Thinking
East and West
Cyril Welch
Started writing 30 January 2012
First wrapped up on 8 March
Combed through late August
Some adjustments on 13 March 2013
While utterly agonizing for those engaged in them, lovers’
quarrels generally appear utterly silly to those looking on.
Sunk into one, you want out, you sense its futility and would like it
to end, yet everything you say makes it worse. And when it’s over,
you too look back on it and wonder what it was about. Strange.
We would like to believe that such quarrels play themselves out
in a small niche of our private lives, that they don’t — or shouldn’t
— spill over into the rest of life, into our public life at work or into
the world at large. Yet they do, and we then strive to press them
back into our private sphere, something called our “emotional life”
— as distinct, I suppose, from our “cognitive life.”
It doesn’t work. Love is what holds everything together — one
of those facts of life that may well escape the notice of one who has
never yet quarreled as a lover, not yet teetered over its abyss, never
yet dissolved in the dissolution of its bonds. Bond of two: each
coming from a different source and moving in opposing directions
— and yet melding, precariously, into one life . Bond of kin: each
moving out from a the same source, already melded and now
dispersing. Bond of those in a working relationship — whether well-
defined locally or vaguely defined at large. In pre-Enlightenment
ages, as well as in at least some non-Western cultures, we hear or
read talk of the multiple bonds of nature as though these were loves,
whereas we now call them forces (gravity, instinct . . . ) — with a
difference: if we can get these bonds right, we understand them to
be indissoluble, at most counteractable, so unlike the bonds of love.
Indeed, the bonds of love do not hold. Lovers quarrel. Families
seethe. Workplaces and whole cities simmer with distrust. Nations
war within themselves and with one another. Things fall apart.
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Dissolution is bothersome. Typically, we seek refuge in the
reliability of Celestial Mechanics, as our ancestors called the object
of our present-day astronomy, or that of the Terrestrial Mechanics
copied out from it and now applied all the way down to Genetic
Mechanics. Instead of seeking refuge, the more thoughtful among
us may ask why: Why are the bonds of love so fragile, so
unreliable? Or, perhaps more feasibly: How might we learn to
accept their fragility?
Immediately available is an of-course answer, one that gives
short shrift to the question: Each thing, at least every terrestrial
body, drives toward its own satisfaction — co-operates provisionally
with other things in its environment but in the end has no direct
interest in the satisfaction of anything else. Our Enlightenment
tradition insists that satisfaction is essentially individual rather than
communal. This contention seems especially well borne out when
satisfaction gets reduced to survival. Yet, in order to account for
opposing evidence (mothers and fathers who defend their children,
individuals sacrificing themselves for others), the insistence has
undergone so many amendments that it nowadays talks of
individuals wanting to transmit their genes (a kind of immortality
after all). — This answer you may read in books of the 19 and 20th th
centuries, although Nietzsche, reviewing all the traditions of the
West (and contrasting them with some from the East), detected
throughout what he calls the “will to power” (its historical
prevalence he then takes to justify endorsement of it as super
knowledge of everything). But you needn’t go so far into esoteric
literature for its central application to human affairs: you need only
read the various Charters of Rights available in the West, starting
with the American Bill of Rights.
The essentially intra-competitive function of our institutions
depends on the suppression of love as original bonding, the
reconsignment of it to private life, an optional component of
emotional life. I sometimes wonder whether this suppression does
not account for the current collective neurosis, especially evident in
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the United States — a pathological condition, or mass hysteria,
familiar to historians, most recently in the Europe of the 1930s.
But I don’t want to get lost in consideration of macrocosmic
phenomena, essentially nebulous as these are, being themselves
outgrowths of microcosmic conditions. If any genuine under-
standing of those problems ever does evolve (at the moment of
overcoming them), it will issue from an understanding of conditions
closer to home — those in which we are directly and fully implicated
and no longer simply registering them at a distance.
Such as a lover’s quarrel — something which most any reader
knows first-hand. It can take many contrasting forms: quarreling
about intended or unintended slights, about what was said or
unsaid, done or undone, about how past events should be under-
stood, about what and when and how to be doing something; in
addition, among couples sharing the same quarters, about all kinds
of household chores (who should wash the dishes) and planned
activities (whether to watch a game or visit a relative); and of course
about real or imagined infidelities past, present or future, and even
attitudes.
Like two magnetic bars placed wrong end-to-end: reciprocal
repulsion, yet each also trying to twist itself to restitute the essential
attraction. Afterwards, or for others, an opportunity for reflection.
It’s when things go wrong that we find ourselves especially well
positioned to ponder what’s right — to seek out what we assume
prevailed and in some sense know to have prevailed, what has now
gone missing and might again be recovered. It’s when things are
missing that we no long take them for granted — that we wonder
about them, even at them.
There may be a disagreement, a difference in opinion or
volition, but that’s not enough to qualify as a quarrel. Were we to
assume that it did, we should brace ourselves for a lifetime of
quarreling — either that or monotony. No, for a disjunction to
qualify as a quarrel, one or both must be complaining about the
other’s opinion or volition, action or attitude. Complaint directs
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itself to the being of the other person — or, more exactly, to his or her
not being. A complaint strikes to the core, the substance of the
person — unlike objection, reservation or perception regarding
features of a person. It also issues from the core of the one who
complains — who has the complaint. And what’s at stake is the
being of each, their mutual bonding — not really what was said or
done, or is being planned, let alone the chores. At risk, more or less
seriously, is love itself.
Some other conflicts don’t qualify either. A child, even an
adolescent can have a crush: a delightful attraction-at-a-distance,
one not embedded in a life formed together. The affection may even
be reciprocal: a boy and a girl like each other. But unless they form
a third thing, a shared life, each will sooner or later discover many
unlikeable features of the other: there may then be a nasty parting
of the ways, but no love can be lost — because none has been gained.
Then too there are couples whose life together developed from
the desire for prestige, wealth or carnal satisfaction — sometimes all
three melted down into an amalgam of convenience. Again, the two
may in the course of time find themselves in love after all, in which
case they may then really quarrel — as lovers. Otherwise they can
only quarrel as merchants do.
And there’s what might be called troubadouric love — where
one or both are in it for the thrill of being in love, loving to love
rather than loving the other: a self-indulgent way of transcending
the dearth of one’s daily life, so that the prospect of daily life taking
over puts an end to the affair. I have heard stories of men who, on
their wedding night, were appalled at the sight or feel of pubic hair.
Here there’s not even the possibility of disagreeing significantly, let
alone quarreling. The troubadouric lover has a quarrel with life
itself, with its quotidian framework, and in the end wants nothing
to do with it.
At the heart of a lovers’ quarrel lies a genuine attraction — now
transmuted into a repulsion, just as genuine, even though distracted
by some supposed object of the quarrel. What makes the quarrel
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genuine is the original unity of spirit that is now indeed dissolving.
Herein lies the distress of the quarrel — also, if we recollect it
genuinely, its attestation.
About this heart I have nothing more to say: it lurks constantly
in the background of any reflection on love but can only be endured
— any effort to comprehend it places us outside it, which then
falsifies it from the start.
Lately, though, I have learned something to say about what you
might call the brain of a lover’s quarrel.
Look — or listen — again: It’s not right that you didn’t introduce
me to your friend last night. It’s only right that you do the dishes
after I prepared the meal. You’re not right about the point at which
Eve seduced Adam. You’re not right about what our Prime Minister
advocates. — All, remember, in the tone of complaint: distress. The
speaker knows what’s right and charges the other with an error of
judgement. There is, then, cerebral disagreement nested in the
affective disharmony — even if, in desperation, one or both parties
retreat into volitional difference: I just don’t like it, don’t want it, will
not tolerate it (the “it” being what was said or done, or the attitude
behind the saying or doing, not saying or not doing). In short: I’m
right and you’re wrong. And you disagree — thus compounding
your guilt.
The brain of a lovers’ quarrel is this: as distinct from a dis-
agreement, it’s about who’s right — and this at the expense of what’s
right. In logical study we learn to distinguish between the two: “S
is P” and “I assert (I hold, I claim) S is P.” In the first, I turn toward
a subject, and bid you to do likewise — and discover what might be
discerned about it, predicated of it. In the second, I put myself
forward as the author of the predication — and, under duress (say,
in legal or academic proceedings), I must defend my own position
in regard to the subject. The interrelations are much different in
each case. The first stands as a proposal, one where the speaker and
listener may look together to discover what’s right — whereas in the
second the listener looks primarily at the speaker to determine
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whether he or she is right or wrong, perhaps deceived or even
intentionally deceiving.
You may recall the story of Arjuna in the Hindu classic Bhagavad
Gita. Arjuna is a mighty warrior called upon to take the lead in a
battle where, to his dismay, friends and relatives are lined up on the
opposing side, appearing as foes to be defeated. It’s not right, he
says, and refuses to fight. Yet Krishna, his divine charioteer, argues
with him: Arjuna has no business worrying about what’s right in
battle, his vocation is to do battle, and who’s there, whether friend
or foe elsewhere in life, is defined by the battle lines — and what
happens there, while exercising his vocation, is . . . well, that’s the
rest of the story. Warcraft is one kind of knowledge, or perhaps one
dimension of any kind of knowledge, but one especially prominent
in the story. The insight Krishna has to offer is yet another kind of
knowledge, one of prime importance to all of us, no matter what our
vocation. And there is also an in-between knowledge — the kind
that sorts out who’s who, who’s right and who’s wrong, even what’s
right and what’s wrong before and after the battle, i.e. apart from
tending to the matter itself — to what’s really right (taking care of
things). This third kind (the classifications are mine!), no matter
how intriguing before and after, just gets in the way. In Arjuna’s
way, at least. According to Krishna, at least.
The in-between kind is vastly troublesome: it’s the kind
manifesting our desire to get things right in advance of turning
toward them. Or to back off prematurely once we have glimpse of
what’s right. In either case it’s a kind that leaves us out of touch. So
that knowledge here (if we allow it to be so called) is essentially
nebulous.
Contrast this in-between kind with the first kind, which consists
in tending to the matters at hand and requires that we answer to
their exigencies. And with the third kind: when contemplating this
exigency (that we answer to their exigencies) we also learn our
exigency, and to answer to it rather than flee from it — as happens
when debating who’s right. And very obviously happening when
wanting above all to be the one who is right. Works like the
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Bhagavad Gita engage us in this third kind of knowledge — a
knowing of the multiple exigencies arising within one’s vocation
while also knowing the one big exigency of being human. Neither
of which is a knowledge about anything — unlike the middle kind.
How quickly a lovers’ quarrel dissolves if only the two stop
concentrating on who’s right and turn to the matter itself in a joint
venture!
Which got me to thinking of the opening of Laocius’ Second
Meditation, where we read something startlingly contrary to
our disposition in the West, especially as this disposition takes on
enhanced forms in our intellectual pursuits:
The verses appear to recommend that we refrain from trying to
establish what’s right — that the effort itself is wrong. But wouldn’t
so many of our problems — both personal and shared — evaporate
if only everyone agreed about what counts as beautiful and good?
Can it be that this kind of universality is essentially ugly, not good?
But what then might be a viable alternative? Everybody having his
own opinion about these things? Lots of variety (which we already
have!) and perhaps colorful, but no efficacy, no unity. — Or not
being concerned at all about what’s right, beautiful or good? Lots
of stupidity (which already abounds!) and, if universal, even a kind
of unity . . . of indifference. — Or only some people knowing what
counts as right, beautiful or good? Lots of evidence that this is the
case for any given field, where those other alternatives appear
especially silly . . . but hardly worth contesting.
It’s puzzling, and I would like to pursue the puzzle in
conjunction with and contrast to our own disposition to prize
universality of judgement. But first let’s consider the reason stated
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in this Meditation — the reason that such universality is ugly, or not
good. The verses following directly upon those first two begin:
And this highest-level generalization gets illustrated with lower-
level ones:
difficult and easy complement one another
long and short test one another
high and low give rise to one another
consonance and dissonance harmonize one another
before and after accompany one another.
The illustrations of the reason (for concluding that universality
of agreement on what’s beautiful or good is itself ugly or not good)
make sense: we understand things by contraries like fast vs. slow,
alert vs. dull, warm vs. cold, private vs. public . . . As we are
learning a skill, we not only learn to distinguish between what’s
easy and what’s difficult but actually move within the difference,
aiming for ease of execution in what is giving us trouble — and, as
teachers, we do well to take account of our learnees’ progress in
reference to these two poles. Similarly, we will judge a walk to be
short or long, but these determinations are, as we say, relative to
each other and embedded in the situation (taking a child along?
rushed?). We consider a mountain to be high because we know
places that are low — and vice versa. Only the fourth escapes easy
orchestration, even translation — it seems to recall musical issues in
ways no longer intelligible to us.
Our academic work also unfolds within contraries. If eras did
not contrast with one another there would be no historiography. If
societies did not contrast with one another, there would be no
sociology. If animal species did not contrast with one another there
would be no biology. If the works of philosophers did not contrast
with one another there would be no philosophy. Each side brings
out the peculiarities, at least, of the other — but perhaps, with added
effort on our part, also their essentialities.
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May we then rightly generalize — concluding that is and isn’t
(being and lack of being, presence and absence, having and missing)
generate each other? We find something like this thought
prominent throughout Laocius’ work, and also in other works of the
East. Indeed, we find something like it — at least its verbal
formulation — in ancient Greek philosophy: Plato and Aristotle are
often nuancing Heracleitus (¦ê ôäí äéángñüíôäí êáëëßòôçí
�ñìïíßáí: from contrariety the beautifulest harmony). Descartes
offers a pastiche of its Medieval version when he speaks of his own
peculiarly modern drive as placing him between supreme-being and
non-being (inter Deum & nihil, sive inter summem ens & non ens).
And, within the modern project, Hegel restitutes something of the
Greek version when speaking of the astounding power of the
negative (die ungeheure Macht des Negativen): life “comes to life” (has
being, becomes “positive”) only in the face of death.
And how might Laocius’ generalization help us appreciate the
significance of those first two verses?
First of all, though: How are we to understand “everybody
knowing what’s beautiful as being beautiful, what’s good as being
good? Again, speaking as a Westerner, I note the logical difference
between knowing something that’s right, beautiful, good (the three
super-predicates essential to our own tradition) — knowing the job
well done, say — and claiming to know that it is such. Declaring to
the world that it is such, I place myself forward as a believer in, or
even a defender of, its being such — and perhaps seeking the
company of others in the belief, in the defense. The original focus
(the job well done) may not yet fade entirely, but it certainly does
not remain front and center. Front and center is now the belief, and
perhaps my defense of it. The logical focus has changed —
peaceably, perhaps, but also, and easily, contentiously: I contend
with you rather than tend to the matter at hand, and engage in a
sideline contrariety.
Contention rightly does belongs to some circumstances. In a
court of law I must declare what I take to be correct determinations,
and I must be prepared to defend them (defend myself, as we say:
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so I am also drawn into the focus of the debate). Similarly in group
deliberations I must defend my proposals and be prepared to doubt
those offered by others. Students must submit their work for my
judgement, and I look to see whether they have formulated it
defensibly. And so on. In each of these cases the direct response to
matters has been suspended: jurors and lawyers bring into being a
floating world of discourse in search of moorings. Indeed, our own
traditions understand this strange ability to engage in discourse-in-
search-of-moorings as defining what it means to be human: as
constituting our rationality, or at least its framework. Indeed, our
notions of democracy build on this understanding of ourselves.
One result of “everybody” being certain about things as being
“true, beautiful or good” is that the mooring is no longer at issue.
Perhaps we would like to believe that our ship is now safe. But does
that mean we now enjoy the things themselves (e.g., the job being
done well)? Is it possible for us to construct a discourse that,
hovering over moments where things may or may not be right,
beautiful or good, can have settled in advance what it means for
them to be such? Our ancestors recognized our propensity to
dream dreams of such an achievement — dreams of having such
divine recipes (of being divine) — perhaps to distract us from our
actual condition as having to work for a living. Still, though, our
own modern tradition has recommended that we dream these
dreams — but only as heuristic devices, Kant called them (that is, as
guiding our efforts to build, say, computer programs for sorting
things out in complicated but always finite ways).
That we can always — indeed will, eventually — lose our
moorings, and not just individually but also institutionally: this can
be terrifying. Not losing them, or not yet having lost them, we
plunge into, find ourselves drawn into, the actual work where
what’s right is at issue: we tend to the job at hand, knowing full
well that things may turn out well or badly — no doubt distressed as
they veer toward the one end and pleased as they veer toward the
other. On the ground, it’s not a question whether everyone agrees,
and if many do agree it’s only afterwards, when there’s the danger
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of complacency — hardly good. A fixed judgement doesn’t work
forward at all — indeed, the effort to get it to do so can become quite
ugly.
As in most of Laocius’ meditations, the next section presents
thoughts that read as though they followed from the foregoing:
Therefore:
the wise man
attends, without acting, his affairs
pursues, not talking, his teachings,
the myriad things are shaped but not distorted
reared, yet not claimed,
worked upon, yet not relied upon.
Each description of the best appears paradoxical. I take the first two
to be addressing how best to respond to things, the final two to be
addressing how things themselves are best to be understood, and
the intervening verse as taking us from the one to the other couplet.
However we sort them out, the five verses contravene our normal
understanding — which is to take care of things by acting and
spread our views of things by talking, so that the multitude of things
change by our working on them and thereby become ours, and
where, in the midst of so many uncertainties, we look for what
appears safe (whether person, circumstance, or method).
But what’s the context of our considerations here? Wisdom, we
read: what it means to be a true, a beautiful, a good . . . what? The
entire book — Master Lao’s Way & Power Classic is its traditional
designation — provides the answer: we are asked to consider what
it means to be a wise leader. First of all, a leader of a community:
a parent, a teacher, a foreman, director of an orchestra, president of
a university or a nation — a leader of people in some organization.
Perhaps also a leader of natural things, as on a farm — where, be it
noted, a master-farmer is also the head of a household teaching the
young how best to feed and milk cows, sow and harvest rice, and
the like. Within any one instance the question already recurs: What
procedure is most efficacious? Laocius’ classic raises the question
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overall — for anyone in a position of power. For only some people,
then? But each of us usually grows, whether we like it or not, into
some such position, one that introduces myriad frustrations
unknown by children — because we have the position but not the
power.
Key to fulfilled leadership is to take care of things and to spread
the way of doing it — but “without acting” and “without talking”:
What might that mean? After all, that’s what leaders do: they act
and they talk! And in unison of decision: they institute procedures
by decreeing them.
The three other descriptors give clues: things get molded but
we do not deprive them of their own being, they are enhanced but
we do not then lay claim to them as our own, they incite our
attendance on this or that particular but we do not then assume we
are done with them. We are tempted by the opposite: to undo
things as they are (for the sake of how they should be), to take
ownership of the things we have cultivated (our labor on them
makes them ours), and of course to assume we’ve settled accounts
with some of them, employing the ones to move on to others.
And these three temptations locate very precisely what our own
traditions uphold. Right at the start, with Plato, and all the way
down to the most conflicting of philosophies in the 20 century, our th
task has been to act and to formulate in such a way that we re-form
things, take them as our own and secure them — so that we ourselves
can proceed safely. Uphold them, be it understood, not as tempta-
tions but as projects — ones that we may of course betray. This
alternative deserves careful consideration as well.
But first . . . there’s a coda to Laocius’ Second Meditation — a
terse statement of how things go if only we become wise:
Results are achieved, but not lingered over.
Then only, when not lingered over, do they not depart.
As leaders we find ourselves especially committed to bringing
things to completion: our entire entourage and environment hang
in the balance. Yet such completions can have staying-power only
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if we don’t linger over them, dwell on them. This too — this leaving
alone, this relinquishing of our “rights” over things — deserves
careful consideration.
Plato’s Republic also engages us in the question of the best way of
communal and individual life, and of the genuine power of
leadership. And in a manner that contrasts remarkably with that of
Laocius’ classic.
For one thing, it’s born out of a quarrel between points of view.
Socrates challenges Cephalus, now at the end of a long life, to
formulate what he figures is most important for a good life: he is
happy to have restored for his heirs the family fortune his father had
inherited only to dissipate, and generalizes this to answer that
what’s most important is to settle one’s debts — whereupon Socrates
cites simple examples of debts, the repaying of which would in fact
be harmful. So his son and heir, Polemarchus, still at the beginning
of life, proposes the needed amendment: what’s best is so to act that
you benefit your friends and obstruct your enemies — whereupon
Socrates asks him to consider what helping and harming mean,
what sort of people you want to be around, and who counts as a
friend or the opposite. — Every answer provides opportunities for
thinking more carefully about our actual condition of inheritance
and debt, helping and harming, friendship and enmity.
But now a third contender, Thrasymachus, a well-established
teacher of public speaking, bursts into the conversation, irritated
with the others for not admitting the obvious: doing well in life
means achieving power over others, since it’s always the stronger
one who dictates the ways things should be done and can thereby
have things the way he wants them.
And so Socrates asks Thrasymachus (and us, anyone who stays
— Cephalus has left for the sacrifices) what it might mean to hold
that “justice is the advantage of the stronger.” The big question for
any of us is: What really counts as advantageous? But Socrates
starts with the more simple-sounding question: What does it mean
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to be strong — to exercise power over circumstance? An adolescent
like Polemarchus might assume power comes from circumstance:
having been given money or position or weapons. Thrasymachus
is not so naive. He knows that power over things requires the
learning of an art, a ôÝ÷íç — what navigators, musicians, herdsmen,
horse-trainers, house-builders and farmers have (and Polemarchus
not yet). It’s an art (skill, knowledge) that gives us power over
circumstances: art is the ability to make things happen. Socrates
(and we ourselves) may then ask how the exercise of an art — this
power, this äýíáìéò — works. In each case, the power of the artisan
lies in, proves itself in, the promotion of the good of something:
getting the ship from one port to another, generating beautiful
sounds, raising healthy livestock, building a serviceable house, and
so on. In fact, then, power serves the well being of other people and
other things, and not one’s own well being — at least not in the
examples cited. Quite the opposite of the “might makes right”
which always and everywhere pops up its tempting face. And the
opposition does not depend on any sentimental or moral reason. It’s
the way life works (once it starts working).
But Thrasymachus notes that people — some or even most of us
— exercise their art for the sake of the returns they get from the
exercise. And one return is precisely power to do as one likes (or as
much as one’s particular remuneration allows). There’s a difference
of times: times of being at work and times of serving one’s own
pleasure. Sure. So Socrates then asks him about what it’s like to be
self-serving while no longer exercising the art — what it’s like to live
self-indulgently. We are then treated to an elaborate spectacle of the
dissolute life, the life of a parasite such as Cephalus’ father, even a
youngster like Polemarchus. All of which eventually leads Socrates
(along with Plato’s own two brothers, who are skeptical but more
engaged than Cephalus’ heir), to re-open the discussion on a
different plane — the question of why it is we come together to form
a community and then, most crucially, how we might raise children
with a view to educating them in the art of leadership so that the
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community can actually thrive (after we, exercising the art already,
have primed the pump: a kind of circularity of event, then).
— The style is of prime significance. Plato’s scripting of the
question of power plunges us into debate among viewpoints.
Forever afterwards, what appears essential is the formulation of
what’s important — in addition to, sometimes even rather than, the
eventuation of it. Genuinely democratic forms of government rely
on debate of this sort. As does our democratic system of justice. As
does the advancement of our modern sciences. As does our under-
standing of education as opening the minds of the young to various
colorful palettes across time and space. Laocius would think we
were crazy.
Correlating with our Western style is an understanding of ôÝ÷íç
and äýíáìéò that subtly contrasts with that of much if not all
classical literature of the East. Reviewing the examples of artisan-
ship, Plato recurrently elaborates and refines the understanding of
art as “helping complete what nature is unable to finish, and does
this by following her” (Aristotle’s formulation of it in his Physics).
Or as rendering us “masters and possessors of nature,” as Descartes
later refined it onto another plane, dropping in all but name (with
which he was abundantly familiar) the coda to Aristotle’s
formulation. For, on the ancient reading, when exercising an art we
complete what things themselves strive to be. On this reading, our
own action is still a bit in accord with Laocius’ version: it is
understood as primarily one of following rather than directing things,
i.e. dancing with their power, their natural movement — as so
manifestly happens when navigators, musicians and the rest
succeed. To introduce power as contending with things, Descartes,
Galileo, Francis Bacon and other modern thinkers explicitly insist
upon developing a New Knowledge, one based in our own devices
rather than in those of the artisans who had hitherto served as the
paradigms of efficacy. A kind of knowledge dedicated precisely to
Thrasymachean power (Faustian, Oswald Spengler calls it).
Plato’s original break-away inaugurated a long and arduous
effort to establish three, as against two ways of living a good life.
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Hitherto, as still today in many situations, only two types of
vocation seemed legitimate: either you learn an art of making or
changing things within the exigencies of communal life, or you learn
an art of leadership, of taking charge and defending communal life.
Any other activity appeared idle, perhaps amusing but not essential
to anyone other than yourself (originally, “idiot” meant self-
absorbed, as Archimedes appeared to be, along with Socrates, Plato
and Aristotle).
If only production and action are fully legitimate, what are
Socrates and the rest doing? So the Athenians themselves
wondered, and rightly suspected them of corrupting the natural
order of things. What’s their ôÝ÷íç? What good do they do? What
do they help to thrive?
Plato and Aristotle answer by looking first to what other, less
seditious intellectuals were doing: geometers and astronomers, for
instance. Such people must develop an art to do their work, and
they come up with results. Their results don’t take the form of wine
or corn, or of getting ships from port to port. They take the form of
knowing how things are, knowing what undergirds production and
action — the nature of things, nature herself. Some such knowledge
is necessary for, and evident in, every productive vocation: we
intellectuals just do it purely. We may, as Thales reportedly did,
come up with more wine, but the real pleasure lies in the knowledge
itself.
So far, no harm done. But this new breed also meddles in
communal affairs. Socrates and his students challenge — not on a
level with other aspiring leaders, but on the sidelines. They don’t
help matters; quite the contrary: they appear to be haranguing,
maybe even jeering. And, instead of accepting the role of advisors
in communal affairs, these founders of our Western tradition
insisted on developing a third vocation, one having legitimacy inde-
pendently of service to production and action. Which is not to say
that it cannot offer such service; again, quite the contrary. It’s just
that, on the terms of this gigantic development, the new vocation,
the then-New Knowledge, refuses to be reduced to such service.
Thinking East & West 17
The name of this new vocation is contemplation. Its point of
focus is what abides, undergirding both production and action:
nature — whatever has a life of its own, with which artisans enter
into a dance and by which we will all sooner or later be crushed.
There’s a direct lineage, passing through the alterations effected by
such thinkers as Descartes, Galileo and Bacon, from the Greek troika
to the physics of Newton, Einstein and Heisenberg — to all the
chemistry and biology and sociology defining the principles of
education, fabrication and organization essential to communal life
today.
The Greek for production is poiesis — “poetry,” but the modern
term has shrunk to focus primarily on refined linguistic productions.
The Greek word for action is praxis — “practice,” but the modern
term has shrunk to focus on intermediary actions, ones only serving
something greater. And the Greek word for contemplation is theoria
— “theory,” but the modern word has shrunk to focus on sweeping
explanations of how things are: and lost the original sense of
beholding, as theater-goers would behold the drama of life unfolding
before them and thereby re-energize their own. In its original form,
contemplation answers to the human disposition to relax from
production and action, which absorb us into struggling with parts,
for the sake of actualizing the our relation to the whole.
This third kind of vocation is native only to what we call Europe
and its extensions, such as what we call the New World. Native,
that is, in literature and other cultural phenomena. Which is not to
say that India, China and Japan remain innocent of it; quite the
contrary. It’s just that when we go back in our literary traditions we
still stay at home even if we must learn to make adjustments in our
thinking — unlike what happens when we go back to (into) these
other traditions, where we find another kind of thinking entirely,
even if some of the resonances sound familiar.
It’s not that there is no third dimension in the East; quite the
contrary. Krishna informs Arjuna, all of us, of many truths about
life as a whole: for instance, that we have a right to the work but
not to the fruits of the work. But such admonition regarding our
Cyril Welch18
engagements in action and production serves these, does not intend
to engender a stand-alone manner of thinking fraught with its own
contentions and developments. Your only legitimate alternative to
producing or acting is to give yourself up to what undergirds these
two — as Cephalus already does, as monks and nuns are supposed
to do.
Chief among the many differences is the understanding of
language. Most obviously in the expectation of literature — of
books such as Laocius’. Without the ingrained commitment to
getting things linguistically right — as completely and accurately as
possible — and especially without the ingrained commitment to
doing so in fierce, even if constructive debate, these books engage us
linguistically in ways that contrast sharply with our own. Not a
small part of their charm. But a part that easily leads us down paths
of our own fantasy.
The difference in expectation is evident already in the staccato
formulations inherent in Classical Chinese We have a string of
characters that nearly always leaves open many of the desiderata we
would take to be essential to understanding the text: grammatical
number, voice, tense and mood. Here, for instance, is a rather
minimalist translation of a chapter from The Analects of Confucius:
Sage says:
Not keen, no unveiling.
Not stumped, no developing.
One corner lifted,
Not thereby turning to [the other] three,
Result: no returning indeed.
Evidently, these verses ask us to consider the conditions and
events of learning. But, as minimalist as the translation reads, it
already decides matters not decided in the original. The verb in the
prelude we could also read as said — in which case the whole reads
as a report about Confucius. The subject of the prelude we could
read as master — in which case we think of a teacher, and of
Thinking East & West 19
classrooms. And, oddly, the character itself most frequently means
child — one at the beginning, one considered as progeny. The
prelude could conceivably read: “Anyone embedded in his or her
own source will tell you . . . ”
The next two verses lay out parallel conditions for what we
would call genuine learning, or becoming insightful: being eager (or
keen) and being stumped (desiring, but unable to speak). Without
the one, the intervening veil will not be lifted, and without the other
there will be no progress. The initial negatives suggest what pre-
valently happens (complacence and glibness), so they invite
translation with the future tense — to underscore what can happen,
what’s at issue. The characters for what can happen clearly state that
the issue is an unveiling and an unfolding — not, for instance, the
absorbing of information, but an unfolding vision of what’s under
our noses, a movement toward it, not toward anything foreign.
(Philosophers in the West might recognize the “epistemo-
logical” question here: What does genuine learning mean? What
happens when we become truly insightful? There are, after all,
many look-alikes.)
The next sequence, which I have divided into two verses,
describes the unsuccessful effort to learn — now in a metaphor, that
of a carpet with the usual four corners. One corner gets lifted
(there’s no indication of who or how: it just happens), and either
there’s a move to lift the others or not. And if not, then there won’t
be any “returning.”
While the metaphor has a visual clarity, it’s not at all clear how
it bears on this last event — and so on how you might translate it
significantly. With one corner lifted, we catch a glimpse of what’s
underneath: the carpet conceals (veils) the floor (the ground).
Lifting the other three (our agency now, perhaps), we get a full, or
at least fuller view, perhaps in sequence. Whereupon there might
be a return. But a return to what?
The character I have translated as “returning” is: , fu .4
Mathews’ Chinese–English Dictionary offers various renditions: “to
Cyril Welch20
return, repeat, reply; again, repeatedly; to make good” — all verbal
or adverbial, rather than substantive. Perhaps the key phrase could
then read “no getting back to where you need to be” — to what’s
under the carpet, under the veil.
I find the same character in eight of the eighty-one meditations
of Laocius’ classic: 14 (getting back to no-thing, to what’s prior to
things), 16 (contemplating getting back), 19 (getting back to filial
affection), 28 (getting back to infancy), 52 (getting back to the
mother), 58 (things reverting to their worst), 64 (helping others to
return to what they have missed), and 80 (returning to a simpler
form of discourse). Although in Confucius’ verse the meaning of the
character remains wide-open, in Laocius’ verses (except perhaps 58)
it takes us back to what lies underneath the commotions of life. It’s
then something of a let-down, not to say down-right wrong, when
a translator fills in the gaps to obtain: “The teacher will not come
back to give you another lesson (since you have neither expressed
sufficient interest nor done your homework).” The question is how
we might pass from being genuinely at a loss for words, still caught
up in the commotion, to being genuinely articulate, now grounded
in and so speaking from what’s otherwise, and confusingly talked
about — or read about.
But fill the gaps we must. A translator from the West has a
peculiar advantage in this enterprise: to get an English rendering,
for instance, we must risk not only the choice of words but also the
grammatical number and tense, voice and mood. The sparsity of
visible indicators drives us to lift corners, or depend on ones we
believe we have already lifted.
In the philosophic grammar of the West, we can say that in
these classical Chinese texts the subject is conspicuously absent. The
characters themselves, whether construed as nouns or verbs,
adjectives or adverbs, serve only as predicates — sayings in search
of a subject, or ones drawing the reader into the search. And to our
Western eyes and ears the Eastern texts seem unfair — “mystical,”
talking about something beyond our ken. Actually, though, anyone
who carefully considers the few corners lifted may well come
Thinking East & West 21
to suspect the opposite: these texts bid us to return to what’s under
our noses. Their “mysticism” consists in refusing to do the work for
us. And such return does in fact exact from us efforts of greater
magnitude than we might suspect.
It’s quite rare that we find ourselves able to work on things
while letting them be themselves — as must happen in the most
arduous situations: climbing mountains, training horses, raising
children — where each thing has its own being (so we must
discover), and where we may easily betray it (to our own peril). I
understand that intervening verse of Laocius’ to be addressing the
question:
Things are there — in multitudes. Our task in any case, whether as
leaders or artisans, is to form them — each in its turn. In doing so we
run the risk of violating them — in effect, forgetting their own being.
And what their own being is — this we must in each instance learn
to acknowledge. And on the spot, not in advance.
Plato — not just Plato, but our entire Western tradition — devises
another answer to this question of being: in each instance of our
dealings there is a way of its being that the artisan dealing with it
must learn. Contemplating artisanal work, including the exigencies
of that overarching work called leadership, Plato and Aristotle
detected that any master of his craft has already learned the way
things really are (º Ðíôùò ïÛóéá: what underlies crops of various
sorts, livestock of various sorts, songs of various sorts, people of
various sorts, and even communities of various sorts). Such masters
not only acknowledge things as having being in themselves (áÛôÎ
êáè’ áßôü), but also know their being — and thus should be able to
learn to talk about it significantly. This in addition to their
marvelous ability to help the things under their care thrive.
In short, the life of contemplation trumps the lives of production
and action. Trumps them because it ferrets out and articulates the
kind of vision accounting for their power: the vision of how things
Cyril Welch22
really are, i.e. must become. Language itself, our ability to engage
in discussion, both reflects and depends on our commitment to such
extra-curricular vision of what must come to be — whatever our
vocation (Sophist, 259E & passim). But only in the life of
contemplation does it, ëüãïò, figure as the medium itself (thus the
need to defend it against its counterfeited versions).
But surely, you will say, the classical Chinese literature we are
considering also engenders contemplation. What else are these
works doing? How else are we to read them? As Plato says of
Homer’s epics, these works do not provide discourses answering to
the exigencies internal either to production or to action. Rather,
they address questions regarding the whole of our involvement with
things. And isn’t that what contemplation is all about?
Yes, but even a casual reading of any of the works by
Confucius, Mencius or Laocius leaves the reader with at least one
impression: they tell us “Just do it!” We know, in context, what’s
right, and debate will only distract us from the issue. True, we read
about “superior people” (those who do things right), in constant
contrast to their opposites. But these works do not lay out possible
understandings and bid us consider and decide, within this third form
of life, what’s right. Of course, within the exigencies of production
and action there are abundant opportunities for such consideration
and decision, and these works urge us to rise to each occasion,
constantly drawing lines between best and less than best. But no
argument, no effort to settle questions at this third level, this form of
thinking-at-a-distance. Plato defined philosophers as those who
engage in the “art of dialectic”; in so far as this definition holds
throughout the great thinkers of our tradition, we cannot call
classical Chinese works philosophical. We do justice to them
philosophically by drawing them into our orbit while also pre-
serving their difference. Just as Plato and Aristotle drew artisanship
and leadership into their orbit without confusing the three kinds of
art.
It’s not that classical Chinese texts don’t allow for differences.
It sometimes seems that every verse of Laocius presents contrary
Thinking East & West 23
possibilities (rears, doesn’t claim; forms, doesn’t distort): we are
inundated with such contraries, these understood as hovering over
whatever we are doing, and differentiating the right way from its
opposite. Alternatives to think about, but not to quarrel about. You
either know already, or you don’t.
Juxtaposing their works, you can also note how Laocius differs
from Confucius in the understanding of what’s basic to doing things
well. Since translators sometimes render the key characters with the
same English word, I first present them with one name each:
The first, te , figures in the title of Laocius’ classic: the work2
addresses the question how I, in a position of power (teacher, father,
leader of any organization), might also be effective. The second,
ren , incessantly recurs in Confucius’ work: it addresses the2
question of how to be a good person, and especially how to be good
with others. But both terms are often translated as “virtue”:
justifiably, if only readers would recall the Latin smothered in our
English — matured ability to effect things — and not fall back on the
banality of raising children to conform to expectations regarding
honesty and the like. Precisely any genuine embodiment of ren2
exudes strength: the ability to handle rough situations both firmly
and kindly. And both te and ren contrast, in the literature with2 2
mere force, li , which we might then call “brute force” in the never-4
ending effort to distinguish genuine power from its sometimes
impressive look-alikes.
But, to call attention to a marked difference between these two
works, let me cite Laocius’ remarks on Confucius’ favorite term:
Heaven and earth are harsh, not benevolent. 5
A ruler is benevolent with the people. 8
When the Way is lost, benevolence becomes an issue. 18
Drop insistence on virtues,
the people become benevolent. 19
Cyril Welch24
Failing the Way, one resorts to benevolence,
failing benevolence, one resorts to morality. 38
We might read an objection in these verses: Don’t make a big deal
out of this virtue called benevolence, you just generate its opposite
— and, anyway, your job is to meet harsh circumstances.
Consider also the talk of what we in the West — I mean our
tradition of philosophy, also its insinuation into Christian theology
— understand to bear on ultimates: talk of the soul, of dying, and of
the dead. Here again are three characters found in our texts:
Confucius declares outright his refusal discuss any of these concerns
(Analects, 7:20 & 11:11). He does however respond, dismissively, to
them: “if you can’t serve the living you can’t serve the dead” and “if
you don’t know life you don’t know death.” His work directs us
always back toward what we need to face in our actual circum-
stances, in production and action: not only the idle talk about these
things in barrooms and livingrooms, but also the careful talk we find
in Plato and Augustine, intend and effect an extraction from such
immediacy. In contrast, Laocius does in fact address, ever-so
tentatively and (as always) elusively, our concern for shen and su ,2 3
spirit and death, and even our concern for kuei , the dead:3
Valley [receptive] spirits don’t die. 6
Dying, yet not perishing, one endures. 33
Aiming to live, you die. 50
In the reign of the Way, the dead cease being spirits. 60
Strength and firmness bring death. 76
Let people take death seriously, not run off. 80
Even without attending carefully to each of the fuller statements,
you can sense in these samplers, as well as those on benevolence, a
thinking of ultimates, a kind of thought immersed in the dark side
of life. Their timbre you will never hear in the practical advice and
anecdotes of Confucius’ Analects. Moreover, in the juxtaposition of
Confucius and Laocius we easily detect incompatible doctrines
Thinking East & West 25
regarding living and dying — and regarding the leadership
encompassing these.
But there is no effort in any of this literature to dispute
doctrines, let alone refute them. To do so would imply that some
author “got it right” — some doctrine, some formulation, was in
itself right. All at the expense of what’s right. All in contravention
of “doing it right.”
The never-ending challenge is to get back to things: to return.
And all the more for readers and writers engaged in talking about
it — about the task, about the event, about the urgency, about the
failures and the betrayals.
To return in order to begin — to catch on, hook in — rather than
drift along. But how can we, in the West, understand this
challenge — in parallel, so to speak, and thereby let the differences
highlight the task?
Our own tradition is one of disputation and refutation — in
order to get at things. Plato sets Cephalus, Polemarchus and Thra-
symachus against each other. Under the antagonism of Socrates,
and ourselves as the protagonists, we may learn to focus on the
matter itself — but all the while as though the task were to achieve
a proper formulation.
“As though,” I say: the ultimate intent is to get us to respond
to the matter itself. Yet, unlike our Eastern counterparts, we assume
— our traditions have assumed — that such response is intrinsically
linguistic (“logical”), so that one necessary condition is that we learn
to get the formulations right. Right not in reference to accepted
standards: these always drift and beg for moorings (for our return
to them, the erstwhile beginnings). Right in reference to the matter
itself.
Our faith is that the clash of familiar standards serves well as
a catalyst, in any event as a reminder of the inadequacy of pre-set
formulations. So that, while our counterparts have practiced the art
of calligraphy, we — our intellectual traditions — have practiced the
Cyril Welch26
art of logography: the design of formal languages intended to
endure throughout varying situations and to provide a reliable place
to stand while dealing with their vexing vicissitudes. As a logician
myself, I recognize logography as enunciated in Leibniz’s dream of
a “new logic, a new Scripture,” as actualized in Russell’s axiomatics,
and as materialized in today’s computer programs: formulations as
functions awaiting instantiation.
What we may miss in our counterparts is what we find and
admire already in Homer, where clashes of viewpoints already serve
to focus our attention. I especially like the passage in the Iliad
(10:225) where the warriors are debating how best to enter the
Trojan camp, and Diomedes agrees to undertake the task but also
asks for a companion in the nocturnal venture:
óýí ôg äý’ ¦ñ÷ïìÝíù, êáß ôg ðñÎ Ô ôïØ ¦íüçógí
Óððùò êÝñäïò §®q ìïØíóò ä’ gÇ ðÝñ ôg íïÞó®,
�ëëÜ ôÝ oÊ âñÜòòùí ôg íüïò, ëgðô¬ äÝ ôg ìôéò.
When two go together, one sees before the other
so that the best may come to be. Alone one might see,
but one’s sight is shorter, and one’s discernment limited.
“One sees before the other”: that is, each viewpoint reveals a limited
range, and two in competition will widen it. Quantitatively,
perhaps, but also qualitatively: precisely because our lines of vision
cross, we achieve a focal point (by triangulation, as it were).
And the beauty of formalized language, language as composed
of functions, lies totally in its serviceability, its potentiality free of
actuality. A function does not name anything: a + b says something
only on two conditions: first, that its two variables get instantiated;
second, that it stands within an assertion. To satisfy the first
condition, we must also stipulate a domain, which also serves to
clarify the operator (if “numbers” is the domain, the likely operation
is that of addition, just as the symbol “+” conventionally stands for
it — but we could stipulate “furniture of a house” as the domain, and
the operator may then stand for juxtaposition). Then, to satisfy the
second condition, we must place that one function into relation with
Thinking East & West 27
something else, e.g. b + a (to remain within our formal language), or
even simply a predicate all our own, e.g. “ is a number” or “fits the
color scheme well.” Without instantiating the two variables, we are
not yet focusing on anything (except our own performance, of
course: a large part of the pleasure in any case — once you’ve
learned to perform gracefully). Without making a claim, we offer no
challenge to see better than another.
Our question — the question since Plato and right down to the
20 century — has been: under exactly what conditions does ourth
language become referential? In other words, what happens when
our talk regains its moorings, actually focuses on something —
focuses us on something? At the end of our tradition, we have
decided not to raise the question — always the most effective way of
dealing with a problem. We get the formulations — the functions —
right, and it’s up to time and circumstance, above all up to others to
put them to work. If they work, that’s reference enough; and if the
job is a tough one, what more do you want?
What our own ancestors noticed was that names of things may
not name any thing at all. In fact, one of the marvels of literary
language is that it talks about things that don’t exist, things that
might exist, things that no longer exist — and often does not
distinguish among these possibilities, as in playful fantasy and
intentional deception. About names of people — nicknames for
panoplies of achievement — Plato offers the image of a deluge that
only mountaineers survive: they have the names (as we have
Aristotle, Jesus, Descartes, Thoreau) but don’t know their §ñãá —
their “workings,” their functions, the functions of what the names
name. To recover the function of a name (of things and personages
both), we ourselves must work — must learn to return to what the
name names. The clashes of dialectic intend to put us to this work,
to get us to return.
Later on in our traditions this ancient thought of empty words
is put to other uses — as in these beautiful lines from the 12 centuryth
poet Bernardo Morliacense (which I only have from Umberto Eco’s
explanation of the title of his novel The Name of the Rose):
Cyril Welch28
Est ubi gloria nunc Babylonia? nunc ubi dirus
Nabugodonosor, et Darri vigor, illeque Cyrus? . . .
Nunc ubi Regulus? aut ubi Romulus, aut ubi Remus?
Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus.
Where now is your glory, Babylon? where now terrible
Nebuchadnezzar, and strong Darius, and famous Cyrus? . . .
Now, where is Regulus? where Romulus, where Remus?
The rose of yore remains a name — we cling to bare names.
We cling to names in lieu of their functions: the places and people
they name have vanished, just like yesterday’s rose. Or yesteryear’s
snow as, in François Villon’s still later image: Où sont les neiges
d’antan? But in these literary instances the intent has passed from
the logical to the religious and finally to the sentimental.
Names, we must now struggle to recall — now, after the halcyon
days of formalism — are manners of relating to things, not primarily
(only derivatively) items in our vocabulary. Thus there is such a
thing as a false name — one naming things falsely, meaning either
that we are not relating to them at all (a person can be a philosopher,
a tool can be a screwdriver, an organ can be a kidney, a work can be
a poem “in name only”); or that we are, in the naming, relating to
the thing poorly, partially, even deceptively. When speaking of the
three principle ways we get off track, Augustine names one of them
variously as “curiosity,” “spectating,” “concupiscence of the eyes”
and fallax nomen scientiae: “fallacious name of knowledge”: as when
we believe we are knowing Africa by attending an illustrated lecture
on its geography and history, knowing the tasks of government by
listening to the news on the radio, or knowing the human condition
by watching soap operas on television. Names galore, all leaving us
decidedly out of it. Knowledge in name only: knowledge deserving
the name must be earned.
In what Plato and Aristotle called ðïßçóéò (making / doing:
production), names float “naturally” into and back out of their
proper naming. Children grow into being farmers or blacksmiths,
even skiers or pianists, and all the while the names they hear and
Thinking East & West 29
utter align themselves (and the children) with matters at hand.
Under such conditions, we may drift, but then the matter itself, in all
its diversity, will soon enough balk at us, and we either return to it
or pass on to something else.
In what Plato and Aristotle called ðñ�îéò (leading / organizing:
action), names hover over situations — adults now have to tend to
them as futural, as human affairs that may or may not cohere, and
talk takes the basic form of propagating faith, ðßóôéò, for good or for
ill (for the good of the whole or for the good of some individuals as
the expense of others). Names can be fallacious because they are,
here, essentially shaky. Yet time will tell: the unworkable, even the
deceitful, will sooner or later bring the enterprise to ruin, along with
everyone in it. As one line in Matthew reads: in the fulness of time
we must render an account, a ëüãïò, of our every word, ð�í Õìá.
It’s in what Aristotle called èåùñßá (beholding at a distance:
contemplation) that names — we ourselves — run the risk of losing
all moorings, taking on a life of their own that can conceal rather
than reveal: can conduct us, in apparent safety, to the end of our
days in this false life. Thus the incessant insistence, right from the
start and all the way down to the frenzied sciences of today, to
justify theoretical discourse, align it after the fact, show how it does,
after all and for all its apparent aloofness, prove itself on the ground,
contribute to production and action. To keep the engine running
rather than idling: Die Verwirrungen, die uns beschäftigen, Wittgen-
stein says, entstehen gleichsam, wenn die Sprache leerläuft, nicht wenn
sie arbeitet: it is not enough just to firm up our terminology.
Whatever the virtues of our Western ambition to establish this
third way of life, it is not native to classical Chinese thinking, the
sole intention of which is to get us back into production or action.
Like Plato’s Republic, it is addressed to us as actual or potential
leaders, but unlike its counterpart in the West, it makes no claim to
self-sufficiency — to embolden a life of its own. If you were not
leading, then you composed something in paint or sound, or
arranged an elaborate tea party, and any discussion would take the
form of propriety. Indeed, Oriental propriety appears to us as eerily
Cyril Welch30
analogous to the formal language of functions we have developed
in the West: it awaits the essential. Yet, trading formalism for
propriety, our own literature may blaspheme and vulgarize with
few if any recognizable limits.
In classical Chinese literature we read over and over again
about the role of names — about our own, as literati, in their
functioning. Most famous, perhaps, are those lines in the Analects
(13:3) where, asked what he considers to be the first thing to be done
in government, Confucius answers: “To rectify names, of course!”
It may be worth the effort to consider exactly what this can mean,
since the first reaction of his own interlocutor might well be ours
(namely, it’s crazy to think governors should start with attention to
lexography). Confucius picks up the challenge:
And, he goes on (more smoothly now): “affairs not flourishing
result in the fine arts [as we would call them] not thriving, fine arts
not thriving result in disciplinary measures not being taken
[standards not being upheld], disciplinary measures not being taken
result in people not knowing what to do with their hands and feet.”
This last image suggests what might be essential for coherence in
joint effort: each can respond directly to current exigencies — not at
all assured, and in any case leadership is sorely needed.
Everything depends on how we understand “rectify”
(“uprighted”). We easily assume it means we should pronounce
and write words correctly in order to maintain their meaning — so
that we can listen and speak, read and write clearly and effectively,
appreciating the complexities that require elucidation as we deal
with vexing circumstances. That is, we assume that the task to
which Confucius calls us is to get the terms right and then return.
It doesn’t work. At least not when reading the classical
literature of China. You might be able to translate the Analects in the
Western spirit, but Laocius’ Tau Te Ching makes no sense at all in it.
In fact, though, the character we often translate as “rectify” means
Thinking East & West 31
something closer to our “align”: directing us toward what engages
the talk — resonating with whatever itself demands attention. And
this first of all, not after straightening out our vocabulary. Names
are to be “righted,” then — where the contrary of “right” is “self-
contained, free-floating, empty, gaseous” and not simply “wrong”
(a phrasing that makes no sense to us in our contemporary “cor-
respondence theory of truth,” according to which only statements
can be right or wrong).
Laocius picks up on Confucius in a suggestive way. About talk
at its best, genuine talk, uprighted talk, we read (Meditation 78):
Or perhaps “Aligned talk resorts to opposites, brings out its own
contrary.” This statement follows upon a metaphorical extension on
the recognition that water, apparently so supple and weak,
overcomes the hard and strong (as in the sea’s erosion of cliffs) — so
too the good ruler proceeds, firmly but gently. The wise ruler
accepts the filth and trouble of his realm, and thereby becomes the
caretaker of its sacred soil, its true king. “Strange as it seems,” we
ourselves might have concluded the meditation: life is full
paradoxes, unexpected truths. But Laocius’ conclusion bears on,
directs us toward, the nature of talk: it does its best work by
bringing out what contradicts our expectations, namely the matter
itself rather than our own formulations about it. These four
characters describe precisely the language of the entire work.
As logicians we might note the effect of translating Laocius to
be saying: “Any true statement elicits its own contrary.” With-
drawing into our third form of life, we would then ask whether this
statement about statements elicits its own contradictory, namely that
some, at least, say exactly what they mean. — Another game.
Seven of Laucius’s meditations talk of names, the first five of
which clearly in regard to the naming of the “way” under con-
sideration. The final one, Meditation 47, concludes the thought
beginning, “The wise, not traveling, still know . . . ”:
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Two challenges: first, it’s not necessary to go to things for naming
them properly; second, things can flourish under our rule without
our having to act. How can we make sense of this talk? How can
we possibly rectify, align it?
Of course, the character-by-character translation remains
especially gaseous and must be rectified, together with our own
vision. Does first-hand inspection of anything suffice to assure we
know it? Even our own tradition answers in the negative: rather,
we must take stock of the whole in which the detail can make sense.
Naming — focusing on — what demands attention (engaged as we
are and not merely looking on) accredits that, and accreditation we
can do without traveling (perhaps only reading a book or writing a
letter). The work itself engages us in naming, and we can learn to do
this in the quiet of our study. — The second half complements the
thought, one reiterated in various forms throughout Laocius’ work:
the flourishing at issue under our rule we do not understand as a
product of our own agency (or, if we do, we undo it: another
contrary to ponder).
Consider this possibility: Whatever great literature we read,
whether under the name of Plato or Christianity, that of our own
Enlightenment or that of Laocius’ time, it appears to us through a
haze of shortcuts, not exactly wrong in themselves but already
serving to relieve us of the onerous demands the originals place on
us: Plato believed in a world of ideas above the things we perceive,
Christianity teaches us to behave properly so that we will enjoy an
afterlife, Enlightenment thinkers recommend a self-centered
rationality for understanding nature, Laocius represents Oriental
mysticism. Consider, too, the possibility that this haze of short-cuts
prevails not only among the half-learned, but also among the
professionals. That, in effect, we all begin, each morning, in some
such haze. That there is no such thing, as far as we are genuinely
concerned, of starting out immediately with the full version — that
Thinking East & West 33
in fact we come back anew each day to the task of resuscitating it:
or don’t, perhaps cannot, even actively resist any suggestion that
coming back anew might be helpful.
Then we will at least begin to move within the spirit of classical
Chinese literature. For it invites us to enter the spirit of conducting,
in our musical sense of the word: we have a score and our task is to
turn it into music. Not only to comprehend all those scribbles so
that we can read them as notes in the spirit more or less indicated on
the score (inserting our own indications as well), but to get them to
play, get others to get them to play in concert. So long as the work
works, it works, it’s not a work of our own agency. And when the
concert is over the full version of the score is no more: we have to
keep coming back — remember and anticipate what now appears as
our agency.
If you wish to name a third way of life embodied by Laocius
and others in the East — a life analogous to the contemplative life in
the West — try something like “rectification of inherited names.” So
that, in Confucius’ sequence, talk may regain its punch, so that daily
affairs may make sense, so that there’s a solid place in life for works
celebrating sense-making, so that there are measures to uphold, and
finally so that we know what to do with our feet and our hands as
well as our mouths.
The enemy of this form of life is banalization — neither the
forces of nature nor the injustices of rulers nor the errors of other
readers and writers. Thus, I suggest, the constant contrariety
internal to the Tau Te Ching: “this rather than that.” A placid form
of discourse, we likely think. Placid precisely because it’s intended
to free us back into the often violent exigencies of ruling where, once
again, the intent is to free people, anew each day, into the
unbrookable exigencies of their own hands-on work.
To us today this form of life appears as backward-directed and
as miring its practitioners in the past. That’s because our own life of
contemplation developed precisely in the efforts, initially crowding
around the year 1600, to institute a form of thinking (theory) that
Cyril Welch34
intends the opposite: intends, namely, to turn us into agents of
change, especially in the sciences of health, mechanism and
organization — the new medicine, the new physics and the new
politics. Until that year, the office of literati such as ourselves bore
some resemblance to that of Laocius. The last of the fully powerful
works in this tradition were those of Thomas Aquinas and Dante
Alighieri.
Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose depicts our own
tradition of backward thinking in the figures of two aged monks,
Jorge and the Abbot, who object to the younger monks’ keen interest
in discovering the new. The Abbot rightly insists that the mission
of the Benedictine Order is to “conserve, repeat, and defend the
treasure of wisdom entrusted to us by our fathers” — to be
“custodians of the Divine Word.” Of course, only creative efforts
can effect this conservation, and these the aged monks have already
forgotten in their attacks on the youth. Yet precisely the fuller
version of the task belongs to our Platonic-Aristotelian tradition of
a self-sufficient realm of contemplative discourse.
We in the West today can hardly get back into the thought of
either Dante or Laocius. And, apart from the healthy exercise it
affords, there is hardly any need to get back into it. Our task, I
propose, is to back into our own — back to the basics of the kind of
thinking all-too familiar in our own tradition, itself constantly short-
cutted in caricatures of our own making. Laocius’s work offers a
suitable foil, a contrariety reciprocally elucidating.
Why the first regression, the banalization? Well, there’s Plato’s
image of the flood leaving only mountain people, and these
only with the names. But that is only a myth, as we say. Aristotle
offers a reason: we actually know things only in the doing, in the
knowing, in the activity essential to making contact. The knowledge
we afterwards “have” counts only (impressive enough) as the ability
to know. So we hear talk of actual vs. potential knowledge. Off
work (not training our horses, not leading our group, not reading or
Thinking East & West 35
writing carefully) we “find” things much differently — we have half
lost them, lost them in their actuality. And our off-work talk, unless
put back to work again (now in recollection and anticipation, as
when genuinely writing or genuinely teaching) seeks out safe
formulations in lieu of the originating engagement. As Plato so well
put it toward the end of the Republic, the chief measure of such
unengaged linguistic composition is the pleasure of others in the
same uprooted condition.
Unengaged, unactual?. We were just considering Laocius’ verse
stating that, in the best talk, naming does not require seeing: we
can, and do, mind things at a distance — recall and anticipate, decide
and love, without visiting them on the ground. In whatever way
Laocius and his tradition accounts for this, the Platonic account is
distinctively ours. It distinguishes, namely, seeing with the eyes
from the seeing evident in master artisans, who see what the eyes
in their heads cannot see, namely where things are naturally
heading — the goals of their own development. Plants and animals
and the human organizations for dealing with them begin and end,
not just in time but in growth potential. Those who have learned to
deal with them see doubly: they foresee what they see, and thereby
can participate in the birth and death of things (death meaning their
failure, inevitable, to live up to the end that defines their growth).
This foreseeing is a distinctively human vision. As distinctively
human, this vision accounts for our living all the while in discourse
(ëüãïò), not just occasionally — in speech, even quiet pondering and
calculating. Speech emerges for us by way of, as the interweaving
of foreseeings with one another:
äé� ã�ñ ô¬í �ëëÞëùí ôäí ¦éääí óõìðëïê¬í Ò ëüãïò
ãÝãïígí ºìÃí. (Sophist, 259E; see from 253B)
Among the many significances of this formulation, worked out over
the centuries, is that we intellectuals can be at home in our third
form of life: once we learn to do our job well, we make good on our
own nature, whereas leaders and artisans only make use of it. As
Mallarmé could still say in the19th century, language is essentially
ours, and only temporarily let out for daily affairs. Banalization is
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degradation, and we counteract the decline by firming up our
formulations, whether in literary or scientific ways.
Our own most recent tradition aspires to hold the contemplative
life accountable to the others. Science now earns its way by sup-
plying formulas for production and action: proves itself in its ability
to produce things (there’s no such thing as understanding tissues,
a biologist has insisted, apart from the ability to make them). In
general, an educational discipline must earn its keep similarly. And
the very bastion of contemplation, language itself, thinkers in the
modern vein must assume evolves from the exigencies of co-
operation and negotiation — from banality itself. The question now
is how to understand language in its non-banal forms — a way of
assuring that these, whether poetry or chemistry, remain in proper
service.
Yet every reductive effort is itself a logical enterprise, and so
assumes the primacy of what it aspires to overthrow. The only self-
consistent reduction requires us to confine ourselves to wiggling our
fingers.
Which is not to say we need not think carefully about our
Platonic commitments. Quite the contrary. But just where can we
stand when doing so? Or move, for that matter? My suggestion is
that we re-learn, and learn to love it, in dialogue first of all with its
own multiplicity — and then also with traditions wholly foreign to
our own. And all the while remaining wary of reducing them to our
own most recent ones. And of course not to banality either.
Yet in every case we need some common ground to stand and
move on. And here’s a suggestion of one in Laocius, a verse that
especially inspired these reflections on knowledge:
What’s remarkable about this formulation is that it attributes to the
Way (the path, the doctrine, the way of being at issue in the entire
work) both our distinctively human ability to foresee (to know
Thinking East & West 37
beyond the obvious, and to engage others in this prescience and
premonition) and our distinctively human ability to obscure (to hide
ourselves from things, to hide things from others). Even more
remarkable is the fact that the attribution does not depend on our
own commitment to a world of ideas, more or less apparently self-
sufficient.
Foreknowledge is the flower of the Way: it’s only because we
are properly underway that we can see where things are going (and
we with them). In a vaguely Confucian work called The Doctrine of
the Mean we read (Chapter 24) that fully developed people know in
advance (same character as what I translate as “fore=”) how things
are going to turn out: whether well or badly. Which makes sense in
many practical affairs: an accomplished musician can tell at any
moment what’s coming next, and whether a performance is going
to come to something. Yet the author not only pins this advance
knowledge on the reading of omens but says that it marks us as
“spirits” (the same character as in “valley spirits don’t die” and
“ghosts cease being spirits” once we are well underway).
This sort of fore-knowledge we have learned to associate with
superstition: looking into the entrails of animals or the starry
heavens, to the creases in one’s hand or the arrangement of tea
leaves at the bottom of a cup. We easily note that such double vision
does not embody an activity engaging us in the actuality of things:
it’s a sideline passivity that understands things only as affecting us,
not as being themselves in their own actuality. The vision is indeed
double (tea leaves and happy marriage), but there’s no inner
melding of the two sides (my horse and what it needs).
And this kind of “spirituality” we have learned to associate
with false prophets, soothsayers in for the pay of it, or for the dis-
traction it affords. But it’s a common enough propensity, if not
always a profession. Dante places its practitioners deep down in the
Inferno — not because they fool themselves or defraud others (who
knows, they may even say true things!) but because they are trying
to twist matters of divine judgement into human satisfaction:
Cyril Welch38
Chi è più scellerato che colui
che al giudicio divin passion comporta?
Who is more wicked than he
who matches his passion to divine decision?
For self-assertion is the worst thing of all where conformity of one’s
own to God’s will is the path of beatitude, as in the Paradiso.
But even the folly originated by the Way does not carry the
same force as it might for us. The character receives high marks
elsewhere in Laocius’ work: it’s the tranquil acceptance of not
having to decide everything — the opposite of the insistence on
knowing everything; it’s what practitioners of the Way cultivate in
the people they lead — since, once again, know-it-alls are a major
source of social unrest. My dictionary prefers “dull” in its contrast
to “clever.” Assuming that the verse intends a contrast between
flower and folly, within folly we might then contrast simplicity with
simple-mindedness, the simple with the complex, the artless with
the affected, the open (even if naive) with the pretentious (even if
competent) — both these versions grounded (as we would say) in the
foreknowledge sprung from the Way.
We then simply accept our condition at this double fork in the
road: foreknowing still easily going down the path of folly, and here
again forking either into a healthy simplicity or a perverse stupidity.
At this peculiar fork our task as rulers is to tend to the exigencies of
the realm — ones the realm itself will reveal. And our own fleeting
task (as thinkers at the moment) is to help rulers return to those
exigencies: our own task is not to establish a knowledge of that
realm for the instruction of rulers.
Yet in the West that is precisely our task as thinkers, set to us
again by Plato in his Republic. At the very end of Book 9 Glaucon
objects that the city they had worked out in their discussions (ëüãïé)
would not likely ever have a place on earth. Socrates replies that
there may a paradigm of it laid away in the heavens “for those who
wish to view it,” But “it makes no difference,” he goes on: “It’s the
only city in which intelligent people will take action.” And don’t
Thinking East & West 39
think for more than a minute, Reader, that this isn’t exactly what we
are still doing today. Probably the Chinese as well. And despite the
critiques of it leveled by thinkers from Machiavelli through Marx.
For the intelligent today, who engage in action, the world is one of
interweaving visions of possibility and desire, a hovering complex
of foreknowledge, posing both technical challenges and moral
conundrums. It seems we have no way of getting back.
Consider the verses in Laocius’ Meditation 54:
Tend to: maintain, cultivate — not figure out, not transcend to
return with an empowering ëüãïò. Each of these things has its own
power: nobody needs to tell us about it, any more than somebody
needs to tell a horseman or a automobile mechanic what the power
is. Our task, whether as makers, leaders or even (fleetingly)
thinkers, is to acknowledge their power: herein lies our power. And
each person, each family, each community, each realm (“state,” we
would like to say, following Machiavelli) is under heaven: “heaven”
is the name for what lies beyond our power, beyond our care, beyond
our ken — what limits our power. Our abiding task, in any of the
three forms of life, is to return — ever again. Otherwise we float
away into the blue, eventually into the night, enfeebling both
ourselves and what’s under our care.
Of course we want to know, in advance, how to effect this —
how to return. And this desire of ours marks the difference between
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our expectations and those addressed in Laocius’s work. And the
difference between a fruitless and a fruitful reading of its very first
couplet:
Character by character: Way can weigh, not abiding way.
Name can name, not abiding name.
Which hardly means anything in English. In the parallel, we must
chose between singular or plural, any or one: way or ways, name or
names. And while “name” can serve as both noun and verb, “way”
does not (“way” as “circuit to follow” does indeed stem from the
same source as “weigh” as “assess, ponder”). Active and passive
voice (weigh or be weighed, name or be named?). At least we don’t
have to choose among possible tenses: it seems clear that the
couplet speaks in the “eternal present”: about the task of and
limitation on thoughtful discourse of the past, the present and the
future. Indeed, the two verses preface the whole work, stating in
advance what will be developed, or at least encircled, in the
remaining verses of this first meditation — and then in the following
eighty. And their sense depends on how — and whether — we have
made sense of the work as a whole. Twelve notes from which we
must learn to play the whole symphony, or remain with easily
dismissed cacophony.
The peculiarity of the two thoughts is that each opens with the
affirmation of a possibility — our potentiality — and then abruptly
negates one. So we might prefer a contrasting clause: even though
ways and names (or a way, a name), there’s a limit.
While ways can lay out, no lay-out is steady.
While names can point out, no pointing-out is steady.
However else we in the West may learn to appreciate this
couplet, we will notice that it contrasts starkly with our own ex-
pectations. Even if we have learned to admit that no work, even our
own, can do the work for us (any more than a musical score suffices
Thinking East & West 41
for the making of music), we expect of a “theoretical” work to
establish the measures at work (so that, with proper training, we can
play the music — during which the elusiveness has been “captured,”
as we are so fond of saying). It was Plato who first established the
possibility of “theoretical” work constituting a third form of life, a
way that can talk about itself self-sufficiently — as adequately as a
navigator or a statesman might do (without thereby relieving
apprentices from the task of relearning the respective arts for
themselves).
But what exactly do these two verses negate? Most literally: the
ability of any way, any pondering, any name, any naming, to “get
at” its subject “abidingly”: dictionaries and scholars assure me that
the character being negated has a sense close to “steady” or
“constant” and does not carry the weight of our “eternal”: a
Platonic term, one that evolved reluctantly to express the contrast
between this or that pool, stream, lake, ocean (ever changing) and
2what always remains the same in them (H O); already in the New
Testament between this or that age or generation (both understood as
“times” that group people) and what holds for all ages, every
generation — throughout them all: above time. Again and again in
Laocius’ work we will read about our own abiding with what
abides, always a returning to actual circumstances — to our own
person, family, community, realm and even, if we can effect these
rudimentary returns, to “what’s under heaven” (“all over the place”).
A brief word of agreement with those scholars who have
objected to one translation of this couplet, already inaugurated at the
end of the 19 century when British scholars first brought Chineseth
texts to systematic attention in the anglophone West. They read it
as outright negation, introducing subordinate clauses to the effect
of “The way that can be told . . . ,” “The name that can be named . . .“
— which immediately castrates the whole work, transforming it into
mysticism if not escapism. Apparently, such a reading does not
accord with Chinese grammar (Peter A. Boodberg, “Philological
Notes,” in Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 1957, p. 605; Günter
Debon, translator, Reclam Universal-Bibliothek 6798, 1961, p. 113;
Cyril Welch42
John C. H. Wu, St. John’s University Press, 1961, who translates:
“Tao can be talked about, but not . . . , Names can be named, but not
. . . ” etc.). On the other hand, a Chinese colleague of mine,
confronted with the grammatical argument (“the fundamental
axiom of Chinese grammar: modifier precedes principle”), cited
some exceptions to the rule in poetry — and noted that the Chinese
themselves, translating Laocius into modern Chinese, often insert
the relative clauses preferred by some English translators. I myself
cannot judge — except that such translation needlessly adds to the
difficulty of playing the remaining notes in Laocius’ work in a way
according with the flourishing of which it speaks.
The second couplet picks up on the naming introduced in the
first couplet:
The origin of heaven and earth has no name.
The mother of the ten thousand things has a name.
What does it mean to “have a name” — affirmed in the one case and
denied in the other? Our own tradition labored hard to transfer the
question of truth from naming to stating: for us, only a statement
can be true or false, whereas in most other traditions, including our
earlier ones, naming remains essential to locating the question of
truth. True naming not only points up what it names, but engages
us truly in the pointing. False naming (Augustine’s example:
calling knowledge what’s really distractive looking-on) sends us off
in the wrong direction, so that we not only miss the thing
supposedly named but also lose ourselves.
While every effort on our part flourishes only when our feet and
hands are lying firmly on the ground of the matter itself (rather
than, say, floundering in fantasies), we can easily misconstrue the
“preliminary” task of achieving such footholds and handholds. Are
we going back to the origin of everything at once, of things in the
sky above as well as of things on the earth under our feet? Such far-
reaching speculation is always tempting: it leaves us safely out of
the picture — in which case there can be no true naming. The
alternative is, we read, to go back to the mother of the myriad things
we actually encounter: get back to the mother, take the side of the
Thinking East & West 43
feminine, know things as children and as requiring attention
accordingly — in order to get back to their origin we must accept
ourselves as co-parents of them.
The third couplet fits. “Truly,” we read:
Abiding without desire, we see their subtlety.
Abiding with desire, we see their surface.
The difference between seeing things fully (as themselves) and
seeing them partially (their “attributes” only, as logicians say) lies
in two possibilities of our own: seeing them through eyes clouded
by our own plans (which we will always “have” in some way) or
through the eyes proper to things planned. Not so simple a choice
— if it can be considered a choice at all. The two differ in name but,
we go on to read, they issue from the same (just as foreknowledge
and folly do) — and mark the gateway to all possible subtlety
(through which we must ever-again pass).
We are always treading some path, some procedure for
handling things, some way of life. In production the ways dominate
clearly, and in the West we have devised ever more elaborate
devices that can run on their own, originally out of more or less hard
metals and more recently out of their electronic counterparts
(software): whether operated by hands or electronic impulses, such
ways are essentially functions: we insert something into one end
and something comes out the other end. In action too: What are
customs, laws and institutions but ways of life, procedures for
handling social exigencies, paths to be tread? And finally in
contemplation of the now daily sort: research into the ways of the
universe, macroscopically and microscopically — formalized
accounts of how things came and come to be, and recipes for inter-
vening in what’s coming: recipes I say, because contemplation of
the banal sort has now come back to the exigencies of production.
And all along there’s the temptation to assume that there must
be, for each instance, one right way — and, consequently, one right
set of formulations. The temptation arises before and after the
treading, i.e. at moments of abandonment — of frustration perhaps
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but also of fatigue. We might then turn to books or gurus in search
of the way — whether for making furniture or coaching a team, even
living life itself or knowing everything.
Amusing perhaps. Distracting too. Or even distressing — as,
when failing to find what we are looking for, we begin to suspect
that there is no one way after all. As indeed there manifestly isn’t —
manifestly for those who have actually treaded paths on their own,
and carefully (not so for those who have only been treading the
paths laid out by others, even carefully: certainly the case for
children and generally the case for adolescents, and even beyond).
And then? Is there no reason to think about ways of producing,
acting, contemplating? Quite the contrary, I say. The question is
how we are on the way we are on. Or, rather, how we can “handle”
even understand the trip we happen be on. Well or badly, as it
always turns out. Well meaning true to circumstance, to our fellow
travelers, to ourselves. And badly meaning missing, perhaps even
betraying or counterfeiting our circumstances, our fellows, and
ourselves. And to the adolescent who asks just how to do it right,
we can only answer: this one way. And wait. It is only a grown-up
who can know that there is no one way — and that searching for one
only distracts from the re-embarkation.
The way of the West happens to be my way. Precisely by
traveling it well I can value the way of the East, even find good
company with whom to walk a few miles of it. And in good
conversation letting each bring out the exigencies of the other.
Knowing not your own way, you can never learn from the ways of
others.
Returning: in our own literature — dating clearly from Plato,
passing through Aristotle, Augustine, the whole modern
development from Descartes and Bacon through Kant, Hegel and
Nietzsche — this one question subserves the question of knowledge,
lurking rather inconspicuously in the background.
By contrast, the question dominates the literature of the East (for
Thinking East & West 45
which I take Laocius as my guide), while the question of knowledge
lurks in the background (knowledge of action: nary a word about
the knowledge of production).
This difference again poses a challenge to those who would like
to think the two through, perhaps a challenge more difficult for
those of us who must read eastward, passing through the European
heritage.
In the West, returning most originally means getting back to the
way things really are (º Ðíôùò ïÛóéá) — from the way things appear
through the lens of accumulated social vision (äüîá). The name for
what allows it was “intellectual intuition” (íïØò): eventually called
a faculty, a power of our own, although initially understood as
divine in origin. With the New Sciences of our Enlightenment, the
image of returning no longer serves our understanding of getting at
how things really are: “research” henceforth means getting ahead,
discovering things beyond rather than within what we already
know.
In Laocius’ Tau Te Ching, returning requires what we could
formulate in terms directly opposing our own: getting back to “non-
being,” to “what’s not a thing,” (Meditation 14). Weird? Yet
one advantage is that such returning lets things themselves be —in
their own terms (momentarily, at least). Of course, this is not the
only formulation, and I have already taken this one out of its
context. Meditation 28 offers a triad of images, each culminating in
an explicit, if seemingly only metaphorical statement of what it
means to return. Again out of context:
Getting back to being children.
Getting back to what’s without limit.
Getting back to raw material.
What can we, in the West, make of these images? Is our task, at this
stage at least, not to grow up? And doesn’t any proper assessment
of circumstance require that we delimit (give definition to) what we
are dealing with? And what’s to be gained by concentrating on
Cyril Welch46
things-in-the-rough: isn’t this condition, whether of ourselves or of
circumstances, precisely what we must overcome? Indeed, in each
case we can cite thinkers in our tradition who have taken issue
precisely with these images of returning.
But not so clearly at first. Aristotle notes very clearly that one
task of handling things properly consists in grappling with their raw
material (àëç: remarkably the same root meaning as the Chinese:
“wood, lumber”). Both the artisan and the statesman must have
developed a sharp eye for seeing what’s just there so that they can
proceed to form or reform it. I like stories about Cézanne (among
others painters, of course) who insisted on working sur le motif: right
there with what motivates the formation: the things themselves, not
something internal to the artist.
Famously, too, it was Anaximander who insisted on the priority
of the unlimited:
�ñ÷¬í . . . gÇñçêg ôäí Ðíôùí ôÎ �ðgéñïí . . . . ¦î ôí ä¥ º ãÝígóéò
¦óôé ôïÃò ïÞóé, êá ô¬í nèïñ�í gÆò ôáØôá ãßãgóèáé êáô� ôÎ
÷ñgþíq äéäüíáé ã�ñ áÛô� äßêçí êá ôßóéí �ëëÞëïéò ôò �äéêßáò
êáô� ô¬í ôïØ ÷ñüíïõ ôÜîéí.
The origin, he says, of beings is the unlimited. . . . From
wherever there’s the generation of beings, into the same
generates their destruction, according to necessity. For
each pays the others justice for its injustice, according to
the order of time.
Again, a plausible account of how we understand the daily genesis
and destruction of everything from cornfields and cattle to families
and cities (assuming we accept our mortality): each thing starts out
undelimited, gradually takes on form in competition with things
around it, and returns to its origin (we might prefer to say it loses its
originating power). And so we are to understand time.
Returning to being a child — to being a little girl or boy? Here
I can only recall those famous lines from the Sermon on the Mount:
¦�í ì¬ óôñánôg êá ãÝígóèg ñò ô� ðáéäßá,
ïÛ ì¬ gÆóÝëèçôg gÆò ô± âáóéëgßá ôäí ïÛñáíäí.
Thinking East & West 47
Unless ye be thrown over, becoming as children,
ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.
Which would require us to consider carefully what it means to be
“thrown over” (as in a wrestling match: “converted” sounds like
there’s a doctrine to be endorsed), what it means to enter into the
kingdom of heaven (again, like our Platonic tradition, and unlike the
Tau Te Ching, our Christianity speaks of dwelling in it rather than
under it), and then of course what it means to become as children.
In any event, the Sermon does not primarily address rulers.
In Meditations 55 we read that one steeped in power is like a
naked babe, . Both versions direct attention to what we our-
selves do or undergo when returning to what’s without being, to
what’s without limit, to what’s raw. They contradict the adolescent
insistence on knowing what’s basic without knowing oneself in it.
Indeed, we might understand Laocius here as offering a thought
analogous to the Socratic tradition insisting that all genuine
knowledge of things we deal with (vs. fallax nomen scientiae)
develops in exact parallel with knowing ourselves as likewise
beginning with them.
Mencius too endorses the thought, and rather emphatically
(Book Four, Part 2, Chapter 12):
“Great are those who don’t lose the nakedness of their child’s heart.”
But surely, you and I will want to say, there’s something to
prize in growing up: you learn to contribute to on-going affairs
rather than only living off them, to take responsibility yourself
rather than only holding others responsible, to face disagreeable
circumstances squarely rather than bawling your head off.
Above all, and all the while, to focus attention, your own and
others’, on what’s right rather than on who’s right.