A book that practices philosophy with arcane symbols? Time to ponder the Dictionary of Relations of Tsai Hsin-yun.
The Dictionary of Relations created by Tsai Hsin-yun is a philosophical work of art, and more specifically, a phenomenological work of art, since indeed its aim is to mirror the necessary structure of subjective experience. In this way, it belongs in the same category as Sartre’s Nausea or Koltès’ In the Solitude of Cotton Fields. Yet, there is one crucial difference: it does not practice existential philosophy with words, but with drawn symbols. This is a tour de force many might think impossible, and yet it is plain to see on the page.
Full transparency: I have worked on this project as a proofreader and as a translator of some of its introductory texts. I also received a free copy when I asked for one, after deciding on my own that I wanted to showcase this work of art on my blog. You are warned of the full context of my affection, and so now I can resume my enthusiasm: I would like to go into details as to why I think this work is so brilliant and interesting to think about.
Most of the book follows this structure: a two-page spread is dedicated to elucidating a type of relation between entities. The name of the relation in question is given (“interpenetration” says the title of the image I gave as an example above), so that we may know the object of the meditation at-hand, but what is revealed about it is entirely abstract. On the left-hand page, we see a symbol; very obscure in its complexity, though sometimes immediately evocative (for instance, many symbols evoke “hatching” or “blooming”). In general, it is by reading the right-hand page that we can hope to make sense of this symbol: four smaller drawings represent the different steps that preceded the final form of the drawing that we see on the left. Similarly enigmatic and abstract, a poem underneath those drawings describe the inner workings of the relation between entities. All text is translated in French, English, and Chinese.
By all accounts, this set-up should not work. It faces two seemingly impossible challenges:
First of all, it is baffling that any “phenomenological art” should exist in the first place. Works of art like Sartre’s Nausea or Koltès’ In the Solitude of Cotton Fields are like bumblebees, which people are fond as describing as “defying the laws of physics”, repeating (perhaps naively) the adage according to which the insect’s body is technically unsuited for flight. Phenomenological art fails at being art (people have said to me) because in attempting to describe the necessary structure of consciousness in general, and not any individual in particular, it ends up being too abstract. Koltès’ play features a Client and a Dealer, who are nothing but the ideas of the Client and the Dealer, not even archetypes full of recognizable personality traits or socio-economic characteristics, but just two Consciousnesses battling one another, like Hegel’s dialectic of the Master and Slave. It makes for a strange play. Similarly, Sartre’s Nausea is too damn weird (people would say to me)! The plot is sparse, and the appeal is only to dive into paradoxical subjective experiences. On top of this, phenomenological art fails at being proper philosophy (or so philosophers might quietly think). The fictional, aesthetic elements, are considered at best to be window-dressing, and at worse to undermine the purity and rigour of philosophical reasoning. So here you have it, nobody is happy: artists think it is too little like art, philosophers think it is too little like philosophy.
And yet, the bumblebee still flies: it might be an acquired taste, but these works have their own equilibrium of the immersive quality of art, on the one hand, and the reflective quality of philosophy, on the other. It’s just that you cannot enjoy this particular balancing act, if you try to force the work of art to conform to the codes of another genre. You have to learn to look at it another way. I am pretty sure I was the only one in my class, in school, who enjoyed Koltès’ play, and I think this is because non-discursive meditation and the study of phenomenology allowed me to get the hang of this unfamiliar equilibrium.
If this first difficulty – the difficulty inherent to any phenomenological art – wasn’t bad enough, Tsai Hsin-yun’s Dictionary of Relations decides to tackle another apparent impossibility. Say what you will about a phenomenological play and a phenomenological novel, but at least they resort to words. Both art-allergic philosophers – who would prefer if you could summarize your arguments neatly instead of forcing them to read an entire novel about it – and philosophy-allergic artists – who would prefer if your pure consciousness had more meat on the bones – acknowledge that there is something (however small) to salvage in the work of art, because they clearly see that the words are pointing to something outside of themselves, and that words can be translated and repurposed. These people might not be so charitable with drawings. They might feel like there isn’t anything to translate into more familiar forms. They would focus too much on the explicatory poems of the Dictionary of relations, which, considered in isolation, are not enough to give you the answers you seek.
This second challenge – the challenge of wordlessness – is reminiscent of another debate in philosophy of art: can musical composition convey philosophical ideas? Hane Htut Maung has explored this question brilliantly in a recently published article and here is how they summarize the deep skepticism that the notion of a “philosophical piece of music” elicits: “Skeptics about musical representation deny that music can genuinely convey anything. This view goes at least as far back as Eduard Hanslick’s claim that the sonic components of music have “no content other than themselves” (Hanslick, 2018, p. 109). Such pessimism is also shared by Scruton (1976), who argues that music can only be representational if it is possible for the listener to grasp its intended representational content through the music alone, without any help from extra-musical resources. However, according to Scruton, nothing can be found in the music itself that enables it to present a specific thought about something other than itself. Thus, Scruton suggests that music is “an abstract art, with no power to represent the world” (Scruton, 1997, p. 273).” [Section 3: Representing philosophical ideas]
Against this skepticism, Hane Htut Maung argues for two ways in which a piece of music can be philosophical, and these two answers similarly apply to the abstract forms of the Dictionary of relations.
First of all, we ought to deny that abstract art can be said to convey ideas only if it does so without the aid of resources outside of itself (“without any help from extra-musical resources”). This principle of parsimony isolates the abstract piece of art needlessly: a piece of art is always encountered in a full context, and that is not “cheating” to rely on that context to understand what we are looking at or listening to. Hane Htut Maung points out that “Throughout the Renaissance and Baroque periods, there was a musical convention whereby [the music of canonic] counterpoint was understood to reflect the ontology of the cosmos and imitate the order of nature.” [Section 3: Representing philosophical ideas] Listeners would therefore expect the work to be philosophical and be primed to read ideas into it. Similarly, when Tsai Hsin-yun opens the work with the phrase “In the beginning is the relationship”, as well as a reference to the phenomenological notion of “being with”, they prime the reader to watch out for ideas about the subjective primacy of relationships. The reader enters a slow synaesthesia-filled meditative state, in which every symbol encountered from here on out reminds them of actual relationships they had in the past or types of relationships they had or aspire to have.
That being said – and that is the second argument – we are right to wonder if the work of art also conveys ideas whose point of origin are much closer to the structure of the piece itself, rather than coming from context and convention. And the answer is yes! Hane Htut Maung analyses the “structural resemblance” that exists between the patterns of canonic counterpoint and the workings of the human mind: “through structural resemblance, canonic counterpoint could be used to convey the rational activity of the mind, the derivation of knowledge from a set of basic principles, the building of multiple possible universes from aspects of a single universe, the mechanical processes of the material world, the notion of the mathematical sublime, and the reflexivity of thought” (Section 3) Musicians, steeped into the culture of their time, will deal with the leading philosophical ideas of their time, in their own medium.
The Dictionary of ideas achieves structural resemblance in regards to the “being-with” structure of subjectivity. According to Heidegger “‘being-with’ is an ontological structure of being-in-the-world. As a “being-with”, I am essentially keyed in to, and responsive to, the way others comport themselves in our shared world. This means, Heidegger points out, that each of us already has a basic “understanding of the other”—not a cognition or explicitly formulable kind of understanding, but one that is manifest in our ability to cope fluidly with the situations in which we need to act together.” (from the Heidegger entry of Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). It is a basic, pre-theoretical, kind of attunement to the other, which never leaves our side, even as we shift from one type of relationship to another. And as you can imagine, the idea that this pre-theoretical knowledge is not “explicitly formulable” is like catnip to philosophers and artists, who will try to formulate it anyway, and come so very close to achieving it, that the fruits of their efforts bring glory to all human kind.
Absolutely key to the entire book (to the whole attempt of formulating “being-with”) is this single page:
It is so simple. And yet everything hinges on it. We see three elements: 1) the “singular object” represents the most reified part of the relationship. This could be the ego (the sense of individual selfhood) of a person, or this could be a nation-state, or any other “thing” that we are content to treat as a “thing”. 2) the “connection” represents the link between entities, the wilful or accidental interaction that is often taken to be the whole of the relationship when we see the world as atomized and not as inter-dependent. 3) The “event” is the rich new display that occurs in the midst of a relationship. William James wrote that the newborn infant experiences the world as “one great blooming, buzzing confusion”. An event, I feel, is a surge – a thrill! – of great blooming, buzzing, confusion; more or less tamed by our efforts to make sense of it.
This page – which provides symbols for the fundamental ingredients of “being-with”, later combined to form the complex drawings within the book – is what prevents this dictionary from remaining forever mysterious. It is hard to look at it and to not think of Spinoza’s Ethics, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order. Spinoza’s Ethics also supplies the basic elements – premises and definitions – that will later be combined into more complex forms, and this is what turns complicated, mysterious, and quite idiosyncratic statements into things that can be learned, internalized, or offered for discussion. So not only does the work acquire the power to talk about something outside of itself, but it also acquires a rigour that allows us to judge whether what it says is correct or incorrect. If I remember correctly, Spinoza would revise the Ethics based on the feedback of a close group of friends, who was quite invested in the project and had many questions to make sure they understood the master correctly.
To read the Dictionary of relations is a meditative and philosophical experience. Setting haste aside, and refusing to take “things” for granted, you reflect calmly on the typology and description of relationships. With the three basic elements in mind, you follow the logic of the elaboration of each relationship-symbol. As I said earlier, four small drawings represent the different steps that preceded the final form of the drawing, but it is important to notice that these four steps are not the literal chronological steps of the creation of the final drawing. The symbol undergoes deep mutations that obey the inner logic of the relationship, and these small drawings depict this logical metamorphosis, not the hand movements of the artist.
On the image above, you see the depiction of a form of relationship labelled "Annexation". The process the reader sees image per image is one of subsumption of individual objects into a new order. Singular entities are not only absorbed by the growing "Event", but they are also flattened into each other, until they form a singular rainbow. Upon seeing this we may ask: is this how the political process of "annexation" work all the time, turning individuals into the mere glory of a greater event? We may also ask: is there a process of annexation that can happen, not between states, but between individuals?
Thus, the whole of the book can be a commentary on the primacy of relationships and on the necessary structure of each type of relationship. Through this bare-bone, understated, structural resemblance with the subject matter, Tsai Hsin-yun is able to ask you calmly and pedagogically: “it seems like this to me; does it seem like this to you too?” If you reflect, if you follow, you can answer.
For more art works from Tsai Hsin-yun (a lot of beautiful visual art), go here: https://www.tsaihsinyun.com/projets
(PS: On this blog, we explore a new philosophical exercise every month. For example, we did the hard work of reading Spinoza, without skipping the demonstrations. Or to take another example, we explored the epistemic virtues of Tarot. Take a look around the blog for more exercises!
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(17/08/2026)
Pierrick Simon
my email: lemiroirtranquille@outlook.fr
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