About this blog
Wei Wu Wei is the name under which eight small books were published between 1958 and 1974. The author, Terrence Grey, provided a brief account of why his writings were not signed with his personal name in the Preface of “Fingers Pointing Towards the Moon”:
“Tom, Dick, and Harry think they have written the books that they sign… But they exaggerate. It was a pen that did it, or some implement. They held the pen? Yes, but the hand that held the pen was an implement too, and the brain that controlled the hand. They were intermediaries, instruments, just apparatus. Even the best apparatus does not need a personal name like Tom, Dick, or Harry.”
The collected works of Wei Wu Wei draw on a variety of Eastern philosophical traditions, including Zen Buddhism, Taoism, and the Advaita tradition within Hinduism. Wei Wu Wei (hereafter simply WWW) belongs to no tradition, and provides a modern interpretation of the intellectual consideration of the human constitution, the nature of experience, and the absence of self.
Remarkably, many of the thoughts expressed in these writings seem to me to be consonant with recent philosophical directions that underpin contemporary cognitive science. In recent years, there has been a marked turn towards acknowledging subjective experience in a scientific account of what it is to be human. This may seem remarkable, as it is hard to know what an account of reality might be that did not have subjective experience at its core. But it is a contingent fact of the current development of science that experience has lingered on the margins. Psychology, that originally set out to ground a science of human experience, never quite came up with the goods, as it adopted the methods and blinkers of empirical science that takes care to remove the subjective from its account.
Recent moves within cognitive science, drawing on older traditions and discussions, have moved experience center stage. Some of the major reference points, that will crop up herein, include the legacy of Francesco Varela, especially his work with Humberto Maturana, the Ecological Psychology of James J. Gibson, The Coordination Dynamics approach of Scott Kelso, Dynamical Systems accounts of cognition, and more. These approaches have in common a radical reappraisal of the multiple relationships between nervous systems, bodies, and the world that they inhabit. For a radical reappraisal is absolutely necessary if our collective view of the world is to grow to encompass subjective experience at its center.
It is easy to be overwhelmed by the vast amount of argument and counter-argument that is out there. The only justification for the current exercise is that given by WWW at the end of that preface:
Posted in“If you should not understand this-give the book away before reading it! But give it to a pilgrim on the Way. Why? Because it would have helped the pilgrim who compiled it, if it had been given to him, and that is why he compiled it, and why he presumes to offer it to other pilgrims.”