I need to bone up on my Chinese philosophy.
This is less a confession than an earmark. I came across a conversation with Michael Puett on Chinese philosophy, selfhood, ritual, and the modern Western compulsion to find oneself, and the whole thing caught on an old hook.
I am already familiar with some high-level accounts of Asian philosophies, especially Buddhism and the doctrine of anattā (Pali) or anātman (Sanskrit): non-self. That idea has never seemed especially alien to me. If anything, it names with admirable economy a suspicion I already held: that the stable, discoverable, authentic Self is less a hidden metaphysical jewel than a bundle of habits wearing a name badge.
Puett’s point, as I take it, is not merely that the Western self is overblown. That would be too easy, and therefore popular. The sharper claim is that the search for one’s True Self may become dangerous precisely because it mistakes the current arrangement of ruts, reflexes, wounds, preferences, and defensive routines for an essence. ‘This is just who I am’, says the person, embracing not a soul but a sediment. The bad habit acquires a halo. Therapy-speak finds a throne. Another little sovereign subject is crowned in the bathroom mirror.
Against this, Puett presents Chinese philosophy as a tradition of cultivation: not self-discovery, but self-transformation. The point is not to excavate an authentic interior but to train perception, conduct, relation, and response. Ritual, in this frame, is not dead ceremony or social programming. It is a technology of de-naturalisation. It interrupts the little automatisms by which we become legible to ourselves and intolerable to everyone else.
This matters to me because I have long been suspicious of Western narratives and metanarratives, especially those that mistake local grammar for cosmic architecture. The year and a half I lived around Tokyo was instrumental here. I did not leave Japan with a doctrine, thankfully. Nothing so vulgar. But it loosened something. I had already begun to distrust the sovereign Western subject, the metaphysical executive behind the eyes, the heroic interiority forever pretending to be origin rather than residue. What I lacked was a broader vocabulary. A better frame.
As often happens, I later encountered thinkers who had already articulated versions of what I had been circling, usually with more patience, precision, and elegance. Such is the scholar’s reward: to discover that one’s private revelation has an older bibliography.
What struck me in Puett’s discussion was the movement from identity to practice. Religion, selfhood, reading, even attention itself: these need not be treated as badges to defend, but as disciplines to inhabit. This is a useful corrective to the modern anxiety of proof. The self must prove itself. The worker must prove worth. The believer must prove identity. The thinker must prove originality. Modern life becomes a Calvinist treadmill with better branding and worse lighting.
The alternative is not passivity. Nor is it the wet little slogan that everything is socially constructed, therefore nothing matters, therefore let us all dissolve into discourse and invoices. The alternative is practice: deliberate, repeated, embodied interruption. Ritual as a way of making habits visible. Reading as a ritual of humility. Attention as a cultivated stance. Relation as something made, not merely felt.
This is where Chinese philosophy may become especially useful for my own work. It offers neither the Western fantasy of the fixed self nor the lazy inversion of pure flux. It gives us formation, pattern, training, relation, and transformation. Not the Self as essence. Not the self as fiction. The self as practised arrangement. That, at least, is worth returning to.
I am busy, always busy, because apparently exhaustion has been mistaken for virtue by a civilisation that should know better by now. But I want to earmark this thread for further consideration: Chinese philosophy, ritual, anti-authenticity, non-self, practice over identity, and the possibility that what we call ‘who I am’ is often only what has not yet been interrupted.
Philosophics 