Dear reader, grace and peace to you and thank you for reading this far into this project. This project itself began by quoting several sayings from the Chinese, Taoist text, the Tao Te Ching here. It was not remotely my intention in doing that either to promote Taoism or to make my readers Taoists. Put most simply, I am indifferent about whether that appeals to my readers or not. But I did make use of it because, when I read it, it opened up a new experience of life for me, a life that was not about rules and right and wrong and canonised directions or decisions but that was about flexibility to circumstances, flowing with life like water, simplicity, humility and a natural, dispassionate compassion for all things. I was taught not to strive and struggle and resist the things around me but to become soft and flow with them. All things pass, I came to understand, and the nature of nature is change.
According to the earliest Taoist texts, when human nature is aligned with the rest of nature, order and harmony are the result. Taoism is, in this sense, a therapeutic understanding of existence. From this perspective, the purpose of the kind of self-cultivation the Tao Te Ching and Taoism itself recommends, something which also accords with the thoughts of many others I covered so far this project which have broadly promoted an anarchic ‘self-creation’, is to return to a mode of existence that is natural, but that has been obscured by social conditioning. This is essentially what the Cynics of the Greek world complained about too, that being less natural was bad and that being more natural was good. One Taoist remedy, repeating certain actions such as physical exercises or meditation, in such an understanding, is a way of training the body so that it is free to react in a spontaneous, natural way. It is similar to the experience of practicing one's shots in basketball and then making a key basket in the big game — the preparation through repetition makes it possible to act, at a certain moment, without thinking, in pure spontaneity. This accords well with the training aspect to this common to Taoism and to Cynicism, which acquaints one with nature, reality, in order to mimic it, just as it comes to be, and with the habitual practice of those such as Nietzsche, Cage and Goldman in There is nothing to stick to who, all in their own ways, exhorted human beings to more natural lives - and to practices and not simply beliefs.
Yet it is clearly the case that, throughout history, human beings can deviate, and have deviated, from the natural chaos of things, their natural law and order, and have gone after artificial and conventional things of their own imagining. When they do so, often they have brought destruction upon themselves and those around them. Confucian scholars, who were rivals to the Taoist scholars who wrote the Tao Te Ching, were criticized there for imposing rules and social expectations upon people. According to the Tao Te Ching, social mores, the artificiality and conventionality of human culture and threats of punishment, cause more harm than good, as they are methods of forcing appropriate behaviour rather than allowing it to occur spontaneously and naturally which is the Taoist wisdom on such things. That we naturally become the change we seek from such teaching is, in fact, the point of it. This way is to change yourself naturally - rather than to be pushed this way and that and beaten into shape artificially - which is the target in view. Authenticity here matters. It is especially the point where knowledge and knowingness is foreign and innocence is nature in its manner of operation. This is to flow with the river rather than to swim against its current because you are possessed by the idea that you know better.
So, in this case, the only way to encourage appropriate behaviour is by modelling it. If, for example, a ruler is a person of impeccable character, those he leads will naturally follow. But how is the ruler to become the ideal role model, thus insuring harmony for his empire? As an 8th century Taoist master said to a Tang emperor, "Who governs his body, governs the country." The way forward, then, is to practice self-cultivation and to engage in self-examination. To live according to a nature which gives us nothing to stick to will not come all by itself. It will involve us forgetting a great many things. In fact, one thing common to all the thinkers and thought I have highlighted in this project is that human cultures, in their knowingness, have, in some way or to some extent, usurped a more natural mode of life we should rediscover by imposing things upon us we should forget. But this is not a matter of going back, as if it were better in the old days: it was always available to us and it still is today. It is not a matter of time or place but it is a matter of attitude, orientation and habitual practice. It is a matter of us having all we need if only we can let go of the things erroneously added.
In Taoism the central idea regarding nature and the natural is relationship. We cannot approach nature as a thing to be mastered but only as a partner in a relationship. The goal is to become a natural part of the anarchic environment. The way to discover that environment is to turn to nature in its manner of operation. For this reason early Taoist philosophers left the cities to learn from nature and primitive people living in remote mountain villages. They hoped to eventually bring human civilization into the natural chaotic state much as the Cynics did around the same time but in Greece and the Hellenistic and Roman empires instead of in China. In Taoism nature is taken to be infinitely wise, infinitely complex, and infinitely irrational. It is divine chaos or anarchy, not divine order. Yet, as chaos, it is order. One must take a personal yielding stance and abandon all intellectual preconceptions and culturally-inculcated habits. The goal is wu wei, acting without action, or non-action, doing nothing contrary to nature but existing as it exists. Nature does not need to be perfected or improved or subjected to human ideas of order. It is we who need to change; it is we who need to come into accord with it. It is we who need to attain to its naturalistic rhythms and not us who need to impose our measuring, instrumentalising mentality upon it.
Part of the Taoist aim in this is to sidestep the observed dualities of life. To this end Taoism historically rejected all dichotomies, even the most fundamental one of being versus non-being. The goal of Taoism is to attain that which precedes duality. The only way to discover this original source is to observe nature. During peak experiences in nature, the deep meets the deep. Yet the Tao, which we may think of as nature, is a divine chaos, not a random accident. It is fertile, undifferentiated, and teeming with unrealised creation. It is the mother of everything in nature as nature births itself; it is a great darkness that operates spontaneously to give birth and life to all things. Taoists, as naturalists, seek not to be saved or to win, but rather to return to the original source of ‘the Ten Thousand Things’ which is the term the Tao Te Ching uses for the superfluity of things in nature. They see creation not as a single event, but an ongoing process that has no beginning and no end. Its divine play is taking place right here and right now. The wise person becomes like an animal or a child, participating joyfully in the profoundly irrational and anarchic (dis)order. He or she learns to trust or accept the chaos. Is that not what being ‘natural’ would amount to?
Consequently, Taoists have always avoided anthropocentrism for they recognise that we are just one of many things and not a special thing, a chosen thing nor a necessary thing. Unlike other spiritualities, they have never lost their animal gods. Ancient Chinese shamans put on animal masks in order to communicate with these animal gods. Their spirit-animals were links between the worlds of people, ancestors, and gods. There was a tradition of animal frolics during which one became a particular animal, such as a crane or a bear. These rituals are still meaningful. Taoists speak of a direct knowing that resonates in the belly when one has direct contact with nature. It is not with the head but with the belly that one can participate in the sacred madness of the ancestral gods. It is only with the belly that one can appreciate the eternal flux and the underlying unity of the Ten Thousand Things. This is not to say, however, that we knowing moderns, fixated with ‘the intrinsic nature of reality’, have to take this literally and too seriously as if what can be empirically demonstrated is all that matters. How do we ‘empirically demonstrate’ a feeling or an idea or a context? Instead, we should appreciate it for its poetic, postmetaphysical resonances and for the relationship it signifies with things beyond us that are not about reified concepts of knowledge or understanding or truth. Here context is much more important and flowing with things that are all around us, rather than classifying them in a table or chart, is appropriate behaviour. If human beings are not chosen or special or necessary and if, instead, they are just beings in an environment, then that becomes the important thing.
The idea to write this particular essay came to me because I held a poll on my account on the social media service, Twitter, some time ago. In that poll I asked respondents what it was they believed in. I gave them the choices of ‘the Good’, ‘God’, however they chose to define it, ‘nature’ and ‘evil’. 73% of the responses chose ‘nature’ and yet, as I never enquired as to what those voting anonymously meant by ‘nature’, I have no idea what they think they were voting for. I suspect that not too many of them were very sure either but that the other options seemed even less appealing, as they conceive of them, than nature did. In this project I am trying to fill out some ideas about what ‘nature’ might refer to and what some of the consequences then are, including what living ‘according to nature’ might then entail. Having read the essays in this project and thought about it some more, I wonder, then, if quite as many might then still choose nature as a consequence? Then again, it may be that some who chose ‘nature’ might have thought that it entailed god, the good and evil as well although, in my view, at least two of those are ruled out specifically once we take the view that nature does not speak, has no opinions and has no canonical function at all.
Yet the third, god, is not, a priori, ruled out and I note that Taoism, my own personal impetus to begin this project, does not formally disdain the notion of gods although neither does it specifically focus on them as the point of what it is about or what it does. This, I think, is wise for we cannot rule out the notion of god even if, as I have written about in my essay Endless Impossible which I will post in the near future, the idea of gods as persons seems vaguely absurd. Yet there are other ways to understand divinity, if understanding it is what we are supposed to do with it, and I’m not sure at all that it is. One way, in fact, has been to think of it as something very like nature and Taoism, in this regard, is quite mysterious in regard to what ‘the Tao’ may refer to. That it is not a person or being seems clear but, as with the Jewish God of the Hebrew Bible, it seems we can say more about what it is not than about what it is. For we hopefully more natural, more flowing with nature, more antiepistemological folk, I would hope that we can lose any possible anxiety about that. There are things we do not need to know and things that wisdom dictates are not necessary to our existence in a harmony of all things. This, I suggest, is one such. As Richard Rorty has informed us earlier in this project, there are some vocabularies which go out of date and become useless to us for they are speaking a language which now appears inadequate in the light of our current beliefs and with what we regard as our direction of travel.
So in what has come before in the blogs previous to this one I have taken a naturalistic spiritual tradition, Taoism, added in some antimetaphysical and hermeneutic philosophy of self-creation from Nietzsche, sprinkled in some of the artistic and aesthetic practices of the Zen Buddhist, John Cage, mixed in a dash of the anarchic politics of Emma Goldman flavoured with a little Cynicism from ancient Greece, and here baked it together with Richard Rorty’s antiepistemological pragmatism, the Cynic-flavoured Judaism of Jesus of Nazareth, some humanistic musings on our experiences of nature, and extrapolated it all back in a naturalistic, Taoist direction. In doing so I have not, I think, obligated you to become a Taoist, a Nietzschean, a Cagian musician, an anarchist, a pragmatist of especially Rortian bent, a follower of Jesus, an incurable romantic for natural vistas or engaging with the elements or, in fact, anything else. The whole point of this project, initially entitled “There is nothing to stick to”, a phrase which remains the motto at the heart of what has been going on, is exactly that there is nothing to stick to. Yes, I really mean it. I really do mean in the face of lots of potential readers who have been taught to believe and who, consequently, feel in their bellies, that there is, in fact, much to stick to that, actually, there isn’t. What we have been schooled in is a form a life but only a form of life. It is a culture but it is not nature. It is The Matrix but it is not the world outside it. Here Rorty’s hopeful, future-oriented pragmatism shines a searchlight on our future and asks us where we want to go which might, to some, seem quite a strange and, perhaps, even unasked question in a world in which, so often, things are set out before us as the conventions to follow, the guidelines inside of which we must stay put, if we do not want to be seen as weird, or strange, or idiosyncratic or even dangerous.
Yet one message of this project is that it is one of possibility, of opportunity and of self-creation. We are, none of us, limited by what we are told we can be. We are limited only by what we can be and that may be something as yet unimagined simply because, as people of culture but not of nature, it has never occurred to us that we could be anything except that which we were told or that which human culture guided us to accept as the natural order of things. But nature is not order; nature is anarchic disorder. If we open our eyes to that and disentangle ourselves from cultural anchors which try to resist and control nature’s less interested existence, who knows what might come to be?
So please remember: there is nothing to stick to.
On another occasion I once wrote a short book for myself full of Taoist texts and other things of my own creation. At its beginning I wrote this poem which was meant to bring together a number of Taoist views in a compact way:
Something from Nothing.
Nothing from Something,
Ever Returning,
The Unending Tao.
With a Mind like the Seashore,
Devoid of Intention,
With Actionless Action,
We Flow like the Stream.
All Knowledge is Empty,
All Striving is Useless,
All Time is Deceiving,
All Separateness False.
Walk the Way of Humility,
Abide in Simplicity,
Be the child of Compassion,
Be at one with the Tao.
Reading it, we can pick out several themes:
1. That something comes from nothing and something goes back to nothing in a circular process of return.
2. That “the Tao”, which means “the way”, is the term for the whole, things being thought of as a holism.
3. That the mind is thought of as a seashore which should not cling to thoughts but let them be washed away without any concern.
4. That the natural principle of “actionless action” is maintained and upheld.
5. That imagery of a river flowing and of being “like water”, as in the Tao Te Ching, is used as a metaphor for human living.
6.That life is not a matter of either knowing or striving in the sense that it is not about either the imagined knowledge, truth or understanding gained or the effort one puts into life.
7. That time is an irrelevant invention and that events do not happen on a timeline.
8. That the separateness and objectivity of things is illusory.
9. That humility, simplicity and compassion are recommended as ways to live.
Yet, after some thought on what has already gone before in this project, we can add a few more ideas to this simple and compact list to flesh it out a little and give a fuller expression of Taoist proclivities:
1. There is a concentration on the present and a consequent de-emphasis of both past and future which dissolves any notion of the diachronic narrativisation of either the self or events.
2. There is a focus on emptiness and particularly emptying the self of thoughts, narratives and emotions. Emptiness is regarded as openness.
3. Consequently, the self is thought to be illusory, a fiction.
4. Malleability and flexibility are promoted as beneficial life traits.
5. Peace is the goal of life, both within the individual and, due to its view of all things, within the context of a harmony of all things together.
6. Life is not thought to be about possession - either of anything in particular or in general.
7. Due to its abandonment of the self and the consequent de-emphasis of the individual ego, there is a greater affirmation of everything else instead and a rebalancing and recontextualisation of things in relation to other things. In the difference of all things, a completeness is seen.
8. There is no set of rules or morals, nor any algorithm for deciding such things.
9. There is a sensibility, a kind of being, that is beyond words.
10. The existence of all things is not thought something that is yours to control.
What stands out to me about all this is how some of the key imagery of Taoism, water, the seashore, emptiness, is not exactly imagery which promotes what many, especially in the West which is my main personal frame of reference, would regard as “moral” in such places. An attitude to life which can easily be characterised as “go with the flow” does not seem too morally robust and might easily be imagined to be completely inadequate to a world of criminality, viciousness and hate. Yet here we must remember that Taoism is not primarily a morality but is, instead, a way of living and a way of understanding all things in one. It is actually an anarchic amorality, it is naturalistic and seeks to site human beings in the context of, and in relationship to, all others things. As such, in the Tao Te Ching we read the following:
"When the great Tao is forgotten, kindness and morality arise. When wisdom and intelligence are born, the great pretense begins. When there is no peace within the family, filial piety and devotion arise. When the country is confused and in chaos, loyal ministers appear." (Tao Te Ching, 18)
Here the world of which we are aware, the world of contention, arises only because the Tao has been forgotten, buried by other things. Yet it is when we forget such things as I have mentioned above as being core aspects of Taoism that we begin to need things like morality or, even worse, law. We see a similar thought made mention of in the past in the words of Dr Martin Luther King when he says:
"While it may be true that morality cannot be legislated, behavior can be regulated. It may be true that the law cannot change the heart but it can restrain the heartless."
Here it is law which cannot mandate a morality but can restrain those determined to impugn it. Taoism, on the other hand, reminds us that it is only when the Tao is forgotten that people need morality to separate right from wrong and better from worse in the first place. But even then, as Dr King said, there are still those who need law to remind them of the civilised need for morality. Taoism itself is about a proclivity, an attitude, a disposition. It is fundamentally one of letting go. It says that if we live in humility, compassion and simplicity with all things without striving for this or that, without a desire to possess, then the result will be more peace. So it implies, if not directly says, that morality is an observed need if, and only if, you do not do this. It is when you forget or cover over the anarchic disorder of the universe that then you have to start the messy business of right and wrong, something which in Taoism’s naturalistic view only comes into focus once the amoral, non-purposive harmony of all things is forgotten.
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