Humanities and Social Sciences Colloquium

Since its popularization by Isaiah Berlin in mid-20th century, the negative/positive freedom dichotomy has remained a puzzling presence in contemporary political theory. For all its widespread usage, theorists and non-theorists alike have understood and used the dichotomy in wildly different ways, let alone agreed on its conceptual validity or normative relevance. To dispel the confusions, I critically reconstruct Berlin’s as well as his interlocutors’ arguments, and identify four different approaches to construing the negative/positive freedom dichotomy. I then show that whereas each of the first three approaches—linguistic, psychoanalytic and genealogical—has serious problems of its own, the fourth one, i.e. the metaethical approach that grounds the dichotomy in the modal duality of freedom-qua-value, not only withstands various conceptual and normative challenges to dichotomizing negative and positive freedom, but also sheds new light on the theoretical and practical paradoxes of liberal democracy. The reconstruction also contributes to the debate on the concept-conception distinction, by showing how negative and positive freedom are two concepts, rather than two conceptions, of freedom. As a result, the negative/positive freedom dichotomy is fundamentally different from other usual taxonomies (e.g. external/internal freedom, formal/substantive freedom and so on), which are of conceptions, not concepts, of freedom.

Commentator: Yuan Yuan

Zoom; In-person RSVP (limited seats)

Moderated by Jia Miao

During Sri Lanka’s colonial rule, the island was reliant on an export-oriented economy, which was driven by the trade that prospered with the colonials exploiting the island’s resources. This reliance on an export-oriented economy remained even after Sri Lanka gained independence, as maintaining sound relations with Sri Lanka’s export destinations or markets were deemed imperative for the country’s survival. However, the maintenance of these relations has not always benefitted Sri Lanka, as it did not promote local businesses and instead were more focused on appeasing the economic interests of investors and export destinations. Therefore, this paper examines the extra-regional dynamics on Sri Lanka’s socio-economic crisis. It raises questions about the role of regional and great-power competition in the present crisis; whether regional and extra-regional powers could have prevented the current crisis in Sri Lanka; and what role these powers could play in assisting the island-state from overcoming this crisis. Accordingly, the paper argues that Sri Lanka neglected its own national well-being in attempting to appease other countries and their requirements to engage in Sri Lanka, thus resulting in the country’s socio-economic crisis in the early 2020s. Moreover, the mishandling of its non-aligned policy permitted the country to be entangled in the intense power rivalry in the Indian Ocean between China, India, Japan, and the United States. Therefore, various powers were able to ‘use’ Sri Lanka for their own gain in their competition for power, as Sri Lankan leaders miscalculated its economic development and the needs of its people. 

Syama jataka is renowned in the Chinese context for its portrayal of a filial son who supported his blinded parents. Translated in multiple textual versions and depicted in reliefs and murals, it has been circulated broadly in the Buddhist world. Previous scholarship on the story’s Chinese transmission focuses on the story’s representation of the virtue of filial piety and its alignment with the Chinese context. However, a close examination of surviving visual depictions of jataka stories reveal an often-ignored regional disparities of popularity of Syama’s story in early medieval China. While the story became flourishing among other jatakas in murals from cave-temples along the Hexi Corridor, it is intriguingly absent on the Central Plain during the sixth century. The story’s disappearance in the Central Plain raises more questions given the comparative popularity of Sudana jataka and Mahasattva jataka, another two birth stories that has been circulated widely in China.

This article addresses Syama jataka’s unbalanced adaptation in Chinese visual culture by contextualizing its textual and visual tradition into the broader historical milieu of depicting Buddhist stories and filial paragons in the sixth century. It shows that the transformed theme of the story, from loving-kindness to filial piety, was gradually shaped in the translation process of the story’s textual tradition in the third and fourth centuries. Yet the story’s visual tradition encounters reluctance in its integration into the indigenous teaching on filial piety in sixth-century northern China. This hesitation was formed by two historical contexts: the revival of the pre-existing visual tradition of depicting filial paragons in the context of Sinicization, as well as the gradual dominance of seeking transcendence as the primary teaching delievered in representing Buddhist jatakas in early sixth-century North China.

This research further serves as an example to highlight the tension between the textual and the visual tradition in adapting Buddhist teachings into indigenous social milieu. A later mode of depicting Syama jataka in the Hexi Corridor modifies the story’s protagonist and integrates a series of visual elements from funerary art, revealing new layers added to the story. While a rich array of rhetoric strategies in text translation were developed to integrate Buddhist teachings into existing Chinese thoughts, the visual tradition encounters a separate set of questions concerning necessity, didactic purpose of the patronage, and the visual logic of the viewers.