The Woman Carrying a Corpse

 

Chi Hui, "The Woman Carrying a Corpse" translated from Chinese by Judith Huang, from The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories, 2023.


This story is thought provoking. Issues of futility, how our lives and actions come to have meaning, and our relationship to the dead are all interesting topics brought out in Hui's story; however, I'm going to murmur about something else:

The story brings to mind how explanations that involve citing reasons for actions are different than explanations that involve citing causes for actions. While it might be natural on first reflection to think of reasons as simply causes, and as such, reduce all explanations to causal, the story points to a couple of features of reasons-explanations that distinguish them from causal explanations. We tend to muddle the two up, but reasons have a normative component that causal explanations simply don't have; reasons justify an action, but causes can't justify. Second, reasons have a post-hoc nature to them. They often arise to make rational sense of behavior after an inquiry is made, while causes always come before and determine their effect. 

The story suggests a constructive (and social) element to how sense is made of our actions. One and the same event can take on different meanings and be understood in diverse ways. As we discover, the woman has many reasons for carrying the corpse that are all compatible with one another and all explain her action, but none of them are causes.   


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