Sun-Tzu: The Art of Warfare. Translated with Introduction Roger Ames, Ballentine Books 1993

I read this edition of the superclassic shortly after its publication, having got the book as a present from Kari Ahola, a key Nokia manager in connection of a road show I ran in Southeast Asia.

I remembered the book, and particularly its highly stimulating Introduction as I was preparing for my lectures on Philosophy of Life and Systems Intelligence at Helsinki University of Technology but could not find my copy. So I ordered another copy and upon receiving the book reread the introduction.

The Introduction turned out to be even more informative than I had remembered. It is an absolutely outstanding, crystal clear essay on some of the key differences between ancient Chinese thinking and Western modes of thought.

Among other things, it makes understandable why "discussion of military affairs is pervasive in early Chinese philosophical literature" - although this is a culture in which "warfare is neither celebrated nor glorified".

To understand classical Chinese "applied philosophy" one key idea is to observe how it rejects the "Two-World view" of Western thought in which experience gets structured through binary opposites. In the world view of classical China, "there is only one continuous concrete world that is the source and locus of all of our experience." "The world, then, is the efficient cause of itself. It is resolutely dynamic, autogenerative, self-organizing, and in a real sense, alive. This one world is constituted as a sea of ch'i - psychophysical energy that disposes itself in a various concentrations, configurations, and perturbations."

"The general and most basic language for articulating (the relevant kind of) correlations among things is metaphorical: In some particular aspects at some specific point in time, one person or thing is 'overshadowed' by another; that is, made in to another's yang."

Yin and yang are interrelated. "'This' evokes 'that'; one evokes many."

Ames goes on to articulate the classical Chinese mode of thinking in terms of "comprehensiveness", pointing out - again to my particular excitment - the acoustic metaphors as particularly relevant. I have long believed that philosophy, thinking and collaboration should be thought in acoustic, musical, even melodical terms, this being part of the methodology of my lectures and seminars as "live philosophy".

Further, Ames describes the fundamental nature of emergence and harmony in the human action - and brings in context as something essential: "Harmony is attained through the art of contextualizing."

Context varies, and is critical - hence philosophy as applied philosophy, and hence also warfare as a context for reflection. "The Chinese world view is thus dominated by this 'bottom-up' and emergent sense of order that begins from the coordination of concrete detail."

I am thrilled by the idea that, as an active agent operates attuned with the overall processes and systems of which he is part, "an achieved harmony is always particular and specific - resistant to notion of formula and replication."

There is, I believe, a fundamental connection between classical Chinese thinking (and applied philosophy), as articulated by Ames, and what Raimo Hämäläinen and I have approached as "systems intelligence".