ZEHAO.LOG
Philosophy

The Salt of Life

Nov 17, 2022·8 min read

Man has lost his honored place in the natural order. He has been thrown into an infinite universe to drift without aim, with no natural law to guide him and no certain road to salvation.

Michael Allen Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity

Cosmos

Cosmos and Universe are near synonyms. Both get rendered into Chinese as 宇宙. Yet in a certain philosophical sense the two words are flat opposites, and they sketch two completely different ways of understanding the universe we find ourselves in.

To say cosmos is to treat the universe as a thing that is complex and ordered. But the order here is not the cold order of mathematics and physics. It is a kind of order we can now only find in history, in legend, and in religion.

"Yuan (the originating) is the chief quality of goodness; Heng (the penetrating) is the assembling of all that is beautiful; Li (the advantageous) is the harmony of all that is right; Zhen (the correct and firm) is the trunk of all affairs. The noble man, embodying benevolence, is fit to be the leader of others; with the assembly of beauty he can accord with ritual; benefiting all things he can harmonize what is right; correct and firm, he can carry affairs through." (The Book of Changes)

"Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; for people hold the lovely belief that all things in the cosmos move toward the good." (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics)

What do the three great Axial civilizations have in common (early China before the Qin, ancient Greece, ancient India)? Each of them found a kind of table of categories. Out of that table grew their moral rules and their first ideologies, the frameworks of ideas that let everything sit in its proper place. The table marked out the measure of good and evil, drew a picture of the good life, and gave ordinary people a reason to live by and to die for.

This sense of being at one with the good, whether it came from morality, from religion, or from inherited custom, this feeling of harvest and happiness when unity of knowing and doing carries you toward the goals the table sets out, is what this essay will call the salt of life.

You are the salt of the earth

So what is the salt of life?

It is the small thing in our days, so faint you barely notice it is there, yet impossible to do without. Like a pinch of salt, it gives flavor to an otherwise plain life. Salt is the texture of being alive. It is a quiet pleasure rooted in the human senses, the taste of living itself, needing no theory or faith to wrap around it.

On his deathbed Gide spoke of his despair over the world. Then a young man wrote to him from Africa, saying the world is beautiful, there is hope. Gide said: the words of that young man are the salt of the earth, and for that little bit of salt I can close my eyes in peace.

The taste of salt refers to the innate goodness in a person. When a mother does not love her child, when a child is not devoted to those above, when love is not faithful, when government does not serve the people, the salt has lost its taste.

(The two paragraphs above are quoted directly from Lectures on Literary History by Mu Xin.)

The metaphor of salt comes from the Gospel of Matthew. Jesus says to his disciples:

You are the salt of the earth.

But if the salt loses its savor, how can it be made salty again?

It is then good for nothing, but to be cast out and trodden underfoot.

The metaphor of salt is wonderful. It is pure idealism, idealism with no end in view. It rises above place, culture, religion, and philosophy, and leaves only the truest, purest experience of being alive, with a measure of love and a measure of wonder.

The "savor" is best understood as a kind of genuine goodness, the seasoning that turns mere "living" into a "good life."

If the salt loses its savor

The triumph of the Scientific Revolution, together with the nominalist revolution, brought about the collapse of the kosmos.

The distinction between earth and the heavens was abolished. A geometrized space took the place of all those particular positions with their distinct characters. In this infinite, featureless space, rest and motion no longer differed in quality, and the ontological differences between things dissolved as well.

Science seems to hand us the truth of the world, yet in that tidy picture stretching from the Big Bang to the gene there is nowhere to house our joys and our sufferings, our moral striving and our artistic ideals.

Chen Jiaying, Philosophy, Science, Common Sense

At the crossroads between ancient China and modern China, a similar process unfolded. What the West called the "death of God," China experienced as the ossification and collapse of feudal ritual order.

China never had a long-running theological tradition the way the West did. We never had gods to confirm our place in the vast universe. Instead it was the whole ethical order that Confucianism drew out that gave us our identity within the human world. That order became the underlying motive for how Chinese people conduct themselves.

What a pity, though. The vision of the good life that Confucius opened up grew steadily more alienated, more rigid, more rotten as history wore on, until the wars and cultural movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries finally toppled the "House of Confucius."

The progressive force of the New Culture Movement and the May Fourth Movement cannot be denied. But at the same time they sealed off the one definite path that Confucianism had marked out toward self-realization and the meaning of life. They sealed off, in the Chinese context, the certain road to salvation.

And so, in the modern world, Chinese people met the same thing the rest of humanity met: the general spiritual crisis of modernity, which we feel in daily life as a sense of the absurd.

How do we dissolve this spiritual crisis? How do we find a new fulcrum on which to rebuild the values, the ethics, and the politics of a modern society? These are the questions the twenty-first century forces us to face and to answer.

How can it be made salty again

In a modern world where meaning is missing, how do we re-enchant it? How do we look for a value worth believing in, and find our way back to the salt of life?

Having passed through modernization, we can no longer easily fool ourselves by inventing some god to step in and hand down rules and meaning. Nor are we willing to bow, simply and without reflection, to any one "ism."

Perhaps we should trace our way back to the Axial Age and find a salt that has not yet lost its savor, still pure.

Go back to the Axial Age. Strip away the contamination and the alienation that later ages laid onto the salt. Go look at the gods of ancient Greece. Go look at Jehovah before the church appeared. Go look at Confucius on his wooden cart, and Laozi riding out through Hangu Pass.

You will find there is no need to fuss over whether someone was a religious figure, a philosopher, or an artist, no need to fuss over East or West, no need to fuss over faith, religion, or ideal. Back at the purest and most original source, it is all one heart:

A measure of love, the self-love of humankind, and life that dances.

This is the salt of the earth, and it is enough to give our living its direction and our lives their meaning.

Let me close with a poem by Hölderlin.

If life is sheer toil, may a man

lift his eyes and ask: do I

ask too much, can I still be? Yes. As long as kindness,

the pure, still stays with his heart, man measures himself

not unhappily against the divine. Is God unknown?

Is he manifest as the sky? This I tend to believe.

Such is the measure of man.

Full of merit, yet poetically

man dwells upon this earth. I truly believe

that the pure night of stars is no purer than man,

who is called an image of God.

Is there a measure on earth?

There is none.

Hölderlin, Man Dwells Poetically

References:

  1. The Theological Origins of Modernity, Michael Allen Gillespie
  2. Philosophy, Science, Common Sense, Chen Jiaying
  3. Poetically Man Dwells: A Free Rendering of Heidegger, by Heidegger, translated by Gao Yuanbao
  4. Lectures on Literary History, told by Mu Xin, transcribed by Chen Danqing

I am Ning Jing Hai (the Sea of Tranquility). Thank you for reading.

You are welcome to reach me by any means. My email is lunar_mare_official@outlook.com. Write to me anytime and I will answer every letter.

PhilosophyEssayModernityLiterature
‹ Back to all posts