Mencius on water

 When I was toiling away, learning philosophy back in Grad school, I pretty much focused on Western philosophy. That’s a vast amount of material there, bucko, and I figured that if – by the time I was doddering on the lip of the grave – I understood some of it, that would be enough of an achievement.

But such projects belong to the long ago of academia. I’ve become more of a pirate intellectual since then – or, less boldly, a dilettante eclecticist. I take my prizes from where I find them.
Which brings me to Mencius’ marvelous question, which is quoted in Yi-Fu Tuan’s Dominance and Affection: the making of pets: “Mencius asked, “Is it right to force water to leap up?” He was taking the position that human nature is inclined to act in certain ways and not others, using the movement of water as an analogy. “Water,” he said, “will flow indifferently to east or west, but it will not flow indifferently up and down.” Now of course, he added, “by striking water you can make it leap up over your forehead and by damming and leading it you may force it up a hill, but do such movements accord with the nature of water?”
It is one index of the fundamental disposition of modernity, over the last three hundred years, that this question simply has no discursive space in which it can be uttered. The discovery of the nature of water is a project we can all recognize, as part of science. But the idea of respecting the nature of water thus discovered forms no part of the world of ideas and actions we inhabit. Mencius’ question is simply weird. We have so little sense that there might be a nature to be respected, there, that we can only view the question as an analogy for the one nature we do respect, human nature. Which, to be fair, is where Mencius goes with it too.
But even if the question exists in a weird and unrecognizable conceptual zone, it does seem more and more relevant to a world in which we have ignored the nature of water, and imposed on it our second nature. We’ve made a lot of water leap over our forehead by damming it. We’ve melted a lot of water by colonizing the atmosphere with our emissions and shit. And we’ve never asked water what it thinks about this. Water doesn’t speak!
But if water doesn’t speak, it has its own nature. Mencius is right about that. We are, I think, gonna have to carve out a conceptual space where water can speak. Or we are going to be in big trouble.