Some terms play a foundational role in the philosophical discourse of a culture and get passed down as continuing themes, either presupposed by the tradition or made the explicit object of discussion and argument. In the West, these have included “truth,” “reality,” “illusion,” “beauty,” “justice,” “mind,” “essence,” and “God,” among others. These concepts are widespread, and although they are explained differently by different thinkers, they are foundational to much Western philosophical discourse. Indeed, the words are often capitalized to indicate that what they refer to has an ultimate, transcendent, or absolute status. They do not, however, generally play a central role in the early Chinese philosophical tradition, and what appear at first glance to be Chinese equivalents turn out to have significantly different meanings in the Chinese context. The most important concepts presupposed, or explicitly discussed, by Chinese philosophers include “dao” (way), “tian” (the natural world, the cosmos, the heavens), “ren” (human), “wen” (culture), “wei” (artifice), “yan” (language), “wu” (nothing, absence), “qi” (energy, mass-energy), “yinyang” (complementary contrasts), “xing” (natural tendencies), and “zhen” (genuineness). These can be considered fundamental insofar as they tend to be presupposed in some form or another by early Chinese thinkers and writers. Their importance largely remains unquestioned, and though they may be explained in different ways, the manner in which they are used retains a distinctive core, suggesting something fundamental to early Chinese worldviews.
But there are also fundamental modes of thinking: modes of discourse and practice through which we attempt to understand the world. These fall into four broadly conceived kinds: the rational, the empirical, the pragmatic, and the hermeneutic. Rational discourse emphasizes reflection on the meanings of concepts to discover the essential structures and properties of anything to which they could possibly refer, and attempts to refine arguments to demonstrate the truth of one theory by eliminating all other hypotheses as impossible. Empirical discourse emphasizes the senses and controlled experiments: our observations provide data to be explained in terms of mathematical patterns described by natural laws. Pragmatic discourse emphasizes concepts and practices whose primary purpose is to enable us to solve problems and live flourishing lives. And hermeneutic discourse emphasizes making sense of the world, our lives, and our multifaceted forms of significant experience, giving them meaning and value through interpretation. Versions of all of these can be found throughout the history of Western culture; some have emerged as privileged over others by what have arguably become the dominant modes of discourse of Western culture in general and Anglo-American philosophy in particular. The rational and the empirical have primacy, with the pragmatic taking second place and the hermeneutic relegated to a lower status in terms of its capacity to yield a reliable understanding of the world and our experience. The Chinese cultural tradition has followed a different tendency, with the pragmatic and hermeneutic being valued as the primary modes of understanding and the rational and empirical falling to second place.1
In this chapter, I shall discuss the fundamental Chinese concepts “dao,” “de,” “tian,” “ren,” “yan,” “wei,” “wen,” and “yinyang,” in light of these cross-cultural considerations, highlighting important differences in category, worldview, and modes of discourse, especially as exemplified in the various ways “dao” has been understood.2 What will emerge most distinctively are the pragmatic, processive, hermeneutic, and naturalistic tendencies of early Chinese philosophical thinking.
The word “dao” is often said to be the most basic concept of Chinese philosophy. It might be thought of as having the same philosophical status as “Truth” or “Reality” in Western philosophy. Literally, it means “path” or “road.” Etymologically, it consists of the radical for “walk” on the left hand side, 辶, and the graph for “head” on the right, 首. The “walking” radical under which the word is classified in the modern dictionary once took the form of a foot taking a step on a path.3 A dao is the path one takes, the path one makes, and the path as it guides those to follow. Many words contain this component; notably, it is used almost exclusively for verbs related to movement of some kind.4 By extension it takes on the abstract sense of “way” or “ways”: how processes occur or how things ought to be done. Thus, even as a noun its connotations are processive and adverbial. A dao might be social, political, personal, or natural. Confucius and Mozi, for example, advocate ways that are simultaneously social, political, and personal; Zhuangzi and Liezi, ways that are both cosmic and personal but with social consequences; the syncretist Daoists combine this with a way to govern a state.
The philosophical use of the term contains an evaluative element; it implies not only the way the world is but also the way it should be. There is thus a source of tension in the use of the word. There is not just one way the world is, but many; some result in flourishing, some result in destructiveness. The task of the sage or philosophical master is to identify which ways lead to flourishing and which do not: to forge a more fruitful path and show us how best to negotiate it. The Confucians, Mohists, and Legalists believed that it was the wisest of the leaders who were able to discern, chart out, and implement those ways. In contrast, the Daoists believed that we once conformed to those ways naturally, until we began to follow artificial procedures and social conventions.
Dao as Pragmatic
Traditionally, “dao” has been rendered in English as “The Way” or “The Dao,” with its importance and uniqueness emphasized by capitalization and use of the definite article. It appears to name a unique thing, often described as static, unchanging, and eternal: the underlying ground or Substance, the ultimate Reality behind the appearances. However, this conception of dao as transcendent turns out to be a presupposition of the reader or translator rather than implicit in the text. The concept of strict transcendence is highly artificial and attempts to outreach the limits of ordinary language. It may be defined as that which goes beyond the world of experience and must be posited as necessary for its existence.
Throughout the history of Western philosophy, concepts intended as metaphysically transcendent have invariably been accompanied by extensive discussions and arguments distinguishing them from naturalistic and pragmatic impostors. Thus, the concept of metaphysical substance as the logical condition of the possibility of change or as the necessary substrate in which qualities inhere is distinguished from material or physical substance; the concept of a transcendental self as the condition of the possibility of unified consciousness is distinguished from any concept of a natural self that can be empirically experienced; and the metaphysical distinction between the world of mere Appearance and the ultimate Reality that underlies it is differentiated from the everyday practical distinctions we make regarding what things are and how they appear. That is to say, the everyday concepts, meanings, and distinctions that are pragmatically encoded into our ordinary language must be artificially, and therefore explicitly, refined into their idealized or absolutized counterparts.
It is significant that Daoist texts do not contain such discussions. When we read early Daoist texts more neutrally to discover whether they express views that are more consistent with metaphysical or pragmatic presuppositions, the evidence appears to favor the latter. The fundamental tendency of Chinese philosophy, even at its most rarified intellectual heights, remains grounded in pragmatic concerns and hermeneutic methodology. That is, Chinese philosophers attempt first and foremost to interpret the world and thereby investigate its significance for us, our lives, and our behavior. To say that the discourse of dao is pragmatic is to say, in part, that the context of even the most theoretical questioning is always how it works, and how we might learn from it. Philosophers such as Huizi, who had a tendency to get lost in abstract paradoxes and contradictions, were criticized dismissively and remained relatively uninfluential precisely because their philosophies lacked, or were believed to lack, pragmatic relevance.5 To say that a methodology is hermeneutic is to say, in part, that it uses meanings, images, narratives, and metaphors to interpret and make sense of our experience of the world. Hermeneutic methodology makes extensive use of what Pierce calls “abduction”—interpretations of scant evidence that fill in the blanks, as it were, painting a picture, telling a story, or articulating a theory that thereby makes sense of our limited experience (whether perceptual, aesthetic, or linguistic) in more or less plausible ways.6
Dao as Holistic and Immanent7 Source of Things
The Laozi articulates a conception of dao that is understood to be originating, mothering, beginning. This deep, generative aspect is often understood in the strongest sense of metaphysical “transcendence,” utterly beyond the empirical world of which we are aware and in which we engage, and in some sense prior to and responsible for it. Now, originary questions and answers should not strictly be taken to be metaphysical unless they explicitly reject the adequacy of naturalistic explanation: they become metaphysical when, and only when, the necessity of something utterly beyond the natural world is either explicitly argued for or can be demonstrably shown to be presupposed. The development of originary questions from the naturalistic to the metaphysical can be traced through a certain kind of logical procedure. A fundamental question is raised about all natural phenomena, but any answer given in terms of natural phenomena is regarded as insufficient, on the grounds, implicit or explicit, that nothing can explain itself.
Western texts that articulate a conception of a transcendent origin go to great lengths to provide extensive arguments of this nature.8 They try to show explicitly that holistic, naturalistic accounts cannot succeed, because they result in contradictions. Of course, transcendent accounts of the origin of the world are riddled with logical problems of their own, but those who articulate them appear to do so from a conviction that holistic accounts should be shown to be impossible. To confidently attribute a conception of a nonempirical beginning or origin, that is, an origin beyond the natural world, to Daoist thinkers, we would need to find extensive argument showing that anything worldly will not suffice as an explanation. However, in the Laozi and the Zhuangzi, there is no unambiguously explicit articulation of an ultimate reality that is different from and superior to the realm of practical experience. In the absence of such an explicit argument, it is unwise to simply assume that the authors of the Laozi and the Zhuangzi shared these convictions.9
On the contrary, a fundamental theme of early Daoist philosophy, the holistic interdependence of opposites,10 even of something and nothing, existence and nonexistence, suggests a thoroughgoing naturalism: a conception of the world as a self-generating organic whole. It did not have a transcendent origin; both existence and nonexistence are worldly processes that emerge from each other. Certainly, dao plays a role as source, but it is understood as immanently involved in and inseparable from what it produces. Thus, the natural world is understood as a whole with two integrated types of aspects, one subtle and one manifest. The subtle aspects are deep and generative, but nevertheless thoroughly contained holistically and inseparably within the natural whole. They are intangible, but ubiquitously present in the functioning of the natural processes that make up the whole. Within such a worldview, the fundamental status of dao cannot be taken to be that of a ground or substance beyond the world of appearance. It is an integral aspect of the way the world is that remains firmly embedded within those natural processes themselves, not standing mysteriously aloof and beyond them as an absolute ground of Being.11
I shall reserve the term “metaphysics” for theoretical discourses that aim to articulate the nature of a reality that transcends appearances, and “cosmology” for discourses that are superficially similar but do not presuppose the necessity of such a transcendent origin, and that use hermeneutic methodologies to interpret the world ultimately for the pragmatic purpose of living well, that is, in accordance with its dao.
Dao as Processive
If we interpret the term “dao” in the light of these observations, we can take it as gesturing at the deep and elusive aspects of the manner of development of actions and processes. With regard to nature, it would refer to how the processes of transformation take place. When applied to humans, it refers to how a flourishing life should unfold and develop. “Dao” functions metaphorically to highlight the patterns traced out, as it were, as processes develop over time. The passing of time must be envisaged spatially in order to imagine the manners of unfolding as patterns or paths. But we must take care not to be misled into substantializing the abstract pattern when it is spatially “frozen” in this manner.
The word “dao” was not often used verbally in ancient Chinese, but it is used as a verb in the very first line of the Laozi. This verbal sense is often interpreted as meaning “to speak,” which is not altogether implausible. However, the word is rarely, if ever used unambiguously in this sense in ancient Chinese philosophical texts. I suggest that, since the term is of such fundamental significance, it is better to preserve and verbalize its primary philosophical meaning. While this might seem difficult at first, it becomes easier once we realize that a way is already processive: the formation of a way and the process of walking a path are already temporal activities. Moreover, when “dao” is used verbally in early texts, it is more often used to mean “to guide” and “to lead.” Chapter 2 of the Zhuangzi says that the way is formed by being walked: the process of walking the way is the coming into being of the way itself, suggesting that the way is understood not as a static object but as a process.
Dao as Discourse
Verbally the word “dao” means to guide, to lead, to show the way. By extension it can refer to an explicit explanation or statement of the way, and eventually even takes on the meaning “to say.” Indeed, Chad Hansen takes dao to be primarily linguistic. Dao is guiding discourse:12 a way of understanding the world, of dividing, characterizing, and evaluating it that will function as a guide for our behavior. Different daos make competing claims about the best way to divide the world and the best way to engage in it successfully. According to Hansen, then, Daoist philosophy is first and foremost a philosophy of language, and claims about dao are actually claims about the ability of different systems of distinctions to capture the way the world is and function as guides for behavior.
Dao as Indeterminate
We should be careful not to be misled by the quirks of translation into English. In classical Chinese there is no distinction between singular and plural, no definite article “the,” and no indefinite article “a”; terms are most commonly used indeterminately with regard to number, unless the context allows us to interpret more specifically. Thus, “dao” can mean “way,” “a way,” “the way,” and “ways,” and need not be used with unitary reference unless the context requires it. When a philosophical text articulates an understanding of its preferred way, the reference is specifically to its own preferred dao, but not necessarily in terms of number. Thus, its dao may have several aspects, several possibilities of manifestation, several ways it may be followed. It may thus be understood as having an integrity that is indeterminately plural, manifested simultaneously as a way to cultivate oneself, a way to interact with others, a way to govern a state, and not necessarily as a single unity that is uniquely individuated with precise boundaries. This is especially true of the term “dao” as it is used in the Laozi. Indeed, in this text, dao seems to be essentially indeterminate,13 resisting definition and determination at every turn.
As we shall see, even in the most metaphysical-sounding passages of the Laozi, dao is always described as supremely subtle, escaping the limits of discernibility. It is a deep-rooted and potent source of the production of existing things and the particular manners in which they are produced and develop. Thus, dao is not one among the many particular things in the world; it lacks the determinacy and definition of an individual thing, and as such cannot be observed or manipulated in the same way. It is subtle and intangible, but this does not mean that it escapes all observation. If that were the case, it would never be possible for us to learn from it or put it into practice.
A counterpart of dao, de can be thought of as the distinctive potency or efficacy of each thing, each creature or person. It can be understood as an inner source of power that expands outwardly as a kind of charismatic influence. Some people have magnetic personalities: others are drawn to them, admire them for their excellence. Entertainers and sports people in particular attract followers and fanatics. This fascination may be rooted in something as superficial as their physical beauty and charm, in their fluency with words, or more deeply in the qualities of their character and their capacity to excel at what they do.
Such charisma is also manifested in the realm of politics: there are those who have a gift for leadership. “De” is used in this sense by the Ruists to refer to the ethical virtues of an excellent ruler, that is, one in whom the dao is manifested. Their personality and strength of character inspire others to follow them: not only are their words persuasive, but their actions are exemplary. They inspire trust and respect, are able to govern wisely, and influence others effortlessly through the power of their charismatic character alone. They are thus able to bring people to a state of flourishing without actively taking control of them, without the need to articulate laws and impose punishments. The Confucian understanding of de is intrinsically ethical: it does not describe a ruler who has a gift for exploiting the people or attacking and annexing neighboring states, and who incites others to wicked behavior, no matter how influential and successful. De is simultaneously the inner potency that gives rise to ethical character, the power of influence that follows from exhibiting virtuous behavior, and by extension the virtue itself that manifests in one’s bearing. The abilities attributed to de are natural and intuitive; they arise from our natural tendencies, and although they can be cultivated, they are not simply the product of training.
In Daoist texts, the term takes on a more extended sense. It still indicates the influential capacity of a person, but when it is applied to natural phenomena its ties to humanity become diminished and its ethical sense becomes more ambiguous. It becomes the natural potencies of any creature or person, thing, or phenomenon, especially those that affect whatever lies within its sphere of influence. This is still thought of as an admirable quality, to be nurtured if possible, and in that sense has a normative force. But it is less clearly an ethical force. It is possible for there to be de or potency that is ethically neutral, and perhaps even, as Robber Zhi argues in the Zhuangzi, for de to be unethical.15
NATURE, COSMOS TIAN 天
According to Xunzi, Zhuangzi was obsessed with tian and lost sight of the importance of ren, humanity. Although Xunzi does not explicitly discuss the Laozi, nature or the cosmos can also be seen as fundamental to its worldview, but expressed with the term “tiandi” 天地 (“heaven and earth”). Pinpointing the exact significance of the Chinese word “tian,” however, is not easy. It is semantically complex, and while it shares much with each of its traditional English dictionary entries, “nature” and “heaven,” it also differs from each of them in important ways. Moreover, these two English words themselves have a diverse array of meanings and associations. Not only are nature and heaven vastly different, their philosophical significances, as we shall see, are diametrically opposed. All this combines to make translation of the term deeply problematic.
Both translations, “nature” and “heaven,” have cultural connotations and philosophical histories that can cause misunderstanding if taken to apply to the Chinese word “tian.” The word “nature,” for example, might be taken to imply a physical world in which the mental or spiritual has no place. The term “heaven” might likewise be taken to refer to a realm of paradise where a personal God dwells, or to imply a metaphysically transcendent power.16 Of course, there is no single, monolithic “Western” concept of “heaven” or of “nature.” Each term has many facets of meaning and may be understood differently by different thinkers, or when used in different contexts. Moreover, from a philosophical point of view, these terms have fundamentally opposed significances, and we can only use them comfortably and without fear of misunderstanding when these differences are made explicit. In the following sections, I highlight typical Western cultural associations and compare them with Daoist ideas, especially as developed in the Laozi and Zhuangzi.
“Nature” and “Heaven”: Comparative Differences and Difficulties
Philosophically speaking, the natural world is understood as the empirical world: the world that we observe through sensory experience. Scientifically, the natural world is one whose causal connections and inner workings are governed by natural laws, the patterns and regularities of which can be discovered experimentally and expressed, or approximated, in scientific theories. This is the physical, material world that we come into contact with every day, that is studied by astronomy, geology, physics, and chemistry and often understood in largely mechanistic terms.17 But the word also has organic connotations: the domain of nature is the domain of ecology, environmental science, zoology, and botany. This is the biosphere, the world of intricate processes that function holistically in evolving systems that continuously balance, sustain, and rebalance themselves in response to complex conditions that change on multiple levels. Although an organic view can be found philosophically articulated in Chinese cosmological texts that discuss the complexity of transformations, and practically in the development, for example, of Chinese medicine, the mechanistic view was not prevalent in early Chinese thinking.
The natural world has often been thought of as a resource, at our disposal, for human consumption. This can be seen in the biblical conception of “man” as the culmination and caretaker of “creation.” It is also present in Bacon’s conception of nature as a resource to be controlled and manipulated according to our needs and desires, and it is abundantly evident in the way we relentlessly exploit natural resources for our ever-increasing comfort and convenience. By contrast, in early Daoist texts, nature is not thought of as a resource provided for human consumption, but as the context within which humanity finds its place, nurtured and sustained along with all other things.
Nature is sometimes equated with that which is wild and untamed, that which encroaches on civilization and must be held at bay. In the popular imagination, the thought of the natural world often evokes images of animal behavior, especially predatory behavior, and even social Darwinist conceptions, or misconceptions, of the survival of the “fittest.” Conversely, it is sometimes held up as a romantic ideal of harmony and perfection. The latter can be seen in the political views of utopian philosophers such as Rousseau and is also present in some ecological responses to a technologically driven, consumerist society. Xunzi saw nature as an unruly force that needs to be controlled by humans in order to flourish to its maximum potential, while the Daoists maintained something of a utopian conception of nature and natural life as idyllic. The early Daoists saw nature as untamed, but not wild and dangerous; in contrast with civilization, but not necessarily destructive. Rather, civilization was perceived as invading and harming nature. While the early Daoist view of the world is consistent with that of evolution—complex processes that mutually fit and adjust, allowing things to grow and transform in new ways in different contexts—natural creatures are not defined as predatory or self-interested.
On another level, we can also talk about the natures of things. What happens naturally is also what happens spontaneously, following the inner tendencies of things. The inner makeup of each thing makes it the kind of thing that it is and shapes how it ordinarily behaves. The early atomistic philosophers, such as Democritus, appealed to the inner structures of things, too minute to be perceivable, to account for differences in kind. A comparable concept can be found in Chinese, “xing,” though it is not explained mechanistically and is considered to be beyond the capacity of conceptual understanding; it is sometimes discussed so as to include its attendant processes of growth and transformation.
The word “heaven,” on the other hand, has very strong religious connotations. Literally, it can refer to the sky, but more usually, it refers to a spiritual realm beyond the physical world, a paradise in which the highest Divinity dwells, a place of eternal bliss that is a reward for the souls of those who have lived a good life. It is often contrasted with hell, a realm of eternal punishment. These are conceived of in some sense as places, but they are not necessarily physically located in some stretch of the universe, and can only be reached after death. They are thus said, in a metaphorical sense, to be “beyond” the world: heaven is “above” and hell “below.” Heaven is a realm of purity, light, and peace, its value expressed through the metaphor of height; hell is a place of darkness and suffering. “Heaven” can also be used metonymically to refer to God as the ultimate power. In contrast, notions of celestial and infernal dimensions are alien to early Daoist thinking: they entered the Chinese worldview only with the entry of Buddhism into China through Central Asia, sometime during the Han dynasty.
In the plural, “the heavens” refers to the sky, distant and superior, an ultimate power responsible for our lives and our circumstances, though not in complete control of them. It is not necessarily conceived of as a personal force, but neither is it simply as impersonal as the forces of nature. As we shall see below, “tian” does indeed have great affinities with this usage of the term.
Most notably, in Western philosophical discourse, heaven and God are not merely supernatural entities that are somehow in the world but not bound by the laws of nature; they are metaphysically transcendent. That is, they lie utterly beyond the empirical world and are not accessible to experience in the way that the natural world is. Indeed, they constitute the conditions of the possibility of existence of the empirical world, which is, in some sense, their “creation.” Thus, not only are the meanings and connotations of “heaven” and “nature” entirely different, the philosophical connotations of the two terms are entirely distinct: heaven transcends nature.18
Tian: The Heavens as Nature, Transcendence Naturalized
Thus, while the early Chinese understanding of “tian” has much in common with each of the Western notions of heaven and nature, there are also significant differences of emphasis and association. Most importantly, early Chinese cosmology lacks any strong conception of a dualism between heaven and the natural world. In fact, by not distinguishing them, early Chinese cosmology might be thought of as naturalizing the transcendent.
Like the word “heaven,” the word “tian” translated most literally means “sky.” It also implies the sky as a natural force that oversees all, a vast, overarching, expansive, and ubiquitous power responsible for things; in this sense it might be thought of as “the heavens,” or at its most expansive, “cosmic forces.” As the heavens, it is constant or regular, chang 常, in its functioning, overseeing everything below, throughout all seasons. Indeed, the constancy of tian is precisely the regularity of the seasons, the regularity of organic processes in general, especially the cyclic processes of living and dying through which what we would call the biosphere sustains itself. Thus, while it refers to the heavens above, it does not necessarily exclude the world below. In an extended sense, it refers to the cosmos as a whole. Even as the ultimate power that sets the conditions for things, tian cannot sensibly be described as “beyond” the natural world. Indeed, as natural powers they are manifested in natural phenomena.
In both Daoist and Confucian texts, the heavens or forces of nature, tian, are the powers that produce things, give life to them, impelling their growth and development and enabling them to be what they are. Tian is also manifested internally within things. That wood should be hard and strong, that water should be clear when pure and level when unmoved: these are tendencies that arise within the natural world itself. But we should not assume that these phenomena are understood purely mechanistically or in purely physical terms. The naturalness of tian does not exclude its being spiritual. That is to say, phenomena not ordinarily thought of in purely mechanical terms—life, heart, mind, spirit—are not understood as “supernatural.” However, although tian is also spiritual, it is not thought of as a single spirit, a single divinity, a single consciousness. Nor is it a realm in which such spirits live. Tian, in its most philosophical sense, is not a person or a place, but the productive power of the natural world imbued with the accumulated potency of everything ancestral.
Of course, humans are also products of nature, produced by tian. Tian gives birth to us, makes us what we are, gives rise to our inner tendencies and powers, and impels our life processes, our living tendencies. In this way, tian sets the conditions for flourishing and “healthy” lives. Our natural tendencies propel us from birth to maturity and eventually through the phases of dying. If they are allowed to function well, without constraint, we will flourish; if they are interfered with, the processes will be unable to function in a manner conducive to health and longevity.
The Daoist conception of the natural is of what spontaneously follows when inner tendencies are allowed to manifest. Natural events are those that are not deliberately controlled or prevented from developing in accordance with their inner dispositions. Things naturally flow where and how they will. From a civilized point of view, such spontaneity might appear unruly, chaotic, and complicated. But nature has its own means of flourishing; it does not rely on thinking, conceiving, using language to understand things and control them. Its patterns and regularities are complex and seemingly irregular. But if we can expand our viewpoint, see the natural world without such humanistic preconceptions, then we will see that it has an orderliness of its own that does not require human interference to function smoothly and successfully.
THE NATURAL AND THE HUMAN
The relation between the natural and the human is one of the most fundamental issues addressed by Chinese philosophy. In the crudest of brushstrokes, the Confucians emphasize the importance of what is distinctively human, while the Daoists deflect our attention toward the background of natural conditions within which the human is able to flourish. But the very attempt to distinguish the human from the natural world gets us entangled in a philosophical problem: it seems to imply a distinction between what is natural and what is not. How can anything that exists in the natural world not itself be natural? If it is produced by natural things and has natural tendencies of its own, on what grounds can we distinguish it from what is natural? In the following, I discuss some of the characteristics of the counterpart to tian—the human, language, artifice, and culture—before returning to consider this problem.
Human Ren 人
The word “ren” means human, or person; it is gender neutral and indeterminate with regard to number. So it is misleading to translate it as “man” or “a man.” Rather, it means human and humans, person and people. Thus, “ren” does not primarily denote an individual, but includes both the singular person and people as a whole. The word “ren” 人 is also etymologically related to the word “ren” 仁, an ethical concept of fundamental concern to Confucius and his students. The Shuo Wen19 explains the structure of the character as being composed of the graphs for “human” 人 and “two” 二, thereby indicating how humans interact when they come together. Its ordinary meaning includes “kindness” or “benevolence,” but the Confucian understanding deepens its significance to reflect its etymological heritage. As Confucius responds to his students’ questions about ren, it gradually emerges as a virtue that lies at the very heart of being human, indeed, the virtue of being human itself. The Confucian classic Zhong Yong goes so far as to define “ren” 仁 as “being human,” ren 人.20 It is the quality that constitutes our being human, in virtue of which we deserve to be called “human.” For this reason, I prefer the translation “humanity.”
In its sustained meditations on humanity, the early Confucian perspective manifests its humanistic orientation. The goal of Confucianism is to cultivate what invests human life with deep significance: virtue and culture. Humans are capable of acting with ceremonious respect, li 禮, and of doing what is right, yi 義, in preference to what is of personal benefit. This ethical understanding of humanity is the precursor to Mencius’ and Xunzi’s interest in human nature: whether it spontaneously tends toward or away from being good; whether the goodness we observe in people is inherent or must be cultivated.21 Either way, our humanity is not only our starting point but also an achievement: we construct our humanity. Human cultivation is a never-ending process; humanity is always a work in progress. The ideal is not a perfected end point, but something more beautiful that precedes and exceeds us, is always ahead of us and out of our reach.
The Daoists consider human-oriented endeavor of such a magnitude to be counterproductive and disastrous, an artificial fabrication at odds with the natural way. As we shall see below, they account for our deviation from a more primordially natural way with our predilection for linguistic activity and manipulative transformation of our environment in accordance with artificially induced dissatisfactions. But this leads to a problem that recurs throughout the Daoist texts. This critique of humanity is not to be taken lightly: as one moves from a human to a cosmic perspective, ethical concepts lose their grip; one cannot judge actions to be good or bad. Is there anything in this philosophy to prevent a person who thinks this way from acting in a manner that ordinary people would consider inhumane? This concern is not just a Western philosophical imposition: chapter 23 of the Zhuangzi contains an articulation of the problem.22 As we shall see in Chapter Five below, the utopian Daoists may have the means to solve it.
Humans speak, think, write books, give advice; we describe things, put them into words, in an attempt to understand what they are and to communicate our understanding. We live through language; it is an inescapable medium through which we understand our world and in which we coexist. As children, we learn in part by acquiring and developing linguistic skill: we divide and categorize all phenomena through terminology, ming 名, into such and such objects, such and such processes and events, such and such kinds. Insofar as we live through language, we certainly notice its ubiquity but do not ordinarily sense its depth. We take the things we know and name to be real, existing independently in the way that we understand them even if we had never used concepts to categorize them. Red would be red even if humans never verbally articulated the concept; a book will continue to be a book even after the last human ceases to think of it that way.
With language we communicate our understanding of the world to each other and pass it down to future generations. It encapsulates and transmits the understandings of the past, but is also flexible enough to enable new ideas to be formulated and old concepts to be modified, replaced, or corrected. But words are not just descriptive, they are also normative: we evaluate the groups of things we have described and categorized as better or worse. We encode our worldviews and their inherent values through linguistic systems, and we make judgments through criteria that express our values. We persuade others, approve and disapprove of them, praise them when they conform to our demands and expectations, and blame them when they fall short. Thus, in early Chinese philosophy, language is understood to have three basic pragmatic functions: to organize and classify into kinds, to evaluate into hierarchies, and to communicate those classifications and evaluations to cohorts and descendants, in order to both pass on the accumulated wisdom of the past and exhort them to strive to live up to our ideals.
Activity and Artifice Wei 為, 僞
Sometimes, the deepest and most abstruse philosophical issues are concealed in the simplest of everyday words: “be,” “must,” and “not,” for example, give rise to the philosophical concepts of Being, necessity, and negation. In classical Chinese, “wei” 為 is one of these extraordinary words, revealing a deep-rooted pragmatist ontology. It means “to do,” “to act,” “to make,” “to become,” and “as,” and can also function nominally to refer to doing, acting, and making. It can often be translated with the copula, “to be,” suggesting that the equivalent of “being” in ancient Chinese was conceived with pragmatic significance as a kind of acting or functioning. Things are what they do, what they act as. It is also sometimes used in the sense of the word “wei” 謂, meaning “to call” or “to deem as.” This suggests a close conceptual connection between how something functions (what something is) and how it is understood to be (what it is called). Humans act in accordance with an understanding of how things function, and what things are is in part a matter of how we understand and interact with them. We deem things useful, beautiful, valuable; we interact with them as such, manipulate them as such, and that is what they become—they function as useful, beautiful, and valuable things.
Its philosophical significance for Daoism can be further understood by examining the etymologically related term “wei” 僞, where 爲 is combined with the “human” radical 亻 and means “artificial activity.” This is contrasted with zhen 真, genuineness, what is so without being forced or contrived. “Zhen” can refer to what a thing is in its innermost nature, and also has connotations of truth: being true to oneself, or authenticity, and being true to others, or sincerity. In modern Chinese it refers to what is true or real, but in ancient Chinese its ethical senses take priority. “Wei” as the opposite of “zhen” can thus also imply lacking sincerity or being disingenuous. Xunzi, however, uses the term in a positive way. He regards the human additions to the world as essential to good order.
We transform the world to suit our purposes, and thus create artificial things and structures in an effort to improve on nature: this is the activity of technology. We have reached the point where we make dwellings that are almost impervious to wind and rain, clothes that imitate the softness and warmth of fur, vehicles that move faster than the speed of sound. We prefer these additions and improvements to coping with natural circumstances on their own terms. We do not like to trust the accidents of nature, but prefer to be in control of our environmental conditions. The word “wei” thus connotes human artifice in all its senses, positive and negative.
Human transformative activity is not random, but accords with artificial structures, patterns, and values, and these function to transform not only our environments but also ourselves. Everything we do is imbued with a sense of proper form, a right way to be performed, which is transmitted from generation to generation. The right way to eat, to sleep, to communicate are all clothed in a particular style of a particular community, passed down from its predecessors. The forms we imitate and embody from the very first moments of our lives eventually become transparent, seem effortless and natural. It is usually not until we come face to face with cultural difference, with people whose behaviors we find odd, surprising, and even unnatural, that we realize the contingency of culture: that it is artificial, its particularities and peculiarities highly variable, and must be inculcated and cultivated over many years. The combined product of all this transforming activity, linguistic and performative, is the human world in all its multiple manifestations. The social patterns, the physical tools and machines we use, the abstract constructs through which our lives are given significance, and the values by which they are judged are all constitutive of culture, wen. The most complex societies with the most highly developed technological constructs we deem to be “civilizations.”
Confucians in the tradition of Xunzi recognize and emphasize both the contingency and the necessity of culture. Though the forms that particular cultures take may vary radically, some form of enculturation23 is necessary to ensure human flourishing. The natural is merely raw material in need of completion: human cultivation is required to enable not only ourselves but also our environments to function well. The best structures and patterns, even if they are rooted in what is natural to us, cannot appear by themselves but must be first discovered and then passed on to future generations. Human life is optimal when our relations are regulated by values and ideals; nature functions optimally when humans cultivate it in accordance with those same ideals. Weeds and jungles grow naturally; gardens, orchards, and crop fields must be cultivated. Caves occur naturally; homes must be designed and constructed. What is natural respects no stipulated regulations, appears wild and unruly, and if left to its own devices will tend to disorder. For things to flourish harmoniously, an artificial systematic order must be imposed to guide their growth and development.24 We thereby not only construct things that are useful and beautiful but also create the very standards of beauty and usefulness by which to judge them.
Daoist Critique and Recommendation
The Daoists have a surprising and paradoxical critique of the Confucian view: it is precisely the effort to add to and improve upon nature to make it orderly and harmonious that leads to disorder and disaster. Nature is seen as ancient and awe inspiring, its inner workings utterly beyond our limited understanding, and not to be trifled with. We believe that we can improve on the very world that has produced us only because we fail to appreciate it on its own terms. In fact, the achievements of humanity pale in comparison with the magnificence and intricacy of the natural world. We must instead be willing to undo our artificial social structures, let go of our need to control our lives, and return to a simpler, more natural mode of existence. As we shall see, this returning is not a single achievement but a process, a turning around, a change of course.
However, reversing direction and setting out on a path away from artifice and toward simplicity can be no simple task. We have been enculturated since the day of our birth, and humanity as a whole has been immersed in complex cultural systems for millennia. This enculturation shapes, informs, and civilizes our natural selves. It is not just that our naturalness is hidden, covered over with the superficial appurtenances of culture; it has been transformed into something new by unceasing processes of molding and forming, carving and polishing. To return to a more natural way of life, we need to find it first, to reclaim and nurture it. But how is it even possible to know what our natural impulses would have been if we had not been socialized? If we have been so thoroughly transformed by language and culture, we cannot simply relinquish them. Instead, we would have to actively investigate, discover, understand, practice, and embody more natural functions and modes of behavior. If such a thing is even possible, it can be no easy matter. Daoist practice is thus emphatically not simply letting it all hang out and “going with the flow,” as is often claimed in the popular literature. On the contrary, the return to natural simplicity is, paradoxically, for most practitioners a tough life demanding years of discipline.
The distinction between the natural and the artificial is one of the most fundamental of Daoist philosophy, and at the same time, difficult to pin down. How can anything that exists in the natural world not be natural itself? Humans are not unnatural; hair and toenails, secretions and excretions are human products, and are all entirely natural, as are the additions of any other creature. Also, products of human artifice are products of natural creatures, and themselves are made of materials that have natural tendencies. In what sense is artifice not natural? Moreover, aren’t language, society, and technology themselves natural? Don’t animals also communicate, live in social groups, use tools, build nests, and have hierarchies?
The Daoists nevertheless presuppose that there is an important distinction to be made, and their way of life depends on successfully making such a distinction. Moreover, in preferring the natural to the artificial, they are making a recommendation that requires real and dramatic changes in lifestyle.
Defense of Distinction
The distinction in question is not a mutually exclusive dichotomy between what is purely natural and what is purely unnatural. Rather, it is a complementary contrast between phenomena that we identify in practice as “natural” and those that we call “artificial,” and this contrast is a matter of degree.25 That is, when we classify some things and processes as more natural than others, we are really classifying not their degree of naturalness, but their degree of artificiality. While everything is natural and nothing can be purely artificial, some things are clearly more artificial than others. It is the absence of artificiality that is informally, but misleadingly, described as “purely natural.”
The purely natural, in this loose sense, might be glossed as whatever occurs by itself, unaltered by human purposes. Paradigmatic examples would include the sun emitting radiation, the displacement of leaves by the wind, the sprouting of a windblown seed in a forest. It is understood in contrast to artifice: the transformation of something natural according to human purposes. Tools, technology, culture, and civilization are products of such human transformative activity. We manipulate material to create something designed to meet our needs, something that would not otherwise have existed. We use rocks to create a dam: the rock is natural and its blockage of the water is natural, but our deliberately placing the rock in the stream so that we may block the water from reaching a particular area of land or save the water for future use—that is artifice. It is not only physical objects that we manipulate in this way. We may manipulate our own behavior: moving, walking, and touching are natural. But shaking someone’s hand in conformity with social etiquette to demonstrate our respect and good will is artifice. The degree to which we interfere with or transform something natural according to our designs is the degree to which we create an artificial environment. Constructing a skyscraper requires more artifice than building a hut, which in turn involves more artifice than hollowing out a cave. The degree to which we transform our own behaviors to conform to culturally imposed standards of acceptability and meaningfulness is the degree to which we turn our own lives into products of artifice.
In fact, this applies to any purposive creature. Although everything remains natural, there is always for any creature also some degree to which its environment may be modified according to its purposes. Thus, animals that engage deliberately with the world cannot eliminate artifice altogether: a macaque that sits in a hot pool turns it into a bath; a wolf snarls to frighten away a challenger and has communicated successfully its position in a social hierarchy. These are natural behaviors, yet they can all correctly be understood as involving minimal degrees of artifice. Moreover, to the extent that the capacity to transform the world purposively is natural (insofar as it arises without our deliberately creating it), artifice itself is natural. However, this does not entail that the concept of artificiality is meaningless: it would only be meaningless if the artificial had to be radically distinct from the natural.
The difference between human and animal artifice is that humans have the capacity to deliberate and transform the world to an unlimited degree, and are also capable of choosing not to exercise this capacity. Birds build nests, but they do not erect skyscrapers; apes make use of a hot spring, but they do not construct Jacuzzis; wolves howl and live in packs, but they do not write novels or legal codes defining the proceedings of a representative parliament. More importantly, these creatures are not capable of any further development of their artifice: nor are they capable of controlling the degree to which they engage in it. Only humans have the exponentially unlimited capacity to plan and transform our worlds in this way, and the capacity to refrain from doing so. The more immersed in artifice our lives become, the further we drift from our natural moorings. The significance of the distinction then lies not in the mere fact that humans create products, but in that they create products of a very distinctive kind: cities and circuses, wheels and crossbows, books and theories, skyscrapers, computers, satellites, nation states, legal codes. There is a clearly recognizable sense in which these constructs are additions to and distinctively different from what is produced by the rest of the natural world.
Thus, although the humanity with which the Confucians are concerned, our being cultured and civilized, is indeed a natural part of us, a problem arises when we see its value but fail to see its limitations—when we pursue the deliberate and artificial construction of our lives and our environments at the expense of our natural simplicity. Ironically, it is the path of control that the Daoists see as spiraling out of control. It may be natural for humans to be artificial, but the degree to which we choose to pursue artificially constructed lives and an artificially constructed environment at the expense of other natural capacities is problematic.26 Social structures thereby become increasingly intricate, and the more complex the structures, the knottier the webs that tie us in. Cities, states, laws, institutions take on lives of their own and make it increasingly difficult for us to dissolve them for a life of unstructured simplicity.27
Complementary Contrasts Yinyang 陰陽28
“Yin” and “yang” are certainly not uniquely Daoist concepts. In fact, the terms occur only once in the Laozi, in chapter 42, and are only explicitly mentioned in passing in the Zhuangzi. Nevertheless, these metaphors embody a way of understanding change that pervades these texts and is central to their understanding of dao.29 In a similar way, the concepts “dao,” “de,” and “wuwei” were not invented by the Daoists, yet are still taken to be distinctive of Daoist philosophy.
When the natural world is observed as a holistic system of interconnected processes undergoing constant change, some salient patterns begin to emerge. Perhaps the first among these is seasonal transformation—not just the exchange of seasons themselves, but more generally the relationship of celestial phenomena to those of the earth, and the resulting cycles followed by both living and nonliving things. This understanding of natural change is embodied in the traditional Chinese metaphors of “yin” and “yang,” the names for the northern and southern slopes of a mountain. Those who are in the habit of retreating to the mountains, observing the climate and the terrain, may notice two distinctive characteristics: the parts that face the sun often tend to be brighter, warmer, and drier than those that face the other way. This is certainly not universal to all mountain slopes, but is a general characteristic that becomes pronounced in certain geographical locations. In this basic sense, “yang” can be translated as “sunny side” and “yin” as “shady side.”30 Adjectivally, the words can mean simply “shady” and “bright” respectively, but they eventually came to express a host of qualities directly or indirectly associated with these sides of the mountain.
In the northern hemisphere, the yin side of a mountain tends to be cooler, darker, cloudier: morning mists collect along the northern slopes, while the rays of the rising sun disperse the moisture along the southern peaks. The mists become rain, which produces rivulets, streams, and waterfalls. The moisture enables plant life to grow, which in turn provides a habitat for other creatures. The combined activities of precipitation and biological activity keep the soil soft and fertile. In contrast, the yang side tends to be warmer, brighter, clearer, and therefore drier, with firmer soil. By extension, yang becomes associated with the sun, yin with the moon, and hence also day and night, summer and winter. If yang connotes the sky, and rising, then yin connotes the earth, the streams, and descending. More abstractly still, if yang is firm and bright, then it is also forceful, energetic, progressing, strong, and filling, and if yin is soft and dark, then it is also yielding, resting, retreating, gentler, emptying, and returning. Culturally, they also are associated with male and female, or rather qualities associated with masculine and feminine roles: yang connotes leading while yin connotes following; yang implies strength and force, yin is associated with yielding and nurturing. These are not strictly biological gender terms, since all things and all people are supposed to have both qualities in an appropriate balance.31
Notice that extending the metaphorical associations still further can yield different classifications for some of these: following the model of dark and light, we get dying as yin and growing as yang; fall as yin and spring as yang. But following the model of the fertile and barren we would get the opposite: the alive and supple as yin, the dead and dry as yang; spring as yin and fall as yang. Thus, yin and yang are complex enough for each to contain elements of the other. Notice also that while the moon is yin when compared with the sun, it is yang when compared with the surrounding night sky. Again, the sky is yang when compared to the earth, but yin when compared to the sun or the moon. This, however, does not mean that yin and yang are completely relative. The sun, for example, has the greatest degree of yang, followed by the daytime sky, the moon, the night sky, and the earth, least yang of these four. Indeed, this must be the case if the concepts of balance and excess of yin or yang are to be meaningful. Thus, in their most general sense, they are not understood as essentialized forces of nature but as multifaceted characteristics of the phases of natural processes. However, while they are complex, contextual, and matters of degree, they are not completely relative.
In contrast, in typical Western discourse, pairs of concepts tend to be understood as opposites: opposed to each other, mutually antagonistic, and often mutually exclusive. Truth is opposed to falsehood; being excludes non-being; death is the enemy of life. Each element is self-contained and sharply defined, distinguished completely from its opposite. They may be conceptually dependent on each other, but they are defined by mutual exclusion. Truth and falsehood, being and nonbeing mutually negate each other. While relational terms (“big” and “small,” “more” and “less,” for example) and vague boundaries (between red and orange, or between childhood and adulthood) are recognized by logicians, they have been considered to have a subordinate status: a perfect language would eliminate them in favor of terms that are neither relational nor vague.
A reader who approaches Chinese texts with such presuppositions is likely to misinterpret their philosophical significance. In Chinese thinking, pairs of concepts are more likely to be presented as what I call complementary contrasts.32 The structural characteristics of complementary contrasts are exemplified in yinyang pairings. Neither phase of the pair is ever static, but always in the process of transforming to some degree into or from its complement. This view is sometimes compared to that of Heraclitus, but for Heraclitus the ruling principle is agonistic: opposites are at war; the fires of becoming are kept burning by tension between the enemies. The Daoist view, however, is that contrasts do not conflict but rather mutually complement each other. That is, each is incomplete without the other, and the momentum of transformation between yin and yang phases is kept going by mutual yielding, not mutual aggression. Lastly, between yin and yang lies not a sharp and precisely defined boundary, but an extended phase of yin-becoming-yang, and between yang and yin is a phase of yang-becoming-yin. There is no single precise point at which one can be said to begin and the other end; each blends smoothly into the other across a penumbra of vagueness.33
Thus, yin and yang cannot be essentialized in a simplistic way as “forces of nature.” But they are sometimes used, especially in later texts, to classify types of energy, qi 氣.34 The word “qi” means “vapor,” “air,” “atmospheric phenomena,” or “breath,” and philosophically connotes a tenuous energy from which all things are formed. It is thus perhaps a kind of stuff not understood substantially, but processively as energetic condensation into yin qi or rarefaction into yang qi.
Dynamic Balance and Priority of Yin
While yin and yang are mutually productive and yielding, they are not necessarily equal at all times. There is, or should be, an appropriate balance between them. Exactly where that balance lies depends on the specific details of any particular process. Our first reaction may be that balance requires equality, but in fact, the Daoist conception of natural balance is complex and dynamic. Imbalance is not merely inequality, but is heading toward one extreme to an excessive degree. Equality presupposes a static conception of balance that would not allow for natural cycles of change. Dynamic balance requires leaving the center and constantly returning; only through such mutually balancing processes can organic phenomena thrive. Walking and running, for example, are types of controlled falling: we propel ourselves forward and throw ourselves off balance, each foot falling forward in time to redirect the fall to the other side. The sort of balance that allows organic phenomena to flourish is likewise maintained over time, but it is not just a matter of eventually equalizing extremes. Oscillation between extremes might occur naturally, but it does not usually promote organic flourishing. Likewise, throwing ourselves over and falling down to the left and then to the right achieves equality between the two sides, but it is not the kind of movement that Daoists would consider to exemplify natural balance.
Paradoxically, if there is any recurring insight at the heart of Daoist thought, it is that yin phases are in some sense more primordial. Throughout Daoist texts, the productivity of darkness, confusion, emptiness, and indeterminacy is presupposed. But this gives rise to a conceptual problem: can it coherently be maintained that yin and yang are in a mutually productive and balanced relationship, and yet that yin is in some sense more fundamental and therefore to be preferred? I suggest that the answer is yes. Productive balance between yin and yang requires that yin be central. Yin is a phase of rest and indeterminacy that provides the conditions for regeneration. We shall see the same issue in relation to something and nothing, you and wu, in the next chapter. Each gives rise to the other, and yet wu plays a more productive role without being transcendent.