Talk: Brook Ziporyn on Of Mythic Worlds
Olivia Shao:
Hello, everyone. Thank you for coming tonight. What a pleasure to welcome everyone today for special conversation with Brook Ziporyn on the occasion of the exhibition "Of Mythic Worlds: Works from the Distant Past through the Present." We're proud to introduce and welcome him to The Drawing Center. Have advised with writing and translation, and I'm very much looking forward to this evening. Professor Ziporyn is a scholar of ancient and medieval Chinese religion and philosophy, and has received a BA in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago, and a PhD from the University of Michigan.
Prior to joining the faculty of the University of Chicago Divinity School, he has taught Chinese philosophy and religion at the University of Michigan, Northwestern University, Harvard University, and the National University of Singapore. Ziporyn is also is the author of several books. "Evil And/Or/As the Good: Omnicentric Holism," "Intersubjectivity and Value Paradox in Tiantai Buddhist Thought." I hope I'm pronouncing it right. "The Penumbra Unbound: The Neo-Taoist Philosophy of Guo Xiang, "Being and Ambiguity: Philosophycal Experiments with Tiantai Buddhism," "Zhuangzi: The Essential Writings with Selections from Traditional Commentaries," "Ironies of Oneness and Difference: Coherence in Early Chinese Thought, Prolegomena to the Study of Li," "Beyond Oneness and Difference: Li and Coherence in Chinese Buddhist Thought and its Antecedents," and "Emptiness and Omnipresence: An Essential Introduction to Tiantai Buddhism." He is currently working on a cross-cultural inquiry into the themes of death, time, and perception tentatively entitled, "Against Being Here Now," as well as a book-length exposition of atheism as a form of religious and mystical experience in the intellectual histories of Europe, India, and China. Thank you for coming.
Brook Ziporyn:
Thank you very much, Olivia. I'm really delighted to be here and was very surprised and honored to be asked to be here to talk a little bit in conjunction with this exhibit. There are a lot of open questions that I hope we explore together as we look at this. I believe in response, when I first spoke to Olivia about it as she was asking me to come here, do a recent translation of this text, the Dao De Jing, and that's mainly what I'm going to be talking about today because in looking at some of the juxtaposed artworks here where a lot of spaces, both between them and within them, came to light, it seemed to me there's some kind of oblique resonance we can maybe evoke here, so I'll do the best I can. Mainly, I'll be talking about what was spurred in my mind as I've thought about talking about the Dao De Jing in this space among these objects.
In particular, spurred by the title that went on top of these, the very few words that are attached here, thinking about a world and a mythic world, and mythic worlds, plural, a world may be something like ... A dwelt in totality of interacting things and selves beyond which lies the unintegrable, undigestible unknown. Thinking about a little bit what we would call a world and what we mean when we talk about worlds, plural, certain margin between a set of objects or interactions that are dwelt in that one is accustomed to, that one moves among, and then a kind of margin of where things become hard to integrate where we get another world.
Maybe, of course, this is just my bouncing off these words. These are not Olivia's words. Myth. The mythic, a portentous but unsubstantiated image of wondrous things, haunting but impossible to verify. It comes with the idea of a myth that they're in this beyond space that can't be easily integrated or made sense of from within a particular world, whatever we might think a world is. We say, "The world," but now we're talking about worlds and a world, in that sense in which every world is maybe mythic to every other world. That's one of the relations between worlds if we define them that way.
You might go further and think every self is mythic to every other self, which is to say haunting, inescapable, unsubstantiatable, your world, your world, your world, yourself, but impossible to verify. I think that's important when we move it over to things. What if everything is mythic to every other thing? That's where we get into maybe the Dao De Jing.
I want to think about things a little bit in looking at the forms here. The form is the more usual word we use in talking about Daoism, talking about the Dao De Jing, talking about forms and formlessness. What do we observe when we see any specific thing? What do we call a thing, one thing? We see the thing, like this chess piece, but also peripherally, all the other things, quote, unquote, things that surround it.
The second mention of things, however, is diachronic, meaning it comes at a different time. It means a second moment, a second temporal span. You see one thing, you move over. You move the focus over. At any single moment, we see a thing plus something we haven't yet named as a thing. This is just sort of set up for what I think is going to be going on in the Dao De Jing. What do we see around the thing? This is an image that's meant to play up these kind of gestalt shift sort of situations where you have a foreground and a background, and this is sometimes the language used here. A focus and a field, rather than two things as a visual experience, or a figure in a ground to use the language of Gestalt psychology, or maybe a more art historical term, figure in a background.
My point is just to draw attention to the fact that at any given moment, in addition to the focal thing, there's this sort of indistinct aura, which is not a thing until we turn to look at it. Super imposition and synthesis of perceptual events. There's this shifting from foreground background, making the background into a new foreground. This is where I think we get our commonsensical notions, every day sort of thing that it's figures, or foreground, or foci, or things all the way down, i.e., that the world is made up of just things.
It's worth pausing, and I think this is one of the things we get from some of the maybe perplexity that we find when we are looking at abstract semi-figural visual works. A little bit of a pause when we realize that there's a little bit of mental work going on there as we shift from moment to moment, and that our idea that the world is made up of a collection of things, of distinct things is a theoretical or a metaphysical presumption, rather than an empirically observed fact.
In other words, it's because we are synthesizing, superimposing different moments in a very particular way. This is where we start to get into the Dao De Jing side of things because then we start to wonder what is it that motivates or habituates us to organize our visual field and maybe the world of objects we move around in in that particular way. Some practical relation to things to be grasped at and used, for example, that requires us to focus on those contours that allow us to grasp, and operate, and affect things in a particular way. In other words, not a theoretical consideration, but a practical consideration. Maybe to something we'll get to if we have enough time at the end, ultimate teleology, even maybe some theological premises that go with that idea that the world is made up of definite things. That's a bigger topic, but I'll just leave that hanging out there.
What is a thing? Where does it begin and end? Where do we divide one thing from another? It starts to get a little bit problematized when what is beyond anything, at least in immediately observed experience, cut into moments. That's also a presumption that could be questioned. We can imagine that each thing is not really separate from all other things, but that they're all joined to each other at the shared unseen tangled roots, but then we have to think about those roots. This is just elaborating on the previous point. We transfer that picture of a thing as a focal point down into the roots. We have to ask now, these tangled roots, these connected roots, are they the same, or are they different, or are they in fact things in the same sense as that of which they are the roots? We can keep asking this question at every level that we land upon.
The point I'm trying to get at here is that what we call a thing depends on where we draw lines, where we draw boundaries, where what we select out from a background. The real question is where and how we make some kind of a cut in our experience, in our perceptual field, in our mental field. The boundary is what makes the thing a thing and this, hopefully, somewhat evoked by the space we're in and the figures we're here among.
Now, what makes the boundaries? There the question is in what way they might depend, so thinks the Dao De Jing on particular types of values or desires, things we want. Each thing would we say is the tip of an unseen iceberg. We have to ask then, what is this thing below the surface? Is it one thing, one iceberg, many things? Or ... If what we name the thing is just the tip of an unseen submerged moreness ... One thing that we need to maybe also point out here as we delve into the Dao De Jing side of things, that when we name a thing, typically, we are naming the difference that is seen, not the shared or the tangled part, the unseparated part that is always unseen. We see only the differences.
I have a maybe example here that they say, people tell me chimpanzees and humans share about 90-something, 97% of the same DNA. Yet when you talk about what is human nature or what is the essence of the human, you will focus on what distinguishes it from its nearest, closest, most similar next thing. You come to sort of a question for anything like that which is, is the essence of a human the 30% or the 100%? The shared or the separated? Well, normally the naming operation focuses on what allows us to distinguish between things and therefore, systematically will ignore those parts that cannot be distinguished or cut from one another that way.
If the iceberg is the shared totality, which is the background of all named things from which they emerge, of which they are a part, the iceberg is never seen, never named. Cross out the underwater part of the iceberg which is just another object. What do we have? This is where we get to the Dao De Jing. The Dao De Jing trope for what is left, what's below the line of the iceberg, the unseen part is the not yet cut, the unhewn, or pool in Chinese. Raw material as opposed to the vessel or the useful object, or chi, which is understood to be the socially valued and intelligible aspect recognized as a particular thing.
If you do get a chance, whether in this translation or another, or if you have in the past and look at Dao De Jing, you'll notice it's all over the place. It's these sort of unconnected little spurts of verse which go from trope to trope, take a lot of left turns, turns, a lot of non-sequiturs, a lot of jumps. One thing you can track in there is that there are a lot of these parallel dyads throughout this work, which basically in my view at least, track this kind of a relationship between the unhewn, the uncut away and the valued, in fact, ritual object with a lot of different tropes, so a lot of dyads parallel to this.
I'm just naming a few of them. The thing to keep an eye on here is that in the context, the ancient Chinese context in which this text emerged, all the items on the left, column A items were valued, or that is to say were considered, socially, to have some sort of higher value than the others. That includes many unpolitically correct ones like male and female. Also infant and adult. Vessel and unhewn, name and nameless, high and low, male and female, form and formless, moving and still, full and empty, adult and infant, bright and dark. And being and nothing.
Column A, the valued, or the coherent, or the named or the formed and column B, the disvalued or the incoherent. In a way, in the way that I think might be relevant to what we're looking at around us today, these follow a certain kind of structural parallelism. We have this unhewn, raw material, meaning sort of the unchopped up wood from which .... Is the valued or shaped vessel, meaning something like here is a ritual cup carved out of wood. When you carve that, when you cut the thing from the unhewn material at the same time with one stroke, you create two things. You create, on the one hand, the valued thing, the vessel, the thing with a name or with a recognizable form, and you can create with that same stroke something left over, something like the garbage, these wood chips.
Daoists like to use the word the useless, the wúyòng for this. I'll be talking about garbage a little bit more. Actually, this thing is already cut as a visual image. It's cut out of something like this, which is cut out of something like this, which is actually cut out of something like this, which is cut out of something like this, which is, cut out of something like this.
The thing to notice about this is a double status of the unhewn here. This is really the key idea of the Dao De Jing. That B category, everything in that B category, all that uncut stuff in all those progressions that we just went through, on the one hand, it is contrasted to the cup, to the valued vessel. It is the leftover junk. This means it is valueless in contrast to the value of the vessel, that it is formless in contrast to the form of the vessel, nameless, unintelligible in contrast to the intelligibility of the vessel, so it's the opposite. A and B are opposites.
At the same time, as what is prior to the cut and thus prior to the contrast itself, it encompasses both the vessel and the raw material, the value and the valueless, the intelligible and the unintelligible. This is where things get weird in this text and in Daoist works in general. In other words, once things have been cut, if I want to try to indicate how to even conceive, how to name the nameless, what there was before things were cut out, before they were given values, before identities were assigned to them, there's only one kind of thing I can point to and that's going to be that junk on the ground, the valueless.
If I say, "Well, what was this cup before it was a cup?" I'd say, "Well, it was like that," but of course, it's not exactly like that. It's not a one to one correspondence with that but within the system, rather than chasing our tail through maybe what they call an apophatic, a negative theological or a via negativa where we just say, "Well, it can't be known, and even when I say, 'It can't be known,' I don't know that either." Instead, the Dao De Jing and this early Daoist tradition, in general, will say there are all these things including the low, the dark, the female, the empty, the absent, the formless, which are in the system, but they're in the system as the garbage of the system.
The garbage of the system thus has a privileged place. It's the opposite of value, but it's also, and we'll get five actual dimensions of it, but to start with, it's both what is prior to, and in some vague sense, encompassing of the two sides, and it's also just one side, the negative side, so the prioritizing of the negative or the absent. The items in the second column, as I just said, the opposite of the first, what exists prior to the contrast encompasses both items, stand-ins for the unintelligible that is the encompassing coherence of both A and B in the sense of the nonexclusivity of A and B. Stand-ins for them, but that's not the end of the story, of course.
I'm going to give you a chapter to give you a sense from the Dao De Jing. This is chapter 28 in the Dao De Jing. "To know the masculine while also maintaining the feminine is to be a channel for all the world." Those again, these are A and B categories. "Being a channel for all the world, the power of what is constant remains undivided, a reversion to the state of a newborn child." That constant is that A plus B, unchanged between the two. "The power of that remains undivided, a reversion to the state," and again, a B category, the newborn child.
The next verse, "To know the lucid while also maintaining the opaque is to be a microscopic model of all the world." Again, "Power of what is constant remains unwavering, a reversion to the boundlessness of utmost absence." There's a long discussion we could have about the translation there, but let's just run with that for now.
It goes on, "To know the honorable while also maintaining the disgraceful is to be a valley for all the world." Notice, all these images of lowness, emptiness, like a valley towards which things flow from opposite directions. Disgrace is privileged here. Not an elimination of the honorable, but a maintenance of a privileged position for flipping over of the value privilege to the disgraceful, power of what is constant, and then we get the unhewn.
"When the unhewn gets shattered, it is made into vessels and tools. That's that same word, chi. "Each with its purpose." A purposive thing. Something that has a use, a definite use, "But as instead used by a a sage, it is what has seniority over all such functionaries." Then I think a really great line, "The great structuring carves but it does not sever." A cutting without a severing, a kind of bas-relief, I guess, where things are given some definition but remain connected to the rough, raw, unformed blankness from which they are carved out, so we don't cut that root.
There's another chapter where there's another implication of this that start to build. "If when trying to see, we find nothing there, still we name it." We got to lean heavily on that word, name. Because name is one of those A terms. We name the differences. The name actually has an implication of fame, or eminence, or value, as well as mere nomenclature. Something is singled out as desirable. This chapter is playing with the idea that when we're tracking like a spectrum of diminishingly clear sounds or sights, and we reach that point where we can't see any bumps, let's say, there's a special name that emerges for that failure to find anything there. In this case, the name smooth, nothing in the way. Clear is another word like that. Open is another word like that.
These are weird kind of wrenches in the systems of naming that name a failure to find a thing to name and therefore, are given this privileged position here. "Trying to hear, we find nothing there. Still, we name it faint," a faint sound. "I'm hearing, I'm hearing, I'm hearing ..." It's very faint. Silence would work just as well there, and they like that one too. "If when trying to grasp, we find nothing there still, we name it subtle." I don't quite get it, but there's some kind of sense that there's something there, just an intrinsically vague, unclear thing.
Then the text says something funny. "Three names, three determinations in which nothing further can be sought, just so for this very reason they're blended into a oneness." So a kind of convergence, hence that image there. A convergence of sight, and sounds, and tactile things. Where they come to their indiscernible place is where they're united, precisely kind of an identity of indiscernibles. It's the philosophical jargon for that. Three things that cannot be distinguished in any way. That's what we call the same thing.
While the outer outskirt sounds are different from sights, are different from sensations or physical sensations, when you get to that nothing point in all of them, they're indistinguishable, yet they track in these various directions. "Never definite, always unnamed, reverting to what is no thing at all. This is called the shape of the shapeless." A name for nothing like smooth, like silent, like clear. "Shape of the shapeless. The very image of no thing, the vague and indistinct."
The very failure to find a specific form is what is given a name here, great image, shape of shapelessness. The name, namelessness is a name like that, actually. We're still talking. It's still a word when I say nothing. The form, formlessness embodied in all those B category items. Here we have one of the ways in which this image of a creative void, namely a voidness of value that creates value starts to take shape in other sort of sideways images of a creative void.
One that the Dao De Jing likes is the womb of a mother, an emptiness that is fecund. The empty hub, which we'll look at in a second. The still root from which things grow, and to which they return, and further underscored this connection between none and all. On the one hand it's a nothing. On the other hand it's the contact point of every other distinguished thing. That sort of idea.
This is chapter 11. Very famously, 30 spokes share a single hub. The function of the cart happens where the absence is, meaning that empty slot in the middle. If you don't have an empty slot in the middle, you can't plug that into anything. The 30 spokes can't join. I couldn't find a picture with 30, but where you put the axle and where all these divergent things on the periphery come together in a center is in that nothing point, that zero point in the middle.
This chapter finishes with a nice little joke. "Profit lies in the having of something, in properties possessed." That has both a kind of material meaning and a philosophical meaning. Something has properties, but function lies in the having of nothing, in the possession of no properties at all, meaning having no characteristics at all, nothing distinguishable.
Follow this line of thought through another kind of trope hitting this idea from another angle. This is chapter five. "Heaven and earth are not humane. To them, all things are straw dogs." A quick explanation. What's a straw dog? This was an ancient ritual, ancient Chinese religious practice where an effigy of an animal for sacrifice was meant. This was after a way of ending animal sacrifice. They'd take a lot of straw off the ground, tie it into sort of like a piñata looking thing from these grasses, worship it. Then you destroy it like you would in a sacrifice, and then it scattered back. Everyone tramples on it on the way out of the festival. It sort of exploded, so you have this kind of up and down motion, which is to say it starts as nothing with any definite form, without any value, not worship, just like crap, lying around on the ground. Then for a while, it's this holy moly thing. Then at the end, it goes back to being worthless, formless, nothing. That's what we are, folks. That's how heaven and earth treat us.
Here we are, alive, walking around, conscious. We didn't exist for a long time. Then, we exist for a little while. Then, we don't exist again. You were an infant. You couldn't talk. You were drooling all over yourself, and then now you're like a bigshot here giving a lecture in Manhattan. Then a few years down the line, you're going to be drooling and having your diaper changed again, and so everything has that shape. We're straw dogs. It says, "The sage is not humane. To him, all the people are straw dogs, but is not the space ..." and that empty ... Another way of hitting that nothingness metaphor. "The space between heaven and earth itself like a bellows." It's a bellows, which is one of these things you blow a fire with.
The point being heaven and earth, and there's a space in-between. "Empty it is, but never exhausted with each and every movement more and more emerges," so there's another image of a fertile void like a womb. Space between heaven and earth, they are empty. What are they empty of? Values. That's why they treat all things as straw dogs. Nothing has a definite, real, ultimate value, but that's how things emerge.
Something like this. From B to A to B. From valueless to value to valueless. From formless to form to formless. That's why we get this motif of reversal in the Dao De Jing or return. Reversal, return, opposition is the activity of the course. That's the word Dao, what the name of this whole thing is, Dao, a course or a way, the way. Weakness, gentleness, fragility, the functioning of the course. That's in this one little couplet. Then we get all things in the world are born from what is there from being in sort of more portentous translations. What is there is born from what is not there. What exists is born from nonexistence, in other words.
Reversal is like the two sides, the entire A to B to A sequence, but weakness, gentleness, that's a B term. That's a negative value term. That's when you're looking for something and you find nothing there. The lack of the strength to do something or the lack of the imposition of some value into some potential space. In those two lines, you get both of those two senses I talked about. There's this double sense of the unhewn. On the one hand it's the A and B together. On the other hand, it's the opposite of A, so a negative value and a both value at once.
You can look at Daoism or this kind of Daoism, this early kind of Daoism, Dao De Jing Daoism is the discovery of the indefinite as such. The background, the value of the indefinite, the empty space, the unvalued, the force of the nonapparent or the presence of the non-present. I mentioned already the fertile void and the whole, those two senses. We have a convenient pun in English for them. The hole and the whole. The absence, meaning a B category and the whole, W-H-O-L-E being the A plus B, the reversal, the nonexclusivity of the two, the gap, the source, the end, the course. I think we've touched on most of those.
To see why, this little extra dimension to this, I have to do a little bit of history here. This word Dao, because you're actually looking at a very ironic, kind of mischievous usage of this word in what we come to call Daoism. Before the Dao De Jing, before this type of literature starts to appear, pre-Dao De Jing, this Dao is original a generic term. Some of you know that in classical Chinese, there are no definite articles, or indefinite articles, or singular, or plurals, or tenses, or conjugations, or gender, et cetera, et cetera, or punctuation.
When we say Dao, actually, that could mean Daos, or the Dao, or a Dao. It's indeterminant in the original language. We make those judgment calls through context. Originally, the term is generic. It just means any way, any way to get from point A to point B. Not the way, but way or ways, a way to do things, a way to get something in particular, to get somewhere. As such, it's really the broadest possible way for purposive activity in general. There's a way to do it, a method if you like. You're doing something with a particular goal in mind. It's cognate with this word, almost exactly the same character, which means to guide.
It's one reason I translate it as the course because it's like a syllabus. It's a course of how to do something. Has this very strong ... I'm talking about pre-Dao De Jing. A way of X, guide for doing X, how it does what it does, and very, very much normative. How to do something, a path or a method, a set of practices. You may be familiar with some terms. A lot of martial arts, they'll use this word, aikido. That's they way of joining chi, which we'll talk about later. Taekwondo's Korean. The do is still Dao. It's the kickboxing way, but there's a way of archery, and there's a way of flower arrangement, and there's a way of charioteering, and there's a way of good government, which the ancient Confucians were very interested in. There's a way of benevolence and righteousness, which is the way of moral cultivation and virtue.
They're all specific ways. How do you cultivate yourself to achieve this goal? A goal is positive when there's a course, which allows one to attain the end, usually a cultural achievement, a valued thing, an A column thing of some kind. Dao of government, as I said, a study or practice. Then De, the second word in the title is what you attain when you do that, some kind of virtue or really more literally, virtuosity. You practice this particular art form and by doing that, you achieve some virtuosity at the end. That's virtue and Dao. Next, please.
What we see in this through some of these moves that we've just galloped through is that the Daoist Dao is deliberately using this term in an ironic, reversed sense. I said that it means above all initially, culturally, purposive activity. Now it's going to mean specifically non-purposive activity. How does this happen? We see it in the first lines of the very first chapter of the Dao De Jing, famously, "Dao ke dao fei chang dao. Any course can be taken as the right course to take, but no course like that can be the course always taken." That means anything can be made into the guide that you follow anytime you entertain in your mind, "This is what I want. This is what I want to do. This is the way to get it," and you go do that.
Precisely by doing that, you have made it no longer a reliable course for getting to that thing. It's quite perverse. It's sort of a Murphy's law, cosmic Murphy's law sort of thing. Precisely because you've singled it out, cut it out from its background and deliberately applied yourself to achieving it, you've cut off the roots that actually brought it to be, as we'll see in a minute. Another way that line is translated may be, more familiarly, the way that can be weighed is not the eternal way, which implies a kind of perennial mystic reading from the get-go.
It's not completely wrong, I don't think, but I think it's a little bit hasty, and we'll get there in a little sightly more roundabout way, that eternal ... I don't want to get into a long discussion of the translation issues, but more ... I think we will get further into this text if we take it this way. All Daos, all ways can be taken as ways, but in that very act, performatively, in the act of embracing them as the good, we undermine their value. How perverse. By regarding things as good, you drain them of their value.
This is why the Dao De Jing is sort of sometimes, by some mischievous commentators, pitted against things like Platonism, where the good is exactly what makes all things be what they are. The intelligible good, the ideal, the purpose, and on into a lot of metaphysical systems that grow there out of that, so we're starting in a very different place here.
That first chapter goes on, immediately talking about name, meaning whatever is determinable but also, the definition that qualifies something as determinate, a job description, fame, eminence, value, the goal of practicing the Dao. In other words, the ideal envision, we get exactly the parallel line in red there. Any name can be named to determine what is or what should be, but no name like that, in other words, one that is so determined is named can be what determines what is or what should be always. Often translated, the name that can be named is not the eternal name, which I think is more confusing. Next slide, please.
I alluded to this a moment ago, but really, the way the Daoists use the word Dao is a lot like the way we use the word trash, or junk, or garbage, meaning it's the category of what fits no category. If you think about the largest, must multifarious possible word, the word like uselessness. Why? Because the useful, the valuable are just those small number of things you've decided under any set of social, personal, emotional conditions are valuable. By definition, everything else, the entire world of other things is, in terms of that standard, valueless, the lowest valued thing, the trash. Remember those wood chips on the floor. The all-encompassing.
What is the shape of garbage? Garbage has every possible shape. Everything can and will be garbage, every shape in this room, all of us, every single form in here. While the useful, the being, the definite, the wanted has a very limited, small number of shapes, forms, characteristics, garbage is the one word available to us, crap, nonsense, nothing, those kinds of words that name what doesn't fit any known category. The useless, the purposeless, nothingness as an anti-value, so there's those two valences there. Nothing seems like a neutral word, but really because we want something. That's the only reason nothingness is singled out. If we lived in a weird world where the opposite was the case, the Dao De Jing would then be valuing something. It's whatever's left out. Thank you.
I say that the Daoists use the word Dao in an ironic sense. When they say, "There is Dao, Dao exists," it's sort of like this person saying, "Wow. It's a great day for a picnic." Next slide. What does that mean? That means, is it a great day for a picnic? Pouring rain. The Dao De Jing says it is. The Dao De Jing says, calls the unhewn by the name of Dao, which is originally, that word Dao, as I said a moment ago, the most A-type word of all. It's the word for value. It's the word for purposivity. It's the word for what we want. It's the word for the good. They use that word for garbage. Is there the good? It's like saying, "Is this a good day for a picnic? Yes, it is a great day for a picnic."
There's two levels of irony in that. The first is, of course, if I did say that, "Oh, it's a great day for a picnic," I would mean it ironically, meaning it's a terrible day for a picnic. This is to answer a certain question, a linguistic question. How do you, under what conditions do people ever suddenly change the meaning of a word? You can't do that in a language. I can't just suddenly say, "From now on, this is called Pluminon." It's a private language problem because a language is an intersubjective thing, a communicative thing, so it won't work as a word for me to just assign a new word, or if I say, "From now on, this is called a non-book." Although, this is kind of a non-book, but I call this a non-microphone or something. I can't do that, but I can use the word, ironically. When I use the word, ironically, I'm giving its exactly opposite sense. It's important that it's 180 degrees. Otherwise, the meaning won't pick up.
When I say, "Oh, yeah. This is great," this is a lot like saying, "All things were produced by the Dao, the garbage." The exact opposite of a great day of a picnic, Dao is not Dao, is the opposite of value form. Knowledge of the unhewn is garbage, but then there's a second irony there, a second level, the real joke. Because by that I mean it really is a great day for a picnic in a very roundabout, circuitous, almost perverse way, which is to say only rain days. Rainy days make crops grow. Only crops can be made into food. Only food makes picnics possible. B is the real A precisely because it is the opposite of A. Next slide, please.
The text goes on. Nameless does this flip-flop thing. Nameless undetermined. This is chapter one again. In the beginning of things, determined with a name, the mother of all things. Here we have that same thing we had when we talked about the faint or the smooth. On the one hand, you try to find a beginning, a source. You always fail. There's nothing there. There's no name for it. You can't jump out of your skin into what is prior to forms without being there as a form and wrecking it. It's necessarily going to be undetermined, but what do we name that lack, that failure? It's a word like garbage. It's a fertile void. Bingo, the mother of all things, quote, unquote. The same thing, nameless and named. Next slide, please.
It goes on. "There remains always what is beyond all desiring, revealing the wondrous sublimity of each of them and all. and there remains also desire, revealing the cries and the quests of each of them and all." There's a million ways to translate that passage, but just notice there, both always desire and always desireless, and that namelessness connects to desirelessness, meaning both there's no definite thing to be aiming or hanging our purposes on. We don't know what we want and yet, like the way the mother names the absence of an identity ...
This has a social implication too in the sense that in the ancient patriarchical society of Old China, the mother literally had no name. She wasn't part of the patriline. She often, if you would like at a family lineage, the mother would just be the mother of so-and-so. Not named an an empty void, but this is where the life comes from. This is the thing cut out of the system of names, and that's why it's valuable. Again, if the values were reversed, the other would probably be true for the Dao De Jing. They'd find another way in which the garbagey side was on whatever side was being dispossessed.
Okay. Notice that. Both, it can't be an object of desire. It also can't be someone possessing definite desires, and yet we're going to get both, a kind of inchoate desire now for the voidness that is the mother. We'll have a few more references in the Dao De Jing to the nursing infant, the return to the infant without a clear mental picture. If we have time, I will get to that in a bit. Next slide, please. I won't bother with this. Skip.
Overview here. Guiding paths don't guide well if they are taken, and because they are taken as our guides, that is if they are desired, known, named as a preconceived goal. If I wanted to sum this up, I'd say it's kind of a global critique of ideals, per se, a global critique of morals, a global critique of values, by which I mean consciously embraced desires, purposive activity. That's this famous phrase, wu wei. The target of the critique is consciously embraced, purposes, ideals we envision in advance as guides to our behavior.
No guide is the best guide. That's that picnic-like irony. The Dao is the opposite of all Daos, not a guide, not a means to an end, not a purposive activity at all. You might know this phrase, sometimes pops up in pop culture a little bit, non-doing, wu wei. That means non-purposive activity. What is that? Maybe we'll have time to talk about, but this precisely how everything actually gets done, says the Dao De Jing, wu wei, or wu buwei. Non-doing, but leaving nothing undone, but why? The unhewn, the problem of foreground and background with our cognitive act of choosing something as a goal. What happens when we do that? Next slide.
If you've tracked this so far, you'll see that this B category ... Remember in the two columns we had up before, male, formed being high, bright, da, da, da, da, da. Female, formless, nothing, all the negative terms, trash, unhewn. We get not just B as opposed to A, B as including both A and B, but very interestingly, neither A nor B. This is because what is neither named nor nameless, neither formed nor formless is what B is because, as we said, name and namelessness are both names. Form and formlessness are both forms.
There's this kind of pointing beyond itself built into those B terms, where they don't quite map onto the things that name them, all those B column terms, and so we have in different chapters of the Dao De Jing do this in different ways. Sometimes, it'll give you Dao as the opposite of some A thing. Sometimes, as including both. Sometimes, as negating both, as you would expect at this point.
Maybe more interesting, sometimes has the true B, which is to say, what's the real namelessness? That's the B that we're not even naming right now, but also the true A, which is more A, more value. This is the ironic meaning, the second irony when I say, "Well, it really is a great day for a picnic," in a sense. The so-called A, present in A only as the pattern of what? It's a rising and returning, the inherent pull of the tendency back toward its unintelligibility and valuelessness, which is always eminent in it. This is what A, determines how A acts, permeates A, makes A, A, sustains A as A, the true nature of A, and hence, the real locus of its identity as A.
A is A as opposed to B, only because A is value and the unhewn B is the real value of A. That's sort of the fifth, but you got to keep all five of these rolling when you read the Dao De Jing, and maybe when you look at an object too. This is what's fun about the text. It will ride you from one of these to the other and take you from a left turn, anywhere, from five to one, from two to four, from three to one, et cetera. As you see, next slide, they're really all just this, actually, not that complicated idea playing out this double meaning of the unhewn and all of its implications. Because I'm running low on time, next slide, please.
I was going to say, remember that chapter one had this idea of both desiring and not desiring at the same time. A little bit more about this. This is chapter 12. "The five colors blind the eye. The five tones deafen the ear. The five flavors dull the palate. Chasing and hunting make the mind insane. Hard to attain goods impede our steps." That last one is key to understand the other ones because that means the five colors, the five tones, the five flavors are the hard to obtain. That is, what? The valued, the A category. Five specific colors, these are part of the ancient ritual system chosen out. In music, the five tones of the pentatonic scale, from all the microtones and inaudibles, et cetera, that have a special cultural value. In ritual terms, these were correlated in a particular way.
Then it says something pretty interesting. "The sage in ruling is for the stomach and not for the eye. The belly and not the eye. He eliminates that and adopts this." We have a distinction here between two different types of bodily desires. These eye desires which have an object in advance, which single it out and pursue it, but then the belly, which isn't exactly without desires, but desires in a different way. Next slide, please.
"Arise spontaneously these belly desires, not sparked by a particular intelligible object and follow an autonomous course of a rising and decadence," that A-B-A or B-A-B course again. That means you get hungry before you may know what it is you want to eat, and you will get hungry, definitely, whether or not there is a thing to it. It may make you think of something to eat. The causality is reversed, and when you eat a certain amount, you stop being hungry, unlike the eye desires, which have no sort of built-in point of return. They can just keep piling up. Next slide. Next slide.
A good example of this, chapter 55 from the Dao De Jing is talking about an infant. "His bones are weak, his sinews are soft, but his grip is firm. He doesn't yet know of the joining of male and female, but his penis is erect, the ultimate potency. He screams all day but does not grow hoarse, the ultimate harmony," and so on, knowing harmony is called the sustainable. Knowing the constant is called clarity. This is good. "Augmenting life, called a good omen, I call the same, ominous. The mind-controlling vital energy called strong, called strength I call the same, strong-arming." That's working a very nicely placed pun in the text.
What does this image mean, that second type of desire? It's a very weird, granted, weird image, but a compelling one. The infant's erection. That means not a picture of sex, not motivated by a particular object like an eye desire and yet, operating on the belly level without an object, similarly to it screaming. It doesn't really know what it wants. It's not screaming a word. It's not intelligible. It may not even know for whom or to what it's screaming, and this is singled out as the ultimate harmony here. Again, it's a very perverse, funny text in that way. Next slide.
We do have these emergent things, these A category things that they do have a shape, a name, an identity. Just as we have desire and desirelessness, we have name and namelessness. That's that second meaning of B as the inclusive of both A and B, form and formlessness, tentatively known as tree, as vessel, as opposed to the things that are in its background also as named, field, sky, earth, can be known as earth, can be known as darkness, emptiness, space, but they will always also inseparably come from and be permeated by the unhewn, the more that surround that determination. You could say in a kind of summative way, what is Dao? Dao is whatever you're not looking at right now. Dao is whatever you're not thinking of right now like the back of your head or what's right over there. It's going to be a moving target and it's always going to have figures emerging and fading into and out of this form. Next slide.
There's something here about learning to see with eye and belly simultaneously, these emergent figures, rhythmically submerging and emerging in these two forms of desire, and a kind of double vision of each object in its eye form and its belly form, or maybe subsuming the eye form into the belly form, haloed by the objectlessness that eludes all specific desire, name, or form. This is what makes me think of some of the things we have around us today. Next slide.
Whether on this picture there are, in fact, things like facts, that is things that are, in principle, thoroughly knowable, even by an omniscient observer. I think that on the structural picture we put together here, you might say there aren't really facts of that hard and fast kind in this Daoist universe. After all, the Dao is not an omniscient mind. There's isn't an omniscious mind. Dao is not God. Even the Dao doesn't know everything there is to know about any single thing. No one does or ever will, and that's necessarily the case. There's always a dark side, a submerged side like that iceberg wherever you may move your camera.
There can't be a panopticon, a kind of picture of all things. Dao means the necessity of incompletion of any act of knowing. Form is also non-form. Name is also non-name. That the A is also B, inseparable from B, embedded in B, permeated by B. Knowledge also non-knowledge, and necessarily so, for A would not be A, that is the vessel, the valued unless there was also B, the lumber, the non-vessel, the trash. Next slide.
Here's a very easy way to think about this. Are there still knowable, still facts, those emergent belly sorts of objects? The edges of any real thing are fuzzy and a thing is sustained as that thing only as long as it's not entirely severed. You remember that? It cuts but does not sever, so it's a little bit of a cliche, but I think it's a useful one. There's always more to it leading out into the background. Here, we can think of the flowers in dirt. Facts, i.e., things that are made absolutely definite are like cut flowers or plastic flowers cut from their roots. The idea being that if you make a flower as flowery as possible, the thing you name about it, just like we named the human as opposed to the chimpanzee, you say, "I want the flowery," pursuing the flowery thing, that means you try to eliminate all the non-flowery aspects of it. You kill it, and then you have definite things. That's a fact, the Daoist picture of a flower. It's mostly dirt, and those are facts.
I would say this has antitheological implications. I alluded to them a moment ago. God, in most monotheist tradition, knows all things perfectly and completely. God wills. God is purposeful, or at the very least, guarantees that created things are purposeful. God creates things means purpose is ontologically primary and ultimate, that things exist for a purpose. That the final horizon, the actual reason things exist is because of a purpose. They were made to serve a purpose, and it's because these perfectly determinate facts exist in God's mind or will by God that they exist at all. Indeed, God's knowledge and God's will are, in many theological accounts, identical. Knowledge and purpose precede existence. Okay, next.
What we have instead of that development in Daoist tradition, not really in the Dao De Jing, per se, is this transition from all these B categories, not to a highest purpose of deity, but an ultimate principle that you may know this word, chi. In Japanese, it's qi. Breath, energy, something like that. Hopefully, you can see where this coming from. It's kind of weird when you first see it.
How does word, nothingness, for example, or dao, or unhewn, or void, or low, or dark, any of those B categories, somehow get assimilated with this idea of chi, which means breath, or energy, or life? It becomes sort of a global, almost a shared and classical Chinese, the traditional Chinese, many centuries of cultural development, this word for breath, or air, energy, life, clouds that converge into things and disperse into clear space. Those fuzzy-edge things, steam rising, clouds forming and dispersing, dispersing and forming is now the rhythm of that A-B process, that return process. These things are made of chi in it's most congealed form. That's what things are, and when the dissipate, this is the chi in the dispersed form. There's a continuity there that's like that bell curve.
We have a kind of built-in polarity and process between form and formlessness, between inside and outside, between being and nothingness, in fact, and it's all modeled really on breath. Now that in, out, maybe back to our bellows, that thing that issues and draws in, and that has, just like like the belly has that built-in periodicity to it, when it gets fill, it has to empty. When it gets empty, it has to fill. When it gets concrete, when it reaches an extreme, it has to reverse. The rhythmic essence of life, and thing, and world, and all of their mythic other lives, things, and worlds. We're almost done here.
In this perspective, the task, the non-task of art, of life, of thought, of myth is simple, but beyond anyone's unilateral control to keep themselves, worlds, maybe even also myths breathing. Thank you. I guess, we have time for questions or discussion. Yes.