Karyn Lai, Rick Benitez, and Hyun Jin Kim, editors. Cultivating a Good Life in Early Chinese and Ancient Greek Philosophy: Perspectives and Reverberations. London, Great Britain: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. 262 pp. Hardcover $130.00, ISBN 978-1-3500-4957-4.

Abstract

Karyn Lai, Rick Benitez, and Hyun Jin Kim, editors. Cultivating a Good Life in Early Chinese and Ancient Greek Philosophy: Perspectives and Reverberations. London, Great Britain: Bloomsbury Academic, .  pp. Hardcover $., ISBN ----. As the title of this volume of essays states plainly, its subject is the objective of a good life, the means by which it may be cultivated, and the philosophical traditions of early China and ancient Greece that pursued these means and ends. There is much promise in this seemingly pedestrian title, not least for what it might do to nourish our professionally siloed mentalities as philosophers today. It would not be a rash generalization to claim that academic philosophy in the present day does not concern itself primarily with how to live well and what a cultivated “good” life can look like in this world. Surely there are exceptions to such a generalization, and I am not perturbed by any fingerwagging this claim of mine might generate. What I mean to suggest is that, in the context of a predominantly Western-centric, male, and white history of philosophy, the field (at least in the Anglo-American world, but arguably across the globe) has sedimented into a stratification of expertise—“logic,” “metaphysics,” “ethics,” “epistemology,” and other standard titular fare. Moreover, under these rubrics, the thick, lived lives of philosophers are often stitched together with the false allure of logic-chopping, the unavoidable thrust of plain, brute dogma, and the breach of sense that increasingly segregates the classroom from the “real world” outside. Between the lines of the essays that comprise this volume, then, there is the silent burden that is ours to confront: does what we do as philosophy today bear any resemblance to an art of living, a tekhnē biou, that was a, if not the, fundamental paradigm in antiquity? Or, put more directly, to what end is it that we do what we do when we call that thing “philosophy” today? A refreshing selection of possibilities for thinking through these questions is available in the traditions of Greek and Chinese antiquity, where philosophy, as the diverse themes of this volume demonstrate, was first, and perhaps only, a “lived” experience, an assortment of dialectical “exercises” that comprised a larger art of cultivation, and an art in which pure theoria brought with it the risk of vacuity—a grave risk, to be sure, for the consequences it spelled in the context of living a good life. “Cultivation,” nevertheless, opens the gates to highly fraught terminology. If “self-cultivation” has been the prism through which texts of Chinese antiquity Review©  by University of Hawai‘i Press have been traditionally rendered, this has had the corollary effect of keeping such “non-Western” traditions either completely outside the jurisdiction of Philosophy departments in the Anglo-American world or at least at a comfortable arm’s length. Whether such terminology is deemed to fail some alleged standard of rigor, or whether it is seen as not concerned with the strictly dialectical methods and goals at the heart of any act that we call philosophical, the study of traditions of self-cultivation, especially those of Asia, has always found a warmer home, disciplinarily speaking, elsewhere. Certainly, things in the professional world of academic philosophy might be changing (or not), but the point is this: “cultivation,” as a lens for the study of philosophy, has a checkered history in our contemporary professional landscape, and its association with non-Western traditions of philosophy has often been the reason for barring them access to canonical spaces of study and philosophical dialogue. The editors of this volume deserve our commendation, first, for working against this grain and, second, for the philosophically engaging and sophisticated quality of essays they have commissioned to give the topic of cultivation a robust philosophical standing. There is undoubtedly the precedent set by scholars like Nussbaum and Hadot, who some years ago brought into sharp relief the cultivation practices of Hellenistic philosophy. The essays here pay due homage to this lineage, but crucially also expand in multiple directions that demonstrate at least two salient implications of thinking comparatively about philosophy as an art of living: one, that between the traditions of Chinese...