Episode Transcript: #1663 - Edward Slingerland
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Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
So what possessed you to write a book about getting hammered?
That's a really good question.
Like my colleagues are flabbergasted when they see the topic.
My day job is early Chinese philosophy and I do comparative religion and then writing
this book on alcohol.
It grows organically out of work I've done before.
So my specialty is early Chinese philosophy.
My early work focused on this idea in early China of what I translated as effortless action.
The word is uwe.
It literally means no doing or not trying, but it's a spontaneous, it's kind of like being in the zone in sports.
So it's a state where you lose a sense of yourself as an agent.
You feel like everything's just happening, you're not making any effort and yet everything works perfectly.
You solve problems, people like you, everything works out.
And the early Chinese thinkers want to get you into this state of uwe.
But they have this problem that I call the paradox of uwe, which is how do you try not to try?
You want to be spontaneous, you're not being spontaneous.
How do you get from A to B?
And all of what I argue in my dissertation is that all of early Chinese philosophy is this series of attempts to solve the paradox.