Becoming Bamboo: Western and Eastern Explorations of the Meaning of Life

Alice Kidd is an editor with The New Catalyst editorial collective in
Lillooet, B.C.

In Becoming Bamboo Carter asserts the primacy of experience in
valuation. He examines valuing first as a rational and moral activity,
and relates this to the meaning of life. This rational exercise has been
performed many times before. The novelty—and thus the excitement of
and interest in his treatment of the topic—comes from the use of
cross-cultural comparisons that reveal and support the importance of
experience and feeling in valuing.

The Japanese, he suggests, see no division between being in experience
and valuing experience. Western valuing too often rests on detached,
so-called objective examination of experience. The difference has
enormous implications for our customary treatment of each other, of
other animals, of all life and nonlife.

This is not a book for the general reader. Some of the passages, in
early chapters especially, are phrased in academic language that would
seriously reduce the interest of most nonacademic readers. However, the
rewards of toiling through the swamps of intrinsic versus extrinsic
values and moral versus ethical perspectives are real.

Carter proposes deconstruction as a method of valuing life. He sees
this methodology as providing an appropriate path between the rigidity
of a wholly determined world and the formlessness of a wholly
relativistic one. “The meaning of life is to be found in the living of
it, and even for the individual a considerable range of possibilities
and an unending flow of reflections upon your life constitutes part of
that meaning.” Becoming Bamboo provides a framework for living life
whole, as a daily inquiry into the meaning of life.