Haiyan Lee
Philosophy helps discern the underlying patterns of human expressions and behaviors
How were you first introduced to philosophy?
Many philosophers have a charming origin story about how they became a philosopher. It typically involves some sort of happy serendipity, whereupon our protagonist willy-nilly fell in love with philosophy and never looked back. My story is none-too-charming, and my stumbling into philosophy did not turn me into a professional philosopher. I still am not a philosopher—neither by training nor by professional location. Instead, I’m a literature professor holding an appointment in a foreign languages and literatures department (and a joint appointment in Comparative Literature). I would not have presumed to intrude into this space but for the insistence of Gabriel Olano. In part to explain my interloper status, I have combined the first two questions and switched the order.
I grew up in Mao’s China and received a stultifying education (1970s and 80s). My scores on the National College Entrance Examinations were just high enough to be admitted into Peking University, China’s premier institution of higher education, but not enough to earn a spot in one of the more coveted disciplines, such as English and International Finance. So I got assigned to major in Religious Studies, which was housed in the Philosophy Department. I had heard of philosophy but not religious studies, coming as I did from the hinterland and having had little exposure to anything but my textbooks. I ended up not liking either philosophy or religious studies, and I blame the university (and the entire educational system) for it.
In my first year, I had to take a number of courses in Marxism-Leninism, dialectical materialism, historical materialism, Mao Zedong Thought, and the history of the Chinese Communist Party. None of the classes assigned any readings. The instructor lectured, we took notes, and regurgitated everything back to him (yes, they were all men) on the exam. In my second year, I nearly failed the history of Western philosophy course because 1) I couldn’t follow the lectures and 2) instead of the usual final exam, the instructor required a paper and I had never written a paper up to that point and had received no instruction as to how. All this is to say that I had a terrible experience studying what passed as philosophy at Peking University. Religious studies also failed to draw me in for more or less the same reasons. After I came to the U.S. for grad school, I switched to literature, which has always been my first love.
What is philosophy to you?
So why am I here responding to the question “Why philosophy”? A long story short: I rediscovered philosophy in grad school, first at the University of Chicago and then at Cornell University. As a literature student, I was encouraged to take “theory” courses, which in the 1990s meant mostly French theory. The French take their philosophy very seriously, so you could say I was led to philosophy second-hand. The kind of philosophy that appealed (still appeals) to me leans in the direction of politics, ethics, and aesthetics. Philosophy, to me, is whatever helps me discern and make sense of the underlying patterns of human expressions and behaviors. It must have a practical force.
How do you practice philosophy today? What is a philosophical issue that is important to you?
I practice philosophy in a sideways fashion, meaning I don’t write philosophical papers or treatises per se. Put in another way, I don’t do philosophy for the sake of doing philosophy. Instead, I ask philosophical questions in connection to whatever issues or texts I’m grappling with. These days, one question that preoccupies me is why people read fiction. By fiction I mean all manner of storytelling that constructs an imaginary world that deliberately departs from lived reality, either minimally (as in realist fiction) or maximally (as in fantasy). It could be a novel, a film, a soap opera, a video game, etc. Why do people spend so much of their waking hours lost in collective hallucinations? Related to this question is whether truth is necessarily the highest good for all people, and under what conditions is truth subordinated to other goods.
Wilfrid Sellars is a philosopher who can help us find our way in a post-truth world. He makes a distinction between the “manifest image” and “scientific image” of the world. The work of philosophy, according to him, is to unite the two images. We know that people are inclined to cling to the manifest image and mistrust the scientific image, especially when it contravenes their deeply held values or tribal identity. Fiction traffics in the realm of the manifest image. So is fiction good for us? Do we need more fiction in the age of post-truth? Can fiction join philosophy in bridging the gap between the manifest image and the scientific image? These are questions I hope to tackle in my next book project.
What books, podcasts, or other media have stood out to you as a philosopher?
I’ll just mention two books here: Sources of the Self by Charles Taylor. This book taught me moral philosophy not as a stand-alone discipline, but as embedded in the longue durée of Western intellectual and cultural history. It fundamentally shaped my approach to philosophy. The second is Philosophy in the Flesh by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. This book mobilizes new findings from cognitive psychology and cognitive linguistics to challenge fundamental assumptions in Western philosophy, starting with the mind-body divide. It made me far more attentive to two seemingly unrelated areas of inquiry: cognitive science and traditional ecological knowledge (TEK). My new project on animism attempts to rewrite the history of Chinese literature by filtering it through these two lenses.
I’m an avid consumer of podcasts. Most of the podcasts I listen to regularly have a philosophical bent. Very Bad Wizards is hosted by a philosopher and a psychologist. Their conversations range widely from philosophy and psychology to literature and film. I like the ways they bring their respective disciplinary backgrounds to bear on a question or a text and freely riff, meander, and collide, generating insightful sparks along the way. What’s Left of Philosophy? features four philosopher friends who debate topics in political philosophy from an unapologetically leftist perspective. Both podcasts deliver a biweekly brew of wisdom, aperçus, and wit that I find positively addicting.
Haiyan Lee is the Walter A. Haas Professor of Chinese and comparative literature at Stanford University. She is the author of Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of Love in China, 1900-1950 (Stanford, 2007), winner of the 2009 Joseph Levenson Prize from the Association for Asian Studies, The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination (Stanford, 2014), and A Certain Justice: Toward an Ecology of the Chinese Legal Imagination (Chicago, 2023). Her research and teaching interests include modern Chinese literature and popular culture; philosophy and literature; law and literature; cognitive science and affect studies; cultural studies of gender, sexuality, race, and religion; human-animal relations and environmental humanities.
https://profiles.stanford.edu/haiyan-lee