As I indicated in my previous entry on this Chinese thinker,
information in English is rather scarce. In the course of looking up Wang Ch'ung (Wang Chong, 27–c. 100 AD), I came across another link to Fan Zhen on a rather eccentric web site:
Rationalism and materialist philosophy in China: Fan Zhen, Wang Chung
Once again, the Esperanto page, which also has English links, can be found on my site:
Ateisto Fan Ĝen
Showing posts with label Esperanto. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Esperanto. Show all posts
Sunday, September 18, 2011
Monday, May 16, 2011
Juan Chi / Ruan Ji (210-263): Chinese bohemian poet
Transmission of cultural and intellectual information across linguistic boundaries is far from perfect, and the notion that one will readily find everything one could possibly want in English is erroneous. I have blogged before on intellectual figures I could find almost no information on in English but learned about thanks to Esperanto, which has a history of serving as a bridge language between cultures. One such figure is the Chinese philosopher and freethinker Fan Zhen. Another is Ruan Ji, or Juan Chi in the older transliteration, whose life span was 210-263. All the relevant information in Esperanto can be accessed from my Esperanto blog:
Ĵŭan Ĝji, Saĝulo de la Bambu-Bosko
Works by and about Ruan Ji in English are difficult to find. Here's what there is:
Ruan Ji / Juan Chi: Selected Bibliography
"Speaking My Mind" by Juan Chi / Ruan Ji
Cultures all over the world have had their "holy fools": people who act eccentrically, in defiance of prevailing norms, whose extreme unconventional behavior—in complex civilizations, anyway—functions as a form of social critique. In the West, we have heard of Diogenes from ancient Greece. China, too, had many such persons. Here is an anecdote I have translated from Esperanto which I have not found in English:
Ĵŭan Ĝji, Saĝulo de la Bambu-Bosko
Works by and about Ruan Ji in English are difficult to find. Here's what there is:
Ruan Ji / Juan Chi: Selected Bibliography
"Speaking My Mind" by Juan Chi / Ruan Ji
Cultures all over the world have had their "holy fools": people who act eccentrically, in defiance of prevailing norms, whose extreme unconventional behavior—in complex civilizations, anyway—functions as a form of social critique. In the West, we have heard of Diogenes from ancient Greece. China, too, had many such persons. Here is an anecdote I have translated from Esperanto which I have not found in English:
He opposed feudal etiquette, acted strangely and unceremoniously; he took the space between heaven and earth as a chamber, his house as his trousers, remaining naked. When someone would enter his chamber, he would ask: "What are you doing in my pants?"
Sunday, May 8, 2011
Michel Onfray in Esperanto
Pour toutes ces raisons nous demandons que l’espéranto soit ajouté à la liste des langues admises en tant qu’option au baccalauréat.Now Onfray's Traité d'athéologie, which has been translated into several languages—in the USA it goes under the title Atheist Manifesto—is available in Esperanto translation: Traktaĵo pri Ateologio. I have blogged about this in Esperanto: Michel Onfray en Esperanto.
On this blog you will find my critical remarks about the ideological perspective underlying Onfray's work. I have not seen a critique in English that matches the thoroughness of this Russian Esperantist's critical review:
Ateismo subjektiva, limigita kaj katolika [An atheism that is subjective, limited, and Catholic] by Nikolao Gudskov
Gudskov cites a number of omissions in Onfray's historical account, but in addition to other specific criticisms, Gudskov criticizes Onfray's underlying methodology. Gudskov, who has no sympathy for Stalinism, nevertheless evidently learned something from historical materialism, as he insists that religion as a historical phenomenon cannot be understood as an abstraction isolated from the social factors that motivate it, and that the critique of religion cannot be limited to the critique of the Abrahamic religions or monotheism in general. He sums up Onfray's work as intellectually inadequate but useful as a popular work that articulates what fledgling atheists feel but have not yet fully articulated for themselves. I concur.
This is an interesting example of prevailing ideological differences among the intellectual cultures of different nations or linguistic spheres, in this case the French, Russian (formerly Soviet), and Anglo-American, though I should hasten to add that different intellectual cultures overlap said boundaries and can be found within them. Of course, Esperanto is not indispensable for overcoming provincialism nor does it by any means guarantee doing so. Nevertheless, it provides opportunities for dialogues among persons that would not exist otherwise.
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Fan Zhen (450 - 515 AD), Chinese philosopher
Fan Zhen (范縝, hanyupinyin Fàn Zhěn, also transliterated as Fan Chen, occasionally Fan Zen) was a Chinese philosopher whose life span is listed as (circa) 450 - 515 AD. Extensive information about him in English is extraordinarily difficult to find, and his major work Shen Mie Lun appears not to have been translated into English. I could not find him in my two major English language compendia of Chinese philosophy, Fung Yu-lan's A Short History of Chinese Philosophy and Wing-Tsit Chan's A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy.
Here is what I have found in English. The most information is concentrated in a Wikipedia article on Fan Zhen.
On Food for Thought, a web site of heretical quotations, this one can be found:
Fan Zhen is best known for his opposition to Buddhism and his denial of the immortality of the soul, in effect a materialism denying the separate existence of the soul. According to the Wikipedia article, he got in big trouble for this.
I first learned of Fan Zhen via Esperanto: Ateisto Fan Ĝen, a chapter in Antikvaj Filozofoj de Ĉinio [Ancient Philosophers of China] by Hoŭ Ĝjŭeljang, translated from the Chinese. Fan Zhen is labeled an atheist. He also opposed the putative law of karma and its justification for the existence of rich and poor. There is some detail in this short chapter of the Fan Zhen's ideas of the material basis of the "soul". Perhaps one day, in lieu of further sources in English, I will translate this chapter.
In the meantime, we can thank Esperanto as a bridge language from Chinese culture, and we can enroll Fan Zhen as a hero in the annals of freethought.
Here is what I have found in English. The most information is concentrated in a Wikipedia article on Fan Zhen.
On Food for Thought, a web site of heretical quotations, this one can be found:
The spirit is to the body what the sharpness is to the knife. We have never heard that after the knife has been destroyed the sharpness can persist.
Fan Chen (c.450-c.515)Fan Zhen gets singled out in John C. Plott's Global History of Philosophy: The Patristic-Sutra Period, Volume 3. He gets two sentences in Rom Harré's One Thousand Years of Philosophy: From Rāmānuja to Wittgenstein.
Thung Chien Kang Mu, Chapter 28
Translated by Leon Wieger (1856-1933)
Textes Historiques, 1905
Fan Zhen is best known for his opposition to Buddhism and his denial of the immortality of the soul, in effect a materialism denying the separate existence of the soul. According to the Wikipedia article, he got in big trouble for this.
I first learned of Fan Zhen via Esperanto: Ateisto Fan Ĝen, a chapter in Antikvaj Filozofoj de Ĉinio [Ancient Philosophers of China] by Hoŭ Ĝjŭeljang, translated from the Chinese. Fan Zhen is labeled an atheist. He also opposed the putative law of karma and its justification for the existence of rich and poor. There is some detail in this short chapter of the Fan Zhen's ideas of the material basis of the "soul". Perhaps one day, in lieu of further sources in English, I will translate this chapter.
In the meantime, we can thank Esperanto as a bridge language from Chinese culture, and we can enroll Fan Zhen as a hero in the annals of freethought.
Monday, April 16, 2007
Galileo’s Birthday
Written 15 February 2007:
That’s today, the birthday of the founder of modern science, Galileo Galilei (February 15, 1564—January 8, 1642).
As a child, many many decades ago, I subscribed to an innocuous kid’s magazine called Highlights for Children. All I really cared about in those years was science and science fiction, and spent whatever money came my way by way of gifts on science books for children. Well, some issue of this magazine had an article on Galileo, also mentioning his birthday. I never really wanted to celebrate any holiday I didn’t invent myself, and I decided at that very young age that I would make Galileo’s birthday my very own holiday. What could be more important, after all, than celebrating science, the founder of modern science, and a martyr of science as well? I had no explicit position on religion back then that I can recall, but the scientific world view (spiced up by science fiction) was my own, so instinctively my priorities were set. It just doesn’t make sense to have all these religious holidays but none for the scientific revolution, which has done so much more for the human race. And I have never forgotten Galileo’s birthday since.
When not worried over my personal safety and the social chaos of the late ‘60s, I was bored to tears in high school a good percentage of the time. One of my many eccentric indulgences to fill the void was to teach myself Esperanto, the language created by L. L. Zamenhof, who was also pretty much a secular humanist though not an outright atheist and who also invented his own universal religion, akin in many ways to Ethical Culture, which he dubbed “Homaranismo” (literally, “being-a-member-of-the-human-race-ism”, a generalization of a rationalized stripped-down Judaism he called Hillelismo named after Rabbi Hillel). Eventually I acquired and began to read literature in Esperanto (yes, there is such a thing, original as well as translated), and I was captivated by a short story written by an author noted for his work in Hungarian as well as in Esperanto, Sandor Szathmari. The story “Vincenzo” is about the lifelong relationship between Galileo (portrayed as an idealist) and his fictional brother Vincenzo, who is a pragmatic cynic and eventually a cleric. With my instinctive passion for freedom and hatred of authoritarian repression, I always loved anticlerical, especially anti-Catholic, literary efforts, another favorite being Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. So finally for a class project I translated this story into English. Thirty years later I put it on the web:
“Vincent” by Sandor Szathmari
It won’t go down in the annals of literature as a specimen of brilliant translation, but hey, I did what I could at the time.
That’s today, the birthday of the founder of modern science, Galileo Galilei (February 15, 1564—January 8, 1642).
As a child, many many decades ago, I subscribed to an innocuous kid’s magazine called Highlights for Children. All I really cared about in those years was science and science fiction, and spent whatever money came my way by way of gifts on science books for children. Well, some issue of this magazine had an article on Galileo, also mentioning his birthday. I never really wanted to celebrate any holiday I didn’t invent myself, and I decided at that very young age that I would make Galileo’s birthday my very own holiday. What could be more important, after all, than celebrating science, the founder of modern science, and a martyr of science as well? I had no explicit position on religion back then that I can recall, but the scientific world view (spiced up by science fiction) was my own, so instinctively my priorities were set. It just doesn’t make sense to have all these religious holidays but none for the scientific revolution, which has done so much more for the human race. And I have never forgotten Galileo’s birthday since.
When not worried over my personal safety and the social chaos of the late ‘60s, I was bored to tears in high school a good percentage of the time. One of my many eccentric indulgences to fill the void was to teach myself Esperanto, the language created by L. L. Zamenhof, who was also pretty much a secular humanist though not an outright atheist and who also invented his own universal religion, akin in many ways to Ethical Culture, which he dubbed “Homaranismo” (literally, “being-a-member-of-the-human-race-ism”, a generalization of a rationalized stripped-down Judaism he called Hillelismo named after Rabbi Hillel). Eventually I acquired and began to read literature in Esperanto (yes, there is such a thing, original as well as translated), and I was captivated by a short story written by an author noted for his work in Hungarian as well as in Esperanto, Sandor Szathmari. The story “Vincenzo” is about the lifelong relationship between Galileo (portrayed as an idealist) and his fictional brother Vincenzo, who is a pragmatic cynic and eventually a cleric. With my instinctive passion for freedom and hatred of authoritarian repression, I always loved anticlerical, especially anti-Catholic, literary efforts, another favorite being Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. So finally for a class project I translated this story into English. Thirty years later I put it on the web:
“Vincent” by Sandor Szathmari
It won’t go down in the annals of literature as a specimen of brilliant translation, but hey, I did what I could at the time.
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