Entries Published On December, 2021
The Plato’s Problem: Life is a Child’s Play
By You-Sheng Li (2012) A few years ago, I attended a lecture given by a professor at the local library. His topic was the philosophy of language. As an example, he talked about how his young daughter learned to speak: As a toddler, she only managed to speak two or three words with visible difficulty in expressing herself. Then all of a sudden, she is chattering continuously with her mother or other girls around three and four. She speaks so freely without any visible effort and only has with difficulty in stopping talking. There is nothing in the world that …
This Confucius Institute Debate Pushes us Further Away from Confucius and his Thought
By You-Sheng Li (May 2014) When I was reading the article ¡°Toronto Confucius Institute spurs moral debate¡± by Karen Howlett and Colin Freeze in The Globe and Mail, May. 22 2014, I felt that we are further away from Confucius and his thought but it reminds the impassable cultural gap between the Chinese and the West. When all human societies are divided into the genetically coded primary society and the man-made secondary society, Chinese civilization started as a super state of primary societies while the West started with city states of typical secondary societies. There is an impassable gap between …
Human Nature in a New Perspective: Genetically Coded Primary and Man-Made Secondary Societies
You-Sheng Li, Canadian Academy of Independent Scholars When all human societies are divided into genetically coded primary and man-made secondary societies, only primary societies are based on human nature. Human nature can be defined as a series of basic desires and capacities with their peripheral potentials. (Li, 2005) With the capacity of heart beats, 50-90 beats per minute are basic while beats more or less than 50-90 per minute are peripheral potentials. The primary society does not have the power to force its members to live on their peripheral potentials while the secondary society does. It sheds considerable new light …
Serenity: The Lives my Mother and Grandmother Lived
By You-Sheng Li (From the book: The Ancient Chinese Super State of Primary societies: Taoist Philosophy for the 21st Century) (1) The Life My Mother Lived At the supper table, my Mother suddenly collapsed in her seat and lost consciousness. She died three days later her ninety third birthday, September 26, 2007. Autumn drought occasionally hits this rural area of China which hinders sowing winter wheat. Peasants had been worried that this year seemed to be one of those rare years. Miraculously heavy rain poured down almost the same time my Mother passed away, and it made farm work in …
The Human World is too Small to Contain Itself
BY You-Sheng Li, (9 November 2012) The grave seemed too narrow for what it was to contain, and the human world is too small to contain itself. When I was sitting in front of my living room window, I often observed squirrels in the park beside my house. There are dozens of them, and they all are in a great shape, neither fat nor thin but healthy. Do they all live a healthy lifestyle? They spend a minor part of their life looking for food but the rest, idling around nonstop. If we call the former their working hours and …
Han Suyin: A Life Torn Into Pieces by Different Worlds Demands Its Own Wholeness
(1) Introduction We now lived a multiple-leveled and multiple-dimensioned world. During the two world wars and the subsequent Cold War Era (1945-1991), those dimensions were forced to form two worlds fighting each other with people at all levels drawn into the fighting. At the bottom, housewives were making military uniforms day and night while their children playing beside with toy guns. When I divided all human societies into the genetically coded primary and man-made secondary societies, I found the former has an aesthetic order based on our born nature, the emotional and psychological social bond felt at the bottom of …
The Ancient Chinese Super State of Genetically Coded Primary Societies and its Implications for Modern Democracy
You-Sheng Li (Written in June 2012) (Submitted to and accepted by the Ninth ISUD World Congress. ISUD=International Society for Universal Dialogue) Comparing Chinese and Western cultural traditions, scholars often label the former with immanent, aesthetic, intuitive while the latter with transcendental, rational, and postulating. (Hall and Ames, 1987) Theoretically all human societies can be divided into the genetically coded primary society, which is the natural society we are born with, and the man-made secondary society. Those adjective words that describe Chinese and Western cultures fit well into the genetically coded primary society and the man-made secondary society. Since the primary …
Reading Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer Under a New Light
Written By You-Sheng Li ( June 2012) (1) Introduction In spite of vast differences between Western and Chinese cultural traditions, the history of their fiction writing as a distinctive art went along similar evolutionary pathways. Paul S. Ropp gives a detailed comparison of Western and Chinese fiction. [1] He says, “As fiction became more sophisticated and self-conscious in both cultures it also evolved from an earlier tendency to endorse wholeheartedly the society’s common values and moved instead to a more ironic stance that questioned or criticized the dominant values of the civilization… The most strikingly are the parallels from the …
Occupy Wall Street Demands a New World
You-Sheng Li, 28/10/2011 Occupy Wall Street is an ongoing series of demonstrations that started on September 17, 2011 in New York based in Zuccotti Park in the Wall Street area but now it has become an international protest. Various “Occupiers” and supporters have modeled themselves after Occupy Wall Street in over 900 cities worldwide. People are amazed by their wide spreading influence but few know the similarity between those protestors and Taoism. A Taoist website asked me to write a hundred word comments to explore this unusual link. I wrote: Lao Tzu says, “Heaven and earth unite to rain down …
A Comparison of Confucius with Socrates in the Light of a New Perspective: Primary and Secondary Society
You-Sheng Li Abstract Outline All human societies can be divided into two types: genetically coded primary society and man-made secondary society. Western civilization, especially in Mesopotamia and Greece, started with city states, which were formed by free citizens after primary society or clans were disintegrated while Chinese civilization started as the super state of a two-level system. The super state enabled people to live in a relatively peaceful social environment while the two-level system, namely the newly formed secondary societies were built on the top of numerous primary societies, enabled them to still live in primary or quasi-primary society. From …