Thinking History

By Dr. Ruei-hong Tang

This is a deeply beautiful book on history as thinking and thinking as history or thinking history. Thinking spreads deep into time on all themes thinkable, including scientific analyses, self-reflections, dilemmas, paradoxes, and life-essential prudence. Besides, history involves historical process; likewise, this book historically involves its writing process in its own content reflected on. Reading this book reads thinking history as such.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 27, 2017
• ISBN: 9781524577940

Dr. Ruei-hong Tang

Dr. Ruei-hog Tang is a vigorous instructor of history in Chinese Culture University , Taipei , Taiwan . He won four Best Teacher’s Awards. He is well-known for his expertise in world history and in the philosophy of history. He has published a monograph, R. G. Collingwood’s Hermeneutics of History (NY: Nova Science, 2013). The present volume elucidates his own philosophy of history.

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Copyright © 2017 by Dr. Ruei-hong Tang

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Rev. date: 01/26/2017

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Table of Contents

Bundle 1: Thinking

Bundle 2: Variety

Bundle 3: Togetherness

Bundle 4: Concrete

Bundle 5: New

Bundle 6: Open

Bundle 7: Yonder

Bundle 8: Enjoying

Bundle 9: Novel

Bundle 10: Fresh

References

ABSTRACT

Thinking history is thinking historically performed. A vast variety of themes are explicated, not imaginatively, not analytically. This book covers surprises such as these: paradox, liar-paradox, philosophy, and mathematics, prudential wisdom of hiding in secrecy from public one’s meritorious deeds, dialogues with scientific atheists. The volume is round up in joy of children singing these themes of thinking history. All this shows how common days are full of things unpredictable yet all coherent in fact. This book has no analytical summary, as history has no summary. This book is open-coherent as timely story-thinking on life’s way.

Besides, importantly, this book packs thinking themes with vivacious expressive poetry all surprising yet coherent. This book thus matches history all surprising yet coherent in thinking. Here the style of expression is coherent with the content expressed, exactly as history is thinking coherence in a surprising way. Thinking history is historically coherent, as history is thinking coherent quite bodily, concretely, story-told, and musically chanted as thinking.

Introduction

Thinking history is history as thinking that follows fact-sequence coherently story-way, not imaginatively wild, not analytically deductive. This book has surprises, to show how common days are full of thinking unpredictable yet all coherent as history. This book has no analytical summary, as history has no summary. Still, this book summarizes itself as it goes, exactly as history in each moment summarizes itself as it goes on. Going-on summarizes itself.

This book is open-coherent as timely story-thinking on life’s way. This is to say that this book proceeds provocatively, exactly as history provokes surprises yet in thinking way. History as thinking, in thinking history, has its time-logic that bundles, as will soon be explained on pages 2 to 4. Accordingly, this book has many bundles of themes to lug around through timed history. This book makes its history to match cosmic history as thinking and as thinking history.

Bundle 1: Thinking

History as Thinking

One, history is thinking factually coherent. Thinking as history follows fact-sequence coherently story-way, not imaginatively not analytically. This book has surprises, to show how common days are full of things unpredictable yet all coherent in fact. This book has no analytical summary, as history has no summary. This book is open-coherent as timely story-thinking on life’s way.

Besides, two, importantly and quite essentially, this book packs in it quite rich materials existing both in historic China and in Western history, because history is ultimately and inherently worldwide, and world history is by nature multicultural. In all, this book is on history as thinking coherent, timely, and multicultural.

History tells stories of what have happened. Story sticks facts together, in open coherence. Coherence sticks stories together in meaning; open coherence can add or delete stories and still makes sense. History adds a surprising German story of brutal racism in the high German culture supposedly impossible for racial atrocities too low for any culture. For all that, history makes a historical sense of German high atrocities, such a contradiction quite unreasonable.

History-thinking is story-thinking in open coherence, and so history is not literature (it is thinking) or philosophy (it is story). Still, history thinks timely way, and so history is philosophical. Besides, as things take place, history packs them in open coherence, systematically in a literary way. History is not philosophy or literature but philosophical and literary.

Literature lets imagination fly. History must describe facts as they happen. Such description is not random but coherent as philosophy is. But history is not philosophically analytical but openly coherent. Historical coherence is alive as time goes on. History is timely coherent, not analytically coherent.

And so this small book is coherent, timely and sensible, but not analytically systematic. This book contains surprises to show how common actuality is full of things unpredictable as history is a story of surprising actuality. Actual surprises are coherent in fact and open to further facts coming. No analytical summary of this book is possible, then, as history has no summation but open as time is. This book is open-coherent as timely story-thinking is. History is thinking on the move; this book is timely thinking on life’s way, in open coherence. This book has materials in historic China and Western history, as history is inherently multicultural.

History in Time-Logic

History as thinking in time inevitably meets the fascinating theme of the logic of time, how logical time is, or time-logic for short. Time-logic is obviously in contrast with space-logic, a sole traditional favorite, even obsession, of Western philosophy, whose neglect of time-logic makes philosophy in the West weak in the philosophy of history. Space is where things and ideas are set to stay. Time is when things and ideas are expressed as changing.¹ Even science says the world will later vanish in entropy. Even stones will melt in time. Buddhism thrives in time.² Now, logic is the grammar of things and ideas. In space, space-logic is actually set as settled grammar and syntax of things and ideas, as standard logic with set names.

In contrast, time-logic keeps changing with changing expressions. As we think, so we say, and our patterns of saying tends to blend into bundles one after another to make sense. In this situation, things are hopelessly topsy-turvy, as meaning is situation-dependent, as what is meant depends on the changing situation in which it is said. The West has a complex splash over indexicals, demonstratives, indexical signs, egocentric particulars, and token-reflexive words.³ So many complex names and their complex arguments on such complexities of words tell of how much at a loss the West is to make of situation-dependence of meanings of words.

But actually all words are situation-dependent. Look at days, pain, joy, friendship, piety, courage, even mistakes; each of them means differently as their situations differ. All Socrates’ quest of universals (the set stable meaning of each word) in his early eristic dialogues has failed. This historical fact clearly shows how meanings are derived from the situation here now, never set up ultimately in the Realm of Ideas above vicissitudes of the concrete, as boldly proclaimed in the Republic 514a-521b. Thus all words are indexicals, as Mencius says, That was one time; this is one time (2B13).

Poor Socrates perished because he stubbornly refused to admit this time-logic in his space-consistency in the dialogue of Crito. Even how valid 1+1=2 is depends on the situation. One stone plus one more stone do yield 2 stones. But as logic-master Whitehead said, one load of explosives added to one spark produce far more than 2 splinter pieces. His last public quip, The exactness is a fake⁴ can be taken as endorsing pan-indexicals. But then, all words as all indexicals leaves us having nowhere to hang on to. If the situations keep changing, then all situation-dependent meanings are an impossible quicksand commonly called history.

Rescue comes from logic itself. Logic bundles into meaning.⁵ What is logicized is a blended bundle of sense, sensibility, and meaning. Bundled-up stones are incorrigibly stones; bundled-up spade is eternally a spade. A rose is a rose is a rose, insists Gertrude Stein on the inviolable identity of fragile roses. As things have their inviolable identities, we can stand on them to maneuver through the quicksand uncertainties of situation-dependent meanings in life ongoing, history. Now in all this whirlwind of history, what is critical is fact, isn’t it? History is timely coherent in fact.

What Fact Is

But fact is amazingly fecund in implications. We cite here just two features of fact, its involvement with myths, and its involvement of objectivity and subjectivity. First, we think myth as subjective fabrication, even time-honored, unrelated to brute fact. But surprisingly what we take as sober fact is intrinsically involved with our myths, so much so that fact vanishes as myth is deleted. Two examples can be cited.

Albert Schweitzer famously showed us that our quest of factual Jesus without subjective faith (our mythical concoction) is impossible. The quest of historical Jesus is doomed to failure. Rudolf Bultmann wanted to take away ancient myths from the Bible, to strip it to bare facts. He ended up clothing the Bible with today’s myth of Heidegger’s existentialism.⁶ Bultmann’s demythologization of ancient myths amounts to re-mythologizing with today’s myths. Ancient facts are today’s myths; today’s facts are future myths. Our fact is clothed with our myth. Cutting away myth deletes fact.

Secondly, intrinsic involvement of subjective myth in objective fact above shows how objective fact depends on the subject. There is no objectivity without the subject recognizing it as objectively present out there. At the same time, there is no subject without being recognized as objectively present as the subject. What does such two-way recognition is intersubjective community.

Fact is communal, and its coherent presentation is history. History is a communal affair through time. Collingwood said that history is re-enactment,⁷ which requires community through time. Mind you. Coherent description, recognition, and re-enactment describe thinking. History is penetrated by thinking in time, in community, and in open coherence.

Bundle 2: Variety

Global Village

History timely communal inevitably spreads globally. Variety is the spices of the timely the historical. Our Global Village turns wholesome alive only among global multiculture. Africa is a motherly womb inchoate. India is encyclopedic with its slant. The West is analytical, conceptual. China viscerally engages body thinking, story thinking, music reasoning, and concrete thinking, all inter-penetrating for millennia, yet oddly few notice it⁸; not even Chinese thinkers notice Chinese mode. Instead, airplanes boom to own the sky, cars whoosh to own the city, all spreading to own the world with their space-logic as the sole thinking-mode, to harvest eco-disasters.

Variety betokens differences, and differences bite us, this way. Western logic of conceptual thinking⁹ is not China’s actuality-thinking word-trailing 論 the pearl-grains of things 理. Such pearls are quite difficult to logically see. Never cast pearls before pigs, lest they trample them underfoot and turn around to tear you to pieces, says Matthew 7:6.¹⁰ It is so hard to talk with a man of pig-IQ,¹¹ with my respect I thought I owe him, and my respect tends to take him as my equal, for respect implies equality, I would think (but respecting difference implies no equality of any sort).

And so, I tend to give him my pearls of timely ideas. He would then get angry and cuss me to pieces. It is extremely hard to respect him as at staid pig-IQ, not flexuously trailing such concrete timely pearl-grains. Natural inevitability is not logical necessity; we must never treat thing’s thread as logical thread. Mind’s logic must be respected as different from thing’s grains, lest pig-logic of abstract thinking turns around to tear concrete pearl-thread to pieces. Resolution of conflict lies in respecting the historical depths of each culture; variety shows glories of histories of different cultures.

Conceptual thinking says if P implies Q, then Q cannot imply P, but, in actuality, woe is where weal leans, as weal is where woe lurks.¹² How such is the case is made plain, explained, by telling actual stories. Story thinking trails things’ threads; it is concrete thinking in our body-living, and all this is body thinking singing actual poesy of music reasoning; body thinking in story thinking, thought concrete and music-reasoned, make up actuality-thinking.

"How does concrete timely thinking proceed in global multiculture? Well, an Indian elder Alan Old Horn wisely told a young anthropologist, That tin-shed there is our culture. You’ve gotta go inside, feel it, see from the inside looking out."¹³ Accordingly, the pages below engage two activities. One, in approaching world cultures, we notice two lifestyles, Western analytical contrasted with Chinese actual. Two, we notice from inside each shed, looking out one at a time, how differently they see the same lifeworld, and then detail their differences and their interactions.

It is concrete timely thinking, not as easy as we commonly think, but uncommon and creative as poetry. R. Frost, H. D. Thoreau, and W. C. Williams are poets telling of things as they are, so uncommon; these poets are kin to Chinese Confucius and Chuang Tzu. To commonly meander as river is uncommon. These pages below will show excitements of the common so uncommon. And that showing and telling with kid’s show and tell is concrete timely thinking, quite historical. Children are historical.

Children

Kids have no inside, for their inside is their outside. They are all of one piece, all see-through. We are all won over; they are so powerful. Kids have no secret, and so they love secrets. My god, we all love them with all their secrets! All this is what attracts us. No one can resist these kids with all their inside secrets that are no secret at all. Kids incarnate concrete thinking in story thinking totally bodily.

History is story thinking, thinking story-way, not using story as a window dressing to buttress logical thinking,¹⁴ though the fact that logical thinking cannot help but use stories to reinforce itself shows how logical thinking is part of story thinking. What is story thinking? Story thinking trails the concrete pearl-grain, timely grain-of-pearl 理¹⁵ of things, events, and thinking, and the trailing makes history. Story thinking is concrete thinking at work, timely undergone by body thinking. Story thinking makes sense even of logical bankruptcies that disables logical thinking, while story thinking embraces it as a part of its storytelling that is history.

Logical bankruptcies are the liar paradox dramatized, and anything dramatic is welcomed by storytelling. This paradox self-invalidates both positively and negatively. Positively believing I am a liar as true invalidates I am a liar, for believing takes that liar as telling truth and not lying. Negatively disbelieving I am a liar as false validates I am a liar, by taking the liar as liar.

This vile paradox surprisingly infests the root of mathematics that is supposedly the rock-solid assurance of logical necessity and validity. Kurt Gödel famously proved that all proofs must, logically and mathematically, be proved by theorem(s) other than that proof itself.¹⁶ Now, Gödel proved this proof all by himself. This lone proving of not lone proof at once plunges Gödel and his proving into the ken of liar-paradox.

Gödel is invalidated because he proved alone the other-proof, not by other-proving. And Gödel is validated, precisely because his lone proving invalidates it, and such invalidation validates his other-proof.¹⁷ It is thus, at the root of logic and mathematics, the liar paradox invalidates them. The liar paradox turns invalid all logic (because of this paradox) and all mathematics (because Gödel falls into this paradox). Thinking itself is bankrupt, says kid’s story thinking with gusto. After all, we have been watching kids all-consistent laughing at twisty Gödel.

Similarly, and simply, story thinking follows—this following is history—the grain-of-pearl of 1+1=2 as bankrupt in timely actuality, as 1+1 can be less than 2 (loss in investment), more than 2 (a husband and wife team can have children), and much more than 2 (explosive plus a spark). Story thinking kid-happily shows such stories of 1+1 logically bankrupt, by following the grain-of-pearls of timely actuality as kids do.

Objectivity

The child enjoys peek-a-boo because she thinks that things pop out of nothing when perceived. We adults think, on the contrary, that the world outside us continues to exist objectively independent of our existence. But we have no way of proving what we assume, by the child or by the adult. Science (=knowledge) knows what we perceive, and no more. To prove that what we perceive is what is really out there and existing beyond what we perceive, we need someone outside us to compare what our thinking knows with what is beyond it, and such being outside us is outside our knowing.

From ignorance comes a nothing, ignorance; all we are is Mother Nature. Nature gives story thinking in space, as part of history the story thinking through time. China calls itself the culture of literary history story-thinking through time. And so, the pages below often refer to China toward multicultural global village.

We have open society and closed society (Bergson, Popper), in open thinking and closed thinking. Open thinking opens out far; closed thinking closes in conceptually, definitively. Open thinking exemplifies; closed thinking exhausts. Open thinking points to a thing so as to point far, in a specific way and direction one time, and then points in another specific direction and way, another time. Open thinking roams and haunts, ever stating half truths half false, true for now, to change later, saying, This is one time; that was one time. Open thinking plays with such shifts coherently into history.

Both open and closed ways of thinking are thinking sensible and coherent, but each differs from the other in the way matters cohere in each. Open thinking thinks one for now, ready to change with another set; closed thinking stays in one dead-set set. Open thinking discovers; closed thinking ties things up. Open thinking fits actuality as it uses conceptual closed definitiveness to peg open description story-told, historical actual, kid-roaming coherent.

Wow! All this sounds long-faced and serious. Well, all this is serious but not long faced. As river of time meanders on, kids grow up, and now would not take a second look at their toy box. But this box remains a treasure trove for Mom, with tons of tender stuff in it, all eternally precious, as grownup kids remain Mom’s kids. Your trash is my treasure, dear, Mom mumbles, hugging kid-broken toys strewn in the box.

Mother humming joy looks into life’s treasure-trove of her toy box. Mom humming is history in musical joy, quite kid-serious, never long faced. Joy and music are life’s historical themes no one has noted, much less probed. We cannot live without joy; we have no culture without music. All this is history. We need both the West’s discovery of joy-dilemma in logical analysis and China’s body thinking story-thought to plumb to develop joy in life dilemmas. Elucidating joy this way is itself joy historic.

Concrete Thinking

History thinking is concrete thinking that can be thinking on the concrete and thinking itself as concrete; each penetrates the other. First, we think about the concrete, and then think on thinking itself as concrete. We begin with the concrete. The concrete is what comes unannounced to invade our senses. Inundated by the coming that comes constantly, we cannot help but try to make sense of this onslaught, brute and factual.

Zen training consists in struggling with our struggle to make sense of sensing starkly concrete in raw touch with actuality. We are now present at sheer presence of what comes. Things continue to come, but no longer invading us, to bewilder us to nauseate us; we are history moving on. This historic attainment coheres with creative coherence that comes from the beginning of all things the Creator creating, the supreme Coherence to make the concrete coherent beyond nausea into history.

Christian revelation coheres with Buddhist Enlightenment shouting That’s it! The it here is beyond sense beyond speech, thicker than our blood, just here now. It is the just, revealed by the Beyond incarnated actual, appearing concrete historic. We are at home here now, just as we are, in things just as they are. This supreme tautology, just as it is, is the Sense of all senses and all non-senses. Now have we made sense of the concrete the historical? Yes and No. Let me explain.

Yes we have made sense of the concrete historical, as we now need not struggle; we are at home here now. But No, we still have not made sense of things as we are still in the dark on why things are as they are—however much science makes clear on how things happen as they do. We make sense and make no-sense. What is crucial in all this is that we are nauseated no more.

Serenity pervades as we are free, silently adept at thick and thin of vicissitudes of the concrete in the historical. The in here is our inner dove homing, encircling the crisp dusk of southern hills, welcoming night to come serene. Serenity homes us into our pillow that is our dry skull on roadside we meet casually, any time we are tired. Our skull is our dove cloud-high. All things gather inter-coherent inter-different into inter-historic.

I just affirm all contraries just as they are, as I see, as I am. All this while, just as I am, I am on my knees to the Beyond that creates me enmeshed in things created with me. Zen calls all this satori enlightenment; Christ calls it salvation. We know it as we do not know it. We are a bundle of known ignorance, and it does not matter, for it is the logic as things go and as I am. We are home in joy of no-joy all calm, as the baby asleep is watched over by Mom so quiet. In Mom, the baby asleep can jump up awake any time. The baby is life-historic ever quiet alive, jumping without jumping.

We live body-way to think body-way, and so all myths are body-vivid, and the Christian God shows his messages incarnated, and we living body-way understand what is beyond body by body thinking. Our body metaphors us—ferries us beyond, bodily—beyond the bodily realm, and ferry-over beyond body is body-historical act; the beyond-body is quite bodily, after all, as sleep beyond awareness is undergone once each day to refurbish body-vitality.

Images, dreams, and plans are engaged body-less by body thinking routinely, to be body-alive historically. The body-less extends body thinking, and this extension makes history. Still, we are our body, and cannot live body-less that is part of body thinking to enrich body thinking, to enrich us alive body-wise, from today to another today, into history.

Our today here now lives tomorrow nowhere, and without tomorrow nowhere, today is nowhere. No tomorrow, no today exists; no body-less, no body is. We are all-body to undergo the body-less Beyond, to turn vigorous historical. All this shows how beyond our self we are. We live beyond us, beyond death beyond life, strange as it may sound; we call all this strange ongoing history. We live the Beyond of history; we are beyond us. Such is the actual historicity of our body thinking, too vast too rich to exhaust, all so enthralling.

So far, contrary expressions have been piled up to express the historic dynamics of life-quietude. Dynamics is contraries-together, incoherence coherent, historical. Zen immanent going beyond itself is now coherent with Christian transcendence descending to create the concrete the historic.

Such coherent incoherence expresses concrete history of things ever upside down, for Alice and Tommy to prance around to play together, absolutely chaotic, messy, and ever so alive. Togetherness is of course coherent incoherent, many in one, one as many, as kids brutalize each other as they barter their precious pebbles, as we buy and sell our precious stones, while making war and making love. Their pebbles and our stones are jumping alive, thanks to kids of all ages prancing alive all over, fighting and playing.

All things are thus orderly chaotic, pushing ahead to some goals all-unknown to us all; we just keep going, as kids of all ages. All this is history. We shout playing, even play with evolution, but no one knows what all this is, for kids have no word play (they just play), as we adults wield the word evolution as a mantra so wonderful, never knowing what it is, much less whereto we are evolving. Teilhard de Chardin’s Omega Point is our UFO flying nowhere everywhere, as we set up ufology all-unknown. We just go on ahead, as kids just play on ahead. Our evolution ahead is history.

Tommy notices that his lessons in the three R’s, reading, writing, and arithmetic, are harder now than last semester, not knowing why; ultimately, no one knows why of such evolution, if it is. Playing has no evolution; harder play is no fun, out of kid’s bound. Poetry has no evolution; harder poetry makes no sense. Charles Darwin is all wrong. The number of books in the Bible, supposedly the important Love Letter from God, and the order of books in it, are known, but they were written as they were written and ordered as they were ordered, and what it means is unknown. Such is history.

Likewise, we know our lungs breathing and our hearts pumping. But why they do as they do to keep us alive, and what alive means, are unknown. We live the unknown; we live ignorance. We have no science of ignorance; science is knowledge, and is not no-knowledge. In fact, all our science our proud knowledge totally exhibits our ignorance of anything we live on, on what they are really and on why they are as they are. We proudly muddle on in ignorance. But all these queries may be all-silly. We just go on living, and to be aware of just is historic, knowing the all as unknown to live history.

Such is our body thinking story-thought, quite historical concrete. Stories soar up heavens sacral high in pious India¹⁸; stories make history to cover the sky and earth in scientific West. And stories cherish the vast millennia of cosmos in historical China. It is in this way that story thinking impressively features concrete thinking homo-cosmic in time, all so awesome so historic.

Such is fun compounded with more fun. Here and there, funny things are everywhere, as we roam around everywhere with funny things that we kids of all ages never know. Ignorance makes things funny to play with. Kids are experts at playing with what they do not know; they simply love them! This is Alice’s Wonderland where anything unknown and unknowable dance and prance around, as if things are all known all familiar. Wonderland is history.

It is all the wild, wild world of kids of all ages to daunt Mom and Granny, who keep peeping into this wild funny world topsy-turvy but dare not enter it, while kids keep noisily beckoning at them. Wow! All this is the busy, busy world of kids peeping at the adults in their busy, busy world so funny. These two worlds so busy so chaotic gather to create such noisy messy Wonderland for the Alice of all ages. Mom and Granny are aghast, continuing to watch dear kids lest they hurt. All this chaos is history.

Kids on their part could not care less if they get hurt. And they so fragile do get hurt, and they just wail their pain out, and Mom at once rushes in—now Mom enters their world! Such is the busy, busy world of exciting mess, of daunting chaos, kid’s and adult’s; all this is history. The end, we say, and all kids will shout, Do it again! Alice’s Wonderland lives on happily ever after, into history. All is such a silly tall tale that cannot end; the end, do it again! Again, all such is history.

All such is concrete thinking at play and cannot end, and it is forever funny, ever having fun, ever roaming prancing afresh historic. Such concrete thinking is coherent incoherent, ever in non-sense yet strangely making sense on things to kids of all ages. Making such funny sense is the task of history thinking. Of course, such thinking fascinates all thinkers. Concrete thinking has death and is beyond death, incorruptible but not eternal, drenched in pain while living in joy in despair, sickness, and undying hope, concrete bumps to go on in inchoate actuality. Again, such is history.

Pain daunts. Not gone through pain, Christ’s care, or anyone’s care, could not have penetrated those beloved people in pain. Brazen snake looked up heals snake bites, as wounded doctors heal. Poison kills poison; Christ died on the cross to bring us out of death. Brute pain unjustified is empowered by love uglier than hell, to heal pain unjustified. It is the Gospel of Suffering in deathly love so precious and senseless, the Christ on the cross so ugly in the love uglier tougher than hell (Songs 8:6).

Strangely, John’s Gospel is written later than the other three Gospels and must have been ruminated more than they, and yet John’s Gospel is choppier and more disconnected. Farrer the poet thinker wrote on Gospels of Matthew and Mark, not on John. Temple tried his brave hand on John’s Gospel, out of which Brown made an interesting mess.¹⁹ John’s bits and pieces make us think. Is their scattered character a sign of bewildered astonishment of believers? That way of writing must have been the best they could have done in their heart of hearts. Such is our history thinking on the Gospels.

All this is never covered by conceptual thinking because it cannot cover it, for conceptual thinking is ever locked in logic. But here in the historical in logical nausea, concrete thinking breaks through logic to dynamic calm of wonder, and all such is logic twisted into another sort of logic. This twisted logic is historical logic of time-logic engaged by concrete thinking, nudging us to see how 1+1 is not =2 but equals exploded many as 1-explosive added to 1-spark, as explosives erupt so many in history.

Why do you cite an explosive added to a spark? Supreme logician Whitehead did so, with good reason. We see how all common things are explosives for our attention to serve as a spark, to explode each entity into so many unexpected pieces. Such historical actuality makes the ultimate logician Whitehead to shout his last public announcement, The exactness is a fake.²⁰

The concrete exactness that is not a fake is engaged by history thinking that does handle conceptual exactness as a fake, while conceptual thinking does not, as it cannot. Sadly, the above declaration was the logician Whitehead’s last public announcement, and so its development into history-concrete thinking, whose peculiar exactness is not a fake, must be taken over by China that has been routinely practicing such strange exactness through its long history, called its literary history 文史.

Conceptual thinking consists in analytical logicism, made up of one, logical analysis and, two, its accumulated arguments. But logical-analytical coherence is not enough for the historical concrete that is rife with incoherence everywhere. Nor is argument enough, for argument is advanced from its prior intention. As purposes differ, arguments come to differ, and worse, Socrates won his argument to get death penalty as recorded in the Apology. All thinking must adhere to concrete history and its attendant facts, yet all this while thinking decides on the concrete and the fact, and this fact-thinking circularity is one interesting component of historical concrete thinking.

Concrete thinking plays with this circularity; the play composes history so much fun. Music reasoning is thus a part of history-concrete thinking so delightful. In this dynamics of history thinking, conceptual thinking plays an interesting role, in fact so interesting that we must be on the alert against obsession with studying how conceptual thinking plays its role in history thinking, for the main task of history thinking is to think concretely of concrete situations, including fact-thinking circularity as its part.

Music reasoning is an essential luxury²¹ of thinking, as music constitutes joy throbbing living. Music is the innermost melody of my soul, Fritz Kresiler’s violin gently whispers. I come back home to music whenever I am lost, burned out, tired of living and jittery. Music is the gift from above of my home, reminding me that my home is up there. I am born up in musical heaven quite awesome²² where trumpets fill the air day and night. While awesome heavenly, music my home is at ease in me. Music is my dearly respected Dad in heaven constantly calling me home, ever so warmly, ever so tenderly. Eternity beyond death beyond life is here now as music and as history.

Without music, no one can live; without music-reasoning, thinking is no thinking concrete historical. Thinking is part of living, and life is normally the rhythmic heartbeat in exultant joy. Argument laboriously pushed is constipated, forced unnatural, not thinking proper. If constipated thinking happens to be valid at all, it is limping self-forced, insufficient as thinking proper.

Constipated thinking tends even to beat around the bush, not handling the bush itself burning urgent.²³ And, interestingly, even such beating around is rhythmic, as such thinking is still part of living that is rhythmic historical. All