Hundred Schools Explorer

Check out the site at axelpuff.github.io/hundredschools.

This is one of my last projects created entirely without AI.¹ All writing is mine.

Featured on the Gened 1091 course site.

Project statement

By the middle of the Warring States period, creating a cohesive philosophy had become a fearsome task. Anyone who would attempt it had to confront the limitations and instability of language, revealed by the School of Names; the proliferation of moral standards, embodied by the multiplying schools of Confucians and Mohists; and the impossibility (and potentially even irrelevance) of knowing the distant past. And yet Zhuangzi, Xunzi, and Han Feizi each took on the challenge, producing three remarkable systems which represent three archetypal ways of understanding the purpose of history and philosophy. My goal with Hundred Schools Explorer was to convey the power of their conclusions.

To present the intellectual history side of philosophy in a visually interesting way, I created an interactive version of the intellectual landscape of classical China, one that could organize the texts and thinkers not only temporally but also by the way individual philosophers organized and related them. The reason I chose to make a website was to convey both a large amount of information and how interesting I found it. Websites are a flexible medium; they double as both informational resources and art forms. I can’t beat the nuance of Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy or the experience of Gened 1091, but a website can present a relatively large amount of information in a minimally intimidating form, one that expands and shifts as you interact with it. A 3D website provides even more visual interest and possibilities for relating information spatially. I believe that spatial intuition is crucial for understanding things on a deeper level than pure memorization, and my hope was to help the user process the ideas presented in a more meaningful way through the 3D representations of philosophers’ perspectives.

I think the philosophical stakes of this project are about as high as they can get. What attitude should we take towards philosophy, full stop? Should we see it as an inherently limited endeavor and just go along with things, like Zhuangzi? Should we organize our understanding of it and the purpose of human life around a single ideal, like Xunzi? Or, like Han Feizi, should we cut through the mysticism and idealism and focus on the methods that reliably produce material results? These questions alone cannot capture the nuance of these three thinkers, and even they do not illustrate all the possible attitudes towards history and philosophy. But these three thinkers, and the context in which they drew their conclusions, form an extraordinary case study which I hope to convey to the user.