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Dialectic Episode 5: Tina He
Another week, another interview: this time with my favorite person to talk philosophy with, Tina He. She and I met on Twitter, which is fitting: she's a true citizen of the internet. Fortunately, we now share NYC as a home and I get to have conversations like this one with her much more often. She's a designer, entrepreneur, and writer. She spends her days building developer tooling for Coinbase's Base network and her nights studying philosophy and art. I don't know if there's anyone who more consistently recommends books that inspire me.
We cover identity, locality, growing up in China and living in NYC, the internet, writing and sharing online, finding your people online, her career arc from comparative literature in college to venture capital and crypto, how labor markets and economies lay a foundation for culture in cities and online, what it means to be serious, patriotism and greatness, ambition, philosophy, ideas and action, Benjamin Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World, her favorite philosophers from Kierkegaard to Wittgenstein to Byung-Chul Han, Beauty, taste, aesthetics, film, fashion, and how love and attention underpin her life.
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Siddhartha by Herman Hesse
Speaking of Tina: she enthusiastically recommended Siddhartha to me earlier this year, and I read it a couple of weekends ago.
It seems like a good book to read at various points in life, say age 20, 30, 40... I, like Siddartha, am a seeker. In reading this, I felt Hesse both behind and in front of me: at times, there was wisdom I'd already gained; at other points, lessons far beyond my current immaturity; in others yet, he would seem to meet me exactly where I am.
This is a story of duality: folly and wisdom, words and actions, inner and outer, beginnings and ends, fathers and sons, pain and healing, learning and forgetting, good and evil, Sansara and Nirvana, life and death, ephemerality and eternity. Cyclicality in everything. Again and again, we, the world, the universe, the river flows.
Here are some specific excerpts that moved me:
Wisdom and Words
And—thus is my thought, oh exalted one,—nobody will obtain salvation by means of teachings! You will not be able to convey and say to anybody, oh venerable one, in words and through teachings what has happened to you in the hour of enlightenment!
You are wise, oh Samana,” the venerable one spoke. “You know how to talk wisely, my friend. Be aware of too much wisdom!”
Knowledge can be conveyed, but not wisdom. It can be found, it can be lived, it is possible to be carried by it, miracles can be performed with it, but it cannot be expressed in words and taught.
Unlearning and Return
“What now, oh Govinda, might we be on the right path? Might we get closer to enlightenment? Might we get closer to salvation? Or do we perhaps live in a circle—we, who have thought we were escaping the cycle?”
Now, he thought, since all these most easily perishing things have slipped from me again, now I’m standing here under the sun again just as I have been standing here a little child, nothing is mine, I have no abilities, there is nothing I could bring about, I have learned nothing. How wondrous is this! Now, that I’m no longer young, that my hair is already half gray, that my strength is fading, now I’m starting again at the beginning and as a child! Again, he had to smile.
Where else might my path lead me to? It is foolish, this path, it moves in loops, perhaps it is going around in a circle. Let it go as it likes, I want to take it.
This was among the ferryman’s virtues one of the greatest: like only a few, he knew how to listen. Without him having spoken a word, the speaker sensed how Vasudeva let his words enter his mind, quiet, open, waiting, how he did not lose a single one, awaited not a single one with impatience, did not add his praise or rebuke, was just listening
Time
Oh, was not all suffering time, were not all forms of tormenting oneself and being afraid time, was not everything hard, everything hostile in the world gone and overcome as soon as one had overcome time, as soon as time would have been put out of existence by one’s thoughts?
At times, the book reminded me of another favorite of mine: How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. This paragraph in particular:
For a long time, he sat, read in the pale face, in the tired wrinkles, filled himself with this sight, saw his own face lying in the same manner, just as white, just as quenched out, and saw at the same time his face and hers being young, with red lips, with fiery eyes, and the feeling of this both being present and at the same time real, the feeling of eternity, completely filled every aspect of his being. Deeply he felt, more deeply than ever before, in this hour, the indestructibility of every life, the eternity of every moment.
Searching and Finding:
No, there was no teaching a truly searching person, someone who truly wanted to find, could accept. But he who had found, he could approve of any teachings, every path, every goal, there was nothing standing between him and all the other thousand any more who lived in that what is eternal, who breathed what is divine.
Quoth Siddhartha: “What should I possibly have to tell you, oh venerable one? Perhaps that you’re searching far too much? That in all that searching, you don’t find the time for finding?” “How come?” asked Govinda. “When someone is searching,” said Siddhartha, “then it might easily happen that the only thing his eyes still see is that what he searches for, that he is unable to find anything, to let anything enter his mind, because he always thinks of nothing but the object of his search, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed by the goal. Searching means: having a goal. But finding means: being free, being open, having no goal. You, oh venerable one, are perhaps indeed a searcher, because, striving for your goal, there are many things you don’t see, which are directly in front of your eyes.”
Love
Siddhartha suddenly had to think of a line which Kamala a long time ago, in the days of their youth, had once said to him. “You cannot love,” she had said to him, and he had agreed with her... Indeed, he had never been able to lose or devote himself completely to another person, to forget himself, to commit foolish acts for the love of another person; never he had been able to do this, and this was, as it had seemed to him at that time, the great distinction which set him apart from the childlike people. But now, since his son was here, now he, Siddhartha, had also become completely a childlike person, suffering for the sake of another person, loving another person, lost to a love, having become a fool on account of love. Now he too felt, late, once in his lifetime, this strongest and strangest of all passions, suffered from it, suffered miserably, and was nevertheless in bliss, was nevertheless renewed in one respect, enriched by one thing.
Differently than before, he now looked upon people, less smart, less proud, but instead warmer, more curious, more involved.
Dan Wang's Review of The Three Body Trilogy
I've raved about The Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death's End in this newsletter. It came up briefly in my conversation with Tina and I happened on Dan Wang’s (known best for his annual China-focused letters) review of the series from 2016. It's always fun to reflect on the series, and Dan's takes differed from others I've read.
I can't say I agree with all of his conclusions (notably, I, like most western readers—as he notes in the review—preferred Dark Forest to the first book; I also enjoyed Death's End despite his extreme critique of it) but I found it to be both a compelling read for someone who loves the books and a strong recommendation / preview for those who haven't. If you've heard about them or are just interested, Dan's primer might be worth your while. He does a great job of explaining why the focus on interiority and optimism that runs through the book are so compelling.
A few other bits:
Hypothesizing why writer Cixin Liu's upbringing during a period of radical Chinese progress in the world of atoms might have influenced the optimism and ambition of his ideas:
I quite identify with the themes of The Great Stagnation, and the idea that we’ve had lots of progress in the world of bits but not so much in the world of atoms. And I wonder if Liu Cixin’s imagination is a result of personally witnessing rapid economic growth and regular scientific milestones. Arthur C. Clarke was born in 1917, and Isaac Asimov was born in 1920. When they were young, they witnessed the development of the Manhattan Project and experienced postwar prosperity. 24 years after the Trinity Test, they saw the Apollo Project deliver three men to the moon.
Liu Cixin was born in 1963; liberal reforms began in 1979, and especially in the last decade, Liu has been heavily exposed to domestic scientific milestones. These include China’s space projects (Tiangong, Long March, Shenzhou), deep sea exploration (the Jiaolong submersible), better telescopes (Tianyan), and gleaming new bridges, trains, and cities. I’m not saying that other space programs have done nothing, instead that they don’t get as much domestic publicity as China’s media is able to muster. Liu has been compared to Clarke and Asimov in writing “classical” science fiction; I wonder if these authors all focused on writing about technological advances, instead of dystopian societies, because they all witnessed rapid progress. If so, let’s hope that more people in developing countries get into writing science fiction, and not leave it all to comfortable authors in rich countries, most of whom can imagine nothing other than dystopia.
On the distinctly Chinese flavor of writing (especially in the first book):
Ken Liu, translator of the first and third books, offers this thought: “The best translations into English do not, in fact, read as if they were originally written in English. The English words are arranged in such a way that the reader sees a glimpse of another culture’s patterns of thinking, hears an echo of another language’s rhythms and cadences, and feels a tremor of another people’s gestures and movements.”
And finally, Dan reminded me of a superb excerpt from the first book that explains the actual three body problem and stands as a metaphor for much more:
I created a sphere in this infinite space for myself: not too big, though possessing mass. My mental state didn’t improve, however. The sphere floated in the middle of “emptiness”—in infinite space, anywhere could be the middle. The universe had nothing that could act on it, and it could act on nothing. It hung there, never moving, never changing, like a perfect interpretation for death.
I created a second sphere whose mass was equal to the first one’s. Both had perfectly reflective surfaces. They reflected each other’s images, displaying the only existence in the universe other than itself. But the situation didn’t improve much. If the spheres had no initial movement—that is, if I didn’t push them at first—they would be quickly pulled together by their own gravitational attraction. Then the two spheres would stay together and hang there without moving, a symbol for death. If they did have initial movement and didn’t collide, then they would revolve around each other under the influence of gravity. No matter what the initial conditions, the revolutions would eventually stabilize and become unchanging: the dance of death.
I then introduced a third sphere, and to my astonishment, the situation changed completely. Like I said, any geometric figure turns into numbers in the depths of my mind. The sphereless, one-sphere, and two-sphere universes all showed up as a single equation or a few equations, like a few lonesome leaves in late fall. But this third sphere gave “emptiness” life. The three spheres, given initial movements, went through complex, seemingly never-repeating movements. The descriptive equations rained down in a thunderstorm without end.
Thanks for reading (and listening)!
Jackson
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