Series on the History of Chinese Philosophy, Pt. 13
The Dao of Virtue Complete
Great Carvers Cut Little
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Welcome to Part 13 of the series! If you’ve missed earlier entries, you can check them out here:
We concluded the last entry with an extended metaphor for Daoist metaphysics — the image of a fallow field.
It has one major flaw, though… it implies there’s something like what the ancient Greek philosophers called κόσμος, or cosmos, lying at the heart of Daoist metaphysics.
This is problematic, though, because ‘cosmos’ carries connotations of an ordered, unified whole… an idea echoed in our word UNI-verse.
While a holism of a CERTAIN SORT is undoubtedly present in Chinese metaphysics, it’s anything but homogeneous. Instead, the whole in Daoist thought is usually described as EMERGING from the dynamic interaction of plurality — similar to the way an organism is ‘alive’ when all of its parts are functioning together as they should.
Dispelling Presuppositions
Keeping this key difference in mind not only sheds some light on Daoist philosophy, but can help dispel a number of presuppositions in our own tradition, as well. As Tim Connolly has put it:
To understand Chinese thought as it is, we must get rid of the concepts and theories that have become predominant in the Western philosophical tradition — ‘the useless lumber blocking the path to China.’ (p. 115)
One of the biggest roadblocks on that path might be subject-object dualism — the separation of knower and known into to two mutually exclusive categories.
Descartes’ famous statement “I think, therefore I am,” really only makes sense in the sorts of languages (like French or English) that depend on subject-predicate semantics. So, OF COURSE it seemed obvious to Descartes that if he was able to doubt his own existence it meant there must be something that was doing the doubting.
In a null-subject language (like Chinese), where an action can occur without someone explicitly performing it, that kind of reasoning seems pretty strange. We even find the NEGATION of Descartes stated in some Daoist and Buddhist writings… something like: “I don’t know much, but the one thing I do know is that ‘I’ don’t exist.”
An insight from F.W. Mote helps put this into perspective:
the basic point which outsiders have found so hard to detect is that the Chinese… have regarded the world and man as uncreated… the genuine Chinese cosmogony is that of organismic process, meaning that all of the parts of the entire cosmos belong to one organic whole and that they all interact as participants in one spontaneously self-generating life process.
Consequently, when someone sees themself as part and parcel of a larger, life PROCESS, they tend to be a little less self-involved.
The subject-object distinction also has led to some other roadblocks, too.
The first of these deals with analyses of the object side of that distinction… in what philosophers like Heidegger and Derrida criticized as the “metaphysics of presence.” David Hall and Roger Ames have called it a general ontology:
In the Western tradition, thinking about the order of things began with questions such as ‘What kinds of things are there?’ and ‘What is the nature (physis) of things?’ This inquiry, which later came to be called ‘metaphysics’, took on two principal forms. One, which the scholastics later termed ontologia generalis (general ontology), is the investigation of the most essential features of things — the being of beings.
The other deals with analyses of the subject-side, in what Hall and Ames call a universal science:
A slightly less abstract mode of metaphysical thinking, scientia universalis (universal science), involves the attempt to construct a science of the sciences, a way of knowing which organizes the various ways of knowing the world about us. Both general ontology and universal science interpret the order of the cosmos.
So, if we really want access into what the Daoists were thinking about, we need to think acosmotically, i.e. WITHOUT the presuppositions that extend from a notion of cosmos.
Ars Contextualis — The Art of Context
Of course, there IS a notion of oneness or unity [yī, 一], present in texts falling under that Daoist designation — like the Dàodéjīng, Zhuangzi, and the recently unearthed Fánwù Liúxíng — but it resembles more of a one-THROUGH-the-many kind of idea than it does a Platonist, one-OVER-many view… which has led to the kinds of conceptual roadblocks we just covered.
Hall and Ames have identified a philosophical alternative to the ontologia generalis and scientia universalis approaches — what they called an ars contextualis, or contextualizing art. As they put it:
Perhaps the best designation for the most general ‘science’ of order in the Chinese tradition would be ars contextualis. ‘The art of contextualizing’ contrasts with both scientia universalis and ontologia generalis. Chinese thinkers sought the understanding of order through the artful disposition of things, a participatory process which does not presume that there are essential features, or antecedent-determining principles, serving as transcendent sources of order. The art of contextualizing seeks to understand and appreciate the manner in which particular things present-to-hand are, or may be, most harmoniously correlated.
A similar concept can be found in the way an image takes shape in the negative space of work of art, simply by casting it in relief against its context. Chinese landscape painters perfected the technique of negative space. In many such works, the empty space is as important, if not MORE IMPORTANT, than the lines on the page.
One implication of the ars contextualis approach is a greater appreciation for the beauty of things as they are, without some overarching order imposed upon them. The Japanese aesthetic wabi-sabi is one expression of that idea.
The late British sinologist, Alan Watts, elucidated the point nicely when he said:
When you look at the patterns of foam on water, they never make an artistic mistake and they’re not a mess. They are wiggly, but in a way orderly — and it’s difficult for us to describe that kind of order… Now take a look at yourselves. You’re all wiggly. We think, you know, we’re pretty ordinary because there are a lot of us that look approximately the same. So when we see a human being we think, “Well, that’s pretty much in order, and kind of regular, and it’s okay.” But we don’t realize how wiggly we are; we are just like clouds, rocks, and stars. Look at the way the stars are arranged. Do you criticize the way the stars are arranged? Would you like them to form fours? Would you like them to be sort of set out, like needlepoint, on the canvas of the skies?
Daoist Metaphysics
Now let’s start putting some of these points together to round out our picture of Daoist metaphysics. We’ve already seen the many ways in which it is acosmotic.
When Daoist thinkers wanted to denote the totality of existence in their writings, they often used the phrase wànwù [萬物] or “the myriad things” — which demonstrates how deeply pluralistic their concept truly was. Although wànwù denotes the number ten-thousand, it’s used in Daoist writings to represent an indefinitely large amount.
Put simply, the pluralism at the heart of the Daoist concept of wànwù [萬物] suggests that they had no true concept of cosmos at all. The order found in such a system is bottom-up, not top-down.
Daoist metaphysics could likewise be understood as correlative, insofar as it expresses a reciprocal and complementary matrix of relations between existent things. In this way, the ‘field’ of dào is really a kind of network of significance relations in which each thing is enmeshed… and, so, we might think of the way that ‘field’ shapes how we interact with everything around us as just one ‘focal point,’ among many, within that field. In other words, on a Daoist view, “there is ontological parity among the things and events that constitute our lives.” (Hall & Ames p. 13)
The locus of human experience, then, isn’t some disembodied mind, cut off from the rest of existence. This is important because it suggests that all understanding always already comes with contextual strings attached.
Since individuals within the field are “mutually implicating,” as Hall and Ames have put it, then experience always points back to the field of dào. Understood in these terms, experience is not something that passively happens to us, but instead is something that is actively done. Daoists have moments of life-experience, not merely perceptions.
In other words, experience insofar as it is experienced, is simply life, intensified.
Rather than standing for the imprisonment of one’s own inner sensations, this means a lively interaction within the field; at its sharpest, it indicates total interpenetration of self and surroundings. In lieu of a total yielding to the flux and flow of transformation [or wùhuà, in Chinese], it provides the only presentation of an order that is neither antecedent to the world nor stagnant — but rather is pulsating and evolving.
Those other “things” within the field, it turns out, are better thought of as processual events, not “objects,” since there are in nature — NOT the way marbles are “in” a box, but the way events are in history… in a moving, growing ongoing process.
In this way, Daoism incorporated insights regarding the flux of nature from the ancient text known as the Yìjīng, or “Book of Changes” (see Part 5).
According to the Yìjīng, the order manifested in the changes of nature shows up as a unity of opposites, as interplay between yīn [陰] and yáng [陽]. Everything in nature contains its respective yīn and yáng states, and since these states are understood as being in movement rather than held in absolute stasis — anything could be seen as its potential opposite, when viewed from an alternate perspective. As one chapter of the Dàodéjīng reads:
Dào begets one;
One begets two;
Two begets three;
Three begets the ‘myriad things’ [wànwù].
The myriad things bear the yīn and embrace the yáng, and their cross-currents of qì produce harmony.
Men loathe words like ‘lonely’, ‘widowed’, and ‘hapless’, and yet kings and lords use these to refer to themselves.
Thus a thing might be added to by being diminished and diminished by being added to.
What others teach I also teach.
‘The violent shall not come to a natural end.’
I shall take this as my precept. [Ch. 42]
So, the ‘self’ is just as much ‘in’ this world as it ‘is’ this world — we are a constituent part of the whole. Organisms are processually IN nature and our selves are processually IN our organic make up. Self-creation IS co-creation of the world.
This means our lives are co-transformative. “The capacity for transformation lies within the world itself as an integral characteristic of the events that constitute it.” (Hall & Ames p. 21) AND, it also lies within us, as one of those constitutive events.
The “ten thousand things” in which we live is a happening and our lives are both a part of that happening and smaller happenings in their own right.
This suggests that “the term dào, like the terms “building,” “learning,” and “work,” entails both the process and the created product. It is the locus and the time frame within which the always contextualized creativity takes place.” (Hall & Ames p. 17) In other words, it’s self-animated in the sense of having the basis and origin of its animus, or life, already within itself.
These are some of the points that inspired David Hall and Roger Ames to jettison the traditional translations of the Dàodéjīng as “The Way and its Virtue” or “The Way and its Power” in favor of “The Field and its Focus.”
Translating the Dàodéjīng in terms of ‘the field and its focus’ may seem novel at first blush, but there are some good reasons for thinking about it in these terms.
For instance, by narrowly characterizing dé as just an attribute of dào — e.g. ‘The Way and ITS Virtue” — standard English translations seem to miss something really important. But, dé isn’t some virtue/power that the dào POSSESSES.
We’ve already discussed (in Part 12) how dào really isn’t some unseen ‘force,’ but rather more like the total matrix of relationships between various points of force (or perhaps, better, VECTORS) in an overall situation.
In other words, dào isn’t so much like a gust of wind as it is like the entire situation depicted on a wind map.
That said, dé shouldn’t be equated just with the power of a singular wind gust, either. To pilfer a phrase from Aristotle, “one swallow does not make a spring,” and neither does one swaying pine bough make for a blustery day.
If you want a more accurate assessment of the weather, you have to look around at the other particulars in view. If you want a clearer understanding of dé, you have to look around at the other entities within the ten thousand things… since each is an occasion for dào to find its focus. But, such a focus doesn’t just come from an external source. Focusing the field in the “Dao of Virtue Complete” — or ‘constant’ dé — also involves harnessing BOTH an inner vitality and an inner suppleness. As Chapter 28 in the Dàodéjīng states:
Know the masculine, but abide in the feminine, and become a universal ravine.
As a universal ravine, constant dé will flow through you and never leave.
Always renewed, like a newborn babe.
Know the light, but abide in the dark, and become a universal model.
As a universal model, constant dé will never waver.
You may return to the boundless.
Know honor, but abide in disgrace, and become a universal valley.
As a universal valley, constant dé will never be depleted.
You may return to the uncarved block.
When a block is carved, it becomes useful. When a sage uses it, he becomes the ruler.
Thus, “Great carvers cut little.” [Ch 28]
Just as the low places on the Earth’s surface are where things come to rest, so can resilience and wisdom come to those who reside there. As they say: “Still waters run DEEP!” Embodying these ideas, one can bend — but not break — when the great windstorms come. The rigid oak may snap, but the supple bamboo lets the wind wash past… only to rise again.
For the author(s) of the Dàodéjīng, this meant returning to a simpler way of being:
The wish to grasp the world and control it — I see its futility.
The world is a sacred vessel; it cannot be controlled.
One who would control it would ruin it;
one who would grasp it would lose it.” [Ch 29]
Lots of people, especially those in charge, tend to live their lives with a sort of death-grip… trying to choke everything into submission to suit their whims, only to find that the tighter they grasp, the harder it is to hang on. Instead, the Dàodéjīng puts an emphasis on personal efficacy as a means of leadership by example:
A man of the highest virtue does not pursue to virtue and that is why he has it.
A man of the lowest virtue pursues virtue and that is why he is without it.
The former acts without striving, and leaves nothing undone.
The latter acts but accomplishes nothing. [Ch. 38]
The Non-forms and Daoist Praxeology
Hopefully you’re starting to get the gist of how Daoist practice is a kind of “contextualizing artform.” In fact, in a certain sense, it’s really an art WITHOUT any set forms, rules, or patterns at all! In this way, Daoist praxeology [or ‘logic of practice’] is both a negative critique of Confucian ethics AND a positive vision for replacing it.
Again, Hall and Ames sum this up nicely:
In Confucianism, ‘self’ is determined by sustained effort in deferential transactions guided by ritually structured roles that project one’s person outward into society and culture. Such a person becomes a focus of the community’s deference…
Daoism, on the other hand, expresses its deferential activity through what [are called] the wu-forms. The three most familiar articulations of this pervasive sensibility are: wúwéi [effortless action], wúzhì [unprincipled knowledge], and wúyù [objectless desire].
In the Daoist critique of Confucianism, it is assumed that li [ritual] has ossified into a technical morality that, far from facilitating unmediated expression, dislocates the human community from its natural rhythms. As such, generic, institutionalized li now mediates behavior, and in so doing, suppresses spontaneous natural habits. (Ames & Hall p. 38, 53)
So, the distinction is NOT between reason and habit, but INSTEAD between intelligent habits and unintelligent, deferential ones. It’s the former, intelligent habits of the Daoist non-forms that lead to the kind of sagehood exhibiting the “Dao of Virtue Complete.”
The Dàodéjīng says:
This is why the sage dwells in effortless action in affairs and teaches without lecturing.
The ten thousand things rise and fall without cease,
Begetting, without possessing.
Acting, without taking credit.
Feats are achieved, then forgotten.
Therefore they last forever. [Ch. 2]
In Part 14 we’ll compare some of these themes in the Dàodéjīng with what’s found in another Daoist text, known as the Zhuangzi.
Hope to see you there!
