuChamp's aesthetic logic, could we equally falsely raise a facet, a bathtub, or even a toothbrush to a status of artistic superiority?

Surprisingly, the Dadaists have as much to offer about art as about the nature of love.

If artists are able to aesthetically distinguish themselves among the lay people, it is because their role lies in opening our eyes, in sensitising our aesthetic sensibility, and inculcate in us an appreciation of objects of initially neglected aesthetic qualities. Dadaists urge us to pay attention to objects of their minutest details, suggesting object even as ordinary as a toilet or a broomstick may detain us for a moment of artistic joy. But it is always hard to notice the details around us, because we are creatures of habit and therefore liable to grow contemptuous of what is familiar.

If we study the history of art in depth, we are likely to be driven to the conclusion that other artists, aside from the Dadaists, follow a similar trajectory. In Monet's painting "Haystacks at Giverny, Summer", rather than attend to us the beauty of a Palace or the usual luxurious goods, he suggests even something as simple and ordinary as a haystack can strike us as beautiful. Mark Ryden's "The Tree Show" urges us to revise our commonly supposed conceptions about trees, to discover the beauty of trees we often neglect, hence attach them to a more "accurate" and "just" value.

So what do the Dadaists wish to tell us? They wish to tell us, through objects that were initially not offered a place in an art museum, that our perception of beauty is not immobile, susceptible to change depending on the lessons artists wish to offer. They sensitise and refine our perception of beauty. They open our eyes to what was initially impossible to appreciate therefore suggest our life is more beautiful than we suppose it to be.

In like manner, when we are in love, we may desire all the small things in us can be appreciated by the ones we love. That all the minutest details within us, however trivial, may be manifested and therefore raised to a status of immense significance. The way our girlfriends brush their hair or the way they arrange their clothes in their wardrobes, the fact that I perceive these trivial details may at one level be silly, but at another level it suggests something justifiable, that I wish to notice and understand everything about them rather than just look, just like appreciating a book by its content rather than by its cover. Do we not wish to be artists when we are in love? Do we not often harbour a wish that our partners can be like Andy Warhol who finds beauty in a can of Campbell soup and therefore raises an ordinary grocery product to a status that demands attention of the world? A close inspection of our beloveds' exceptionally ordinary behaviours makes their insignificant existence take on a certain value, as antidote to cynicism, to which strangers are oblivious.

The analogy we draw from Dadaism for love is that it teaches us to notice rather than look. If our sense of beauty is not immobile, why, then, can't we say the same for love? Dadaists show us what the nature of love should be. They do not just wish to sensitise our sense of love by the virtue of noticing, they also teach us how to separate love and infatuation or love and passion. We may at times marvel at the thoughts whether we are in actually love. How can we be sure our desire for a prostitute is love or obsession? How do we make the distinction between the line of physical desire and amorous desire? Direct physical contact with an object of love does not necessarily grant us amorous possession. If we fail to notice the details in whom we desire, it suggests we are more infatuated with our partner rather than love her, just like opening a bottle of wine and smell the splendour of its aroma without the attempt to drink it.

Oscar Wilde's wisdom seems nearer to the truth as opposed to Plato:

"Life imitates art far more than art imitates life."

All too often we want our romantic relationships can be those depicted in literature, novels, and films. We find in works of art the process of simplification and perfection we often anticipate in our minds. But our reality is always disappointing because artists are responsible for cutting away the periods of difficulties and struggles and trying to persuade us that all problems are deemed solvable by our intelligent minds. Unfortunately, the kisses which most lovers receive are often the vulgar imitations of Rodin's "The Kiss". Little wonder why Oscar Wilde concludes,

"It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection; through art and art only that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence. "

Art allows us to perceive the world from a wholly different perspective. It enforces us to appreciate something that may be previously offending and refine our original perception of beauty. DuChamp urges us to look at a toilet not from our own eyes but through his eyes.

Perhaps art imitates life as much as life imitates art. But beyond a point, when we too often fall in love, that it has become a habit, the realisation of love ceases. Familiarity breeds contempt. Rather than being aware of the lessons of experience, we further go on to commit the same mistakes, neglecting the nature of love, just like we naively think a camera can automatically assure us the possession of beauty. The merits of artists lie in reminding us of the fact that even falling in love is as common as seeing a tree or riding a bus, it does not mean we can rightfully neglect its beauty and nature. Artists inculcate in us an realisation of neglected qualities of love, an understanding of what love is, so we can become what hope to be.

Until we start appreciating our own bathroom, we will not be able to learn how to love.

W

On Excessive Thinking

2010-03-16T16:54:00.000-07:00

Aside from escapism, few activities promise us as much consolation as the process of thinking. Among all the intellectual spheres, philosophers are perhaps the ones who take most pleasure in thought. Rather than brood on intractable problems, philosophers invite us to investigate the root of our problems from an entirely different perspective, hence mitigate our worries and anxieties, if not solve them. However the contemplative habit of mind may put our minds at ease, there is a generally held belief that thinking is perhaps the cause of our problems. It suggests that thinking violates the fundamental law of human nature, something invented to complicate things, therefore is falsely raised to a status of superiority as the greatest intellectual pursuit out of all human activities.

If the process of thinking is problem-inducing, it is because reason seeks to destroy our passion. From the latter part of the eighteenth century down to present day, our world has been influenced by a feeling of what may be called "the romantic movement". This movement has a distaste for the Classical civilisation, rather than champion the ideas laid down by the Greek thinkers through the process of thinking, it directs against science and philosophy, rendering our intellect unnecessary.

One of the pioneers of this movement is Rousseau. In his "Discourse On The Origin of Inequality", he goes on to sketch the history of human civilisation as regressive as opposed to the commonly supposed progressivism. Rousseau thinks that we are all good in the state of nature, always acting on our first impulses hence realising what we naturally need. In the state of nature, people are not drawn to the material possessions that we commonly cherish in the modern world such as a brand-new Mercedes, expensive high-end fashion garments, and a pretentious piece of painting, instead they are more drawn to the essential features of a happy life: love of family, friendship, romantic love, love of nature, a taste for music and dance. Why do we need wine when what our body needs is water? Why do we use art to imitate nature when the nature is itself a great work of art? Why do we make clothes a product of artificial beauty when their original purpose is to protect our body from severe weather? It is this commercial civilisation that pulls us away from happiness, leaving us to sigh and suffer in the world of misfortunes.

Along this line of naturalist thought, two thousand years before Rousseau invokes his absurdly romantic fantasy, Lao Tzu, the founder of Taoism, argues in defence of this naturalist position. Just when Socrates reminds us that the only evil is ignorance and the only good is knowledge, Lao Tzu advises us to banish knowledge and wisdom altogether. Just when we think industrialisation is worthy of honour because it promotes profits, Lao Tzu advises us to discard them. For God's sake, what is wrong with learning how to live and making money in order to make our life happy?

Lao Tzu, like Rousseau, attends to us with the idea of non-doing. He shows us how reason has brought more harm than good. Through industrialisation, we may acquire new skills to increase our wealth, but behind every act of making money, we may neglect the dark side of human nature and liberate a dangerous evil impulse, namely, jealousy, hence the emergence of thieves. The acquisition of knowledge and wisdom may teach us how to live, but the fact that it promotes endless discussions and debates may direct us away from the true aim of the pursuit of knowledge, namely, the attainment of truth. Rather, we may only argue for the sake of arguing in order to please our narcissistic soul and avoid the fear of losing a debate. The evils of mankind are therefore unnatural. They are merely the products of civilisation and money.

From a naturalist perspective, our problems lie in thinking too much, an accusation of excessive cerebral activity. The interference of thinking removes from us the fluidity that passions assure our mind can command. It condemns our intuitive reliability therefore prevents us from realising our own ends to put our thoughts into practice. However convincing this argument may seem on the surface, philosophers blame it on our lack of self-control and our inability to strike a balance between reason and passions.

Bertrand Russell assures us the otherwise. In his short essay "In Praise of Artificiality", he suggests that all civilisation can only be made possible by reason:

"All civilisation, especially on its aesthetic side, is artificial. Manners, good speech, good writing, good music, good dancing- everything that gives grace to life depends, not on the denial of natural impulses, but upon training them to express themselves in ways that are delightful rather than in ways that are crude."

According to Russell, reason does not prevent us from enjoying our state of nature, rather than imprison our passion, it refines and sensitised them which breeds style and beauty. He reminds us that fashion designers are civilised beings and wish to civilise consumers like us by making clothes artificial and stylistic, not a mere protection from severe weather. While Rousseau tells us what our body needs is water, a vast variety of drinks does not just serve to quench our gross thirst, but during the production of drinks, it also presents to us beauty hence enhances our pleasure while drinking.

As to reason may complicate things, naturalists restrain us from pursuing things beyond their necessities. But to be convinced that the world is indeed simple is to refuse to confront problems which may lead to pains and sufferings. In the quest of self-understanding, naturalists accuse us of being narcissistic, drawing all the unnecessary attentions on ourselves. But this assumption is premised on the fact that we must admire our own image in the mirror. Philosophers never invite us to the thought that we must think well of ourselves. On the contrary, they direct us to the virtue of self-criticism, they urge us to look into the mirror of our incomplete selves, remind us that we all make mistakes and that we need to revise our own faults, learn from experience, and correct them. The naturalists' condemnation of reason is perhaps a terrible excuse, an attempt to avoid the verdict of the analytical truth of the mirror, to cover up their lack of intellectual courage and explain away the psychological evidence of cowardice that lies deep in their hearts.

Moreover, if thoughts are left unfettered and passions left freely expressed, they may lead to bad consequences. One should not find it hard to remember how the French absurdly confused violence as a species of romance hence have the heads of aristocrats and members of Royal Family cut off to assure another establishment of dictatorship. How quickly advantages of civilisation may be wiped out by intuition.

Nevertheless, our actions are guided by passions. But that is not to say reason is stripped of its place in conducting human affairs. Reason allows us to decide which ends we want to pursue while passion helps put our thoughts into action. It does not prevent us from enjoy the spectacle of joy that passions offer, but rather it softens and humanises them in order to let them express in their most delicate form.

W

On Procrastination

2010-03-09T00:00:00.000-08:00

A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine informed me about the chi-chi sticks tradition of the Japanese New Year, something requires the shaking of bamboo cylinder until a bamboo stick comes off. On the stick, it is inscribed a Chinese character which suggests whether one will encounter good luck.

What interests me is not this tradition, but rather the reaction of the Japanese to it. If they get a stick which is inscribed with the Kanji kichi "吉/きち", it suggests that they will run into good luck the entire year. If the stick is inscribed with the word daikichi "大吉/だいきち”, which may be clumsily translated as "very good luck", rather than celebrating their promising future, the Japanese would invoke a sense of melancholy, motivated by the fear of having to pay back the next year.

If the Japanese feel the need to restrain their extreme good luck, it is because they bear the wisdom of Socrates. Socrates says,

"Remember there is nothing stable in human affairs; therefore avoid undue elation in prosperity and undue depression in adversity."

Glancing over copies of self-help books, we often encounter a peculiar form of optimism, the kind that intends to obscure the distinction of delusion and reality, which induces us to believe we could be Donald Trumph or Steve Jobs. Our scepticism suddenly degenerates into primordial optimism by a "you can do it too" slogan. After all, despite of all our contributions to civilisation, we are still at heart only highly evolved apes, liable to emotional vulnerability, dominated by jealousy and fear, who often cheat on our romantic partners, love power and fame, and later die.

Socrates, however, does not invite us to an optimistic sentiment, rather than convincing us to invest our hopes in the future, he reveals the danger of too much anticipation. If being optimistic is not the right way to deal with life, it is because reality is always different from what we anticipate. During our anticipation, we cut away periods of boredoms, distractions, and failures and direct our attention to critical moments, namely, the moments of happiness and of success. Socrates suggests that the reality must always be disappointing.

But the American philosopher William James thinks the otherwise. Instead of adopting pessimism at full force, he advocates optimism, a form which distinguishes itself from that in self-help books. His optimism does not only shed new light on our masochistic attitude of life, it also seems to provide justification for religious faith.

Driven by his fear of losing important truth, in his essay "The Will To Believe", he says, "What proof is there that dupery through hope is so much worse than dupery through fear?" This argument had spent its long and glorious history providing solid ground for religious faith. It is better, the argument runs, to invest our faith in the existence of God, because this belief does not inflict harm. If we believe in God and it turns out that He exists, then it is all good and well. On the other hand, if we believe in God and He does not exist, nothing happens and life goes on. But if we do not and He exists, we will have committed eternal sin. Therefore, faith is perhaps not as harmful as the retired Oxford Professor Richard Dawkins suggests.

However convincing this argument may be on the surface, James is too optimistic about human emotions. The fact that he tries to make a clear-cut distinction between belief and disbelief leaves no room for reflective delight. He strips us of the ability to entertain probability to cover up a somewhat deeply flawed metaphysical vision, namely, our longing for certainty and stability, complete belief or disbelief, hence undermining doubt and the scientific spirit. Moreover, humans are at heart emotionally vulnerable. To lead a life with a belief which may be disproved in the end offends our emotional stability because it fails to conform to our expectations. It removes our confidence to act on our own will.

If reality is always different from what we anticipate, it is because we think that happiness can be predicted. We often dream of the happy moments after we accomplish the tasks through meticulous planning. It is precisely because of this habitually absurd human exercise that we should turn to John Stuart Mill:

"Ask yourself whether you are happy and you cease to be so."

The wisdom of John Stuart Mill perhaps springs from the empirical fact that everything is in constant flux. However promising we hope our future may be, it always turns out to be the exact opposite. In our anticipation of happiness, there has always been a vacuum between the starting point and the goal we wish to achieve. We neglect all the obstacles and difficulties we may encounter during the pursuit of our goal. All too often we enforce ourselves to think art imitates life, as opposed to Oscar Wilde's wisdom. The reality, however, suggests that art is the one to blame, something that oversimplifies our complicated lives, rendering every human ritual so perfect. Unfortunately, life often suffers from the irrevocableness of imperfection, wearing us out with repetitions, misleading propaganda, and inconsequential plot lines.

The fact that we brood on the idea of happiness provokes in us a sense of pessimism. On occasions such as birthdays, Valentine's days, and weddings, happiness is always a pre-requisite. If happiness becomes a pre-requisite, it is perhaps because there is something inherently sad about these occasions. We tend not to enjoy something when we are under pressure to do it because our enjoyment does not spring from spontaneous impulse. Our awareness of happiness depends not on the commonly cherished things on earth, be it friendship or romantic love, but rather intervals of separation and the endurance of loneliness. It comes from our experience of pain and suffering. Nothing makes us sadder than someone who keeps reminding us how happy we have to be because he suffers from the rigid inability to integrate the good with the bad.

For the readers who bear the patience to read my article until this point, you may inquire, "what does this have to do with procrastination?" Every act of procrastination is glued to our obsession with planning. Our obsession with planning lies in the fact that we all have an inexplicable desire towards Plato, that stability is good and change is bad. Before we travel, we often devise a meticulous plan to do all the things we wish to do during our journey. But we often misunderstand what holds up our moods. The unforgiving weather, the technical problem of the luggage belt, the constant need to the bathroom because of the food we eat, a small argument with our travel companion, all these may arouse in us resentment. The key ingredients to happiness lie not in anything material or aesthetic, but psychological.

Our procrastinations enforce a deep sense of melancholy because it reveals to us the cynical nature of the world. Nothing will ever turn out to be what we wish it to be. Our tendency to procrastinate hints at something deeply fallacious about our habit of planning meticulously. It accuses us of excessive cerebral activity before we perform each task. Perhaps actions are better than their analysed cousins if left to flow unfettered by sophistication of thought . Before we remedy this absurd behaviour, we are still most likely to procrastinate.

W

On Lying

2010-03-04T21:53:00.000-08:00

Can we survive without lying? For people who have access to high morality, the word "lying" becomes a dispiriting concept. It leads me to think of the melancholy moments in childhood, while we were taught to value honesty above all, we had to write thank you letters for unwanted gifts and make eulogies in front of hypocrites.

There are various reasons of why we lie. The retired Oxford professor Richard Dawkins, in his "The Selfish Gene", assures us that lying ensures a higher chance of survival. As our society becomes more populated, however, our genes will evolve to make room for cooperation. Driven by this reciprocal altruism, we outwardly display our good-will while inwardly enjoy a perverted form of egoism. However heartfelt our generosity may seem, our self-interested motives are glued to the underside of every benevolent act. Our goodness has never been more dishonest.

Perhaps that was when religious moral codes, our most cautionary, prosaic rules, came into play. Forceful injunctions to be benevolent and cooperative reflects our innate tendency to be selfish, to take advantage of what is available. Religious moral codes were created to held our vindictiveness in check.

If we become so irresistible to the act of lying, it is perhaps because most minutes of our days are devoted to scurrilous gossips about celebrities and politicians over packs of biscuits and cups of coffee. What seems so trivial and insignificant in our daily life suddenly becomes socially desirable. The way paparazzi delicately articulate their pencils across pages of magazines enforces a sense of moral relativism. That they have the ability to blur the distinction between honesty and lying which which allows us to cover up our lies with our unusual displays of virtue. In return, in order to avoid the verdict of the herd instinct, furious celebrities choose to lie over the matters that are of insignificance to the public.

It is not hard to see why our moral conviction collapses under the teaching of our parents. Upon receiving unwanted gifts, rather than enforcing the virtue of honesty on us, our parents urge us to follow the convention of etiquette at its best. They want us to be gentlemen rather than barbarians. To the moralist, such tradition of etiquette should be worthy of suspicion, something invented to cover up our lies through ambiguous language. But to the ordinary, this may instead offer a piece of conclusive evidence of the giver having good taste.

Should we then teach our children to speak the truth and tell our celebrities to expose their privacy? The reality, however, compels us to admit the otherwise.

Suppose a group of people who derive sadistic pleasure from beating a cat asks us where the cat is gone, are we supposed to restrain our display of sympathy and point them to the right direction? A man who is not completely deprived of the slightest degree of sympathy, I fear, would rather choose to lie over than being honest.

If politicians are more susceptible to such moral criticism, it is perhaps their act, to use George Orwell's words, is "the defence of the indefensible". The fact that they deliver political speeches with contorted tangles of language that is rendered impassable to the public is because George Orwell's words bear the unbearable truth:

"Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."

There lies at the heart of every politician the unspeakable virtue of lying because politics has always been a grim and nasty business. The habit of lying works in perfect harmony with politics. No one should be foolish enough to believe that political parties will act solely in the interests of the general public. Politicians are no moralists. Only power, fame, and money are worthy of their consideration.

In a world where stupidity becomes the hallmark of social eminence, we lack guidance, self-control, and direction on how and when to lie. We should not teach our children to be honest at all times, rather we should teach them how to use lying intelligently. Not knowing how and when to lie and not striking a balance between lying and honesty we will only bring to our own ruin.

W

On Going Home

2010-02-26T00:00:00.000-08:00

Having lived in the States for more or less six years, it is not uncommon to find myself nostalgic of my home city. On disembarking at Hong Kong International Airport, a sign "Arrival" hanging from the ceiling strikes me as familiar yet so foreign. It is a bright-blue sign. Neither of those letters, however, reminds me of the States nor England. From the font type of the letters, the colour of the sign, my native language under the English word "Arrival", they generate in me a sense of excitement and delight. But why does such a place where I had lived for the first sixteen years of my life provoke in me such genuine pleasure? Perhaps it is because it offers convincing evidence of my having arrived at a place which is of great sentimental value to me. It reminds me of a simple fact: I am home.

The day before I take off from Houston every summer, I usually stay up the whole night in order to be able to sleep on the plane. My insistence on staying up, however, may be worthy of some degree of suspicion because sleeplessness always happens to be my symptom on the plane. Perhaps it is just a terrible excuse, an excuse invented to make up for my intense excitement of going home and my reluctance to take sleeping pills.

After having an unpleasant breakfast at McDonald, I find myself on the plane patiently waiting for the pilot's announcement. Plugging my earphones into my iPod, it is playing Michael Buble's "Home". As soon as every soft tune of the song charms my ears, I notice an unbearable weight is pulling down my eyelids.

I wake up from the state of nothingness. The pilot is announcing that the plane will arrive at Honolulu in less than an hour. As soon as I become conscious, a charming lady seated next to me offers me a gum. This particular occasion suddenly reminds me of Fight Club. In the film, Jack (Edward Norton) reminds us that everything on the plane is single-serving. So on this plane, I meet my single-serving friend. Strangers on the plane may talk to you for various reasons. Conversations may start off by the offering of a gum or a book that you are reading. The reasons are totally random. On this occasion, perhaps my single-serving friend just longs for some company out of boredom. From our conversation, I know that she is a student who is always passionate about science at the University of Boston flying back to her home, Honolulu. She explains to me in the minutest details about her hatred of the urbanity in Boston and how she longs to go back to Honolulu whenever time allows her to do so. Her descriptions about the palm trees, the clear skies, the white beaches, the diversity of fauna and flora, all these hint at why she is a biology student. A while after her effortless talking, she is finally interested in me and asks what I am studying. For the first time in my life, I fail to notice the confused look which suggests my eccentricity from her. Time passes by mercilessly when one wishes to exchange information through the lumpiness of language. As soon as the plane lands, we walk out of the gate door together and that is when she says, 'see you around'. This expression is probably the most polite form of saying goodbye. The word "around" invites us to the paradox of the possibility, however slim, of running into each other soon and at the same time sadly offers conclusive evidence of us never seeing each other again.

Driven by the precaution of the tasteless single-serving meal on plane, I decide to lunch at a pseudo yet the best French restaurant in the airport. As soon as the waitress takes me to the corner table, I begin to observe people who are lunching around me. If observing people fascinates me, it is perhaps because it is one of my main sources of inspirations of what to write. I do not feel ashamed of my eccentricity when curiosity demands it. There is no practical reason for my scrutiny of people's behaviours, but only that I often harbour a confused wish whether I could be one of those pioneers who discovers hitherto unfathomable truths. The restaurant is located at one of those corners in the airport. This geographical location enforces the atmosphere of loneliness. No one is talking. Everyone is either reading his book with a glass of red wine or busy emailing his business partners with a half-finished sandwich. I gaze past one another at the serving counter. At that moment, I am sure my trivial existence is of no significance to anyone. I believe I am seated among insentient creatures.

I look at the menu, choices are limited, it leaves me no room for reflective delight but to order a Chicken Spaghetti. While awaiting my order, there is a gentle feeling unfolding within me, namely, loneliness. This is, however, a pleasant form of loneliness. Rather than being embarrassed by laughter and fellowship, I inwardly derive a masochistic pleasure from the presence of an analogous feeling. I am eating in a place where conversational poverty is acknowledged and the longing for friendship is brutally celebrated.

My order arrives. Unexpected, the sauces are not built on compromise. The sauces blur the distinction between the chicken and the spaghetti hence the disruption of flavour. Neither the chicken nor the spaghetti stands out. Slices of chicken are not arranged in order. The amount of cheese and spaghetti leaves no sign of symmetry. The dish reveals not a sense of simplicity and cleanliness. For the first time, I crave for the single-serving meal on plane.

It is about time to board the plane so I pay the bill and rush to the gate door. The unpleasant meal, however, is unable to diminish my excitement of going home. I get on the plane, embarking on the journey to my final destination.

During the unbearable thirteen hours, my neighbours snore effortlessly, flight attendants serve diligently, and movies are shown continuously. I spend most of my time reading, listening to music, and drifting in and out of consciousness. There are times when we are disturbed by the air turbulence. Occasionally, during air turbulence, while our pilot reminds us of tightening our seat belts, I secretly wish for disasters. If disasters suddenly become my wishful desire, it is perhaps because I am too impatient with my boredom. I wish to derive a peculiar form of pleasure from disasters. Nevertheless, it never happens. I wake up from the announcement that the plane will arrive at the Hong Kong International Airport in fifteen minutes.

I pick up my backpack, say goodbye to the pilot and flight attendants, walk out of the aircraft, looking up at the bright-blue sign, silence becomes an excuse for my inarticulacy of the feeling of excitement and delight. I am glad that I am home.

The journey of going home may be considered our outlook on life. When we travel or go on business trips, we often find ourselves ending up in different airports. During our stay at airports, there may be periods of anguish, self-hatred, and boredom. Flights may delay. Severe weather may render us inevitable to stay overnight at the airport. Souvenir shops may be unforgiving, bringing out blemishes and offering a lack of variety of choices. Despite of all these miseries, we nevertheless manage to get on our plane. During the journey on our plane, we may experience air turbulence or if we are in bad luck, a disaster. On the other hand, we may also meet strangers, strangers who may be able to share our interests and fathom our soul. We have our flight attendants who never forget to serve us meals and when in need, some junk food and a cup of water are offered to fulfil our hunger and quench our thirst. We have our pilot who always reminds us of taking precautions when possible danger is necessarily to be confronted. By the time we get out of the plane, anxieties are consoled and worries are solved. Because we reach our final destination.

Imagine all these little things happened in the airport and on the plane are the things that you may encounter in life. If transition at airports stands for different stages in life, our flights being delayed for adversity, having an unpleasant meal for uncertainties of future, the pilot for our fathers, flight attendants for our mothers, strangers we meet on the plane for the people we meet in life, air turbulence for obstacles, no matter what we encounter and what we do, we are still excited about approaching our final destination. At this point, Freud's theory of death instinct cannot be more obvious. However happy we are in different places, there is always one unchanging fact. We all long to be home. We all came into existence from the state of nothingness. In the end, we return to nothingness. Our existence is our journey of going back to where we belong.

Next time when someone close passes away, rather than letting ourselves burst into tears and mourn at the funeral, we should celebrate his death and be glad that he is finally home.

W