Thinking

East and West

Cyril Welch

Started writing 30 January 2012

First wrapped up on 8 March

Combed through late August

Some adjustments on 13 March 2013

While utterly agonizing for those engaged in them, lovers’

quarrels generally appear utterly silly to those looking on.

Sunk into one, you want out, you sense its futility and would like it

to end, yet everything you say makes it worse. And when it’s over,

you too look back on it and wonder what it was about. Strange.

We would like to believe that such quarrels play themselves out

in a small niche of our private lives, that they don’t — or shouldn’t

— spill over into the rest of life, into our public life at work or into

the world at large. Yet they do, and we then strive to press them

back into our private sphere, something called our “emotional life”

— as distinct, I suppose, from our “cognitive life.”

It doesn’t work. Love is what holds everything together — one

of those facts of life that may well escape the notice of one who has

never yet quarreled as a lover, not yet teetered over its abyss, never

yet dissolved in the dissolution of its bonds. Bond of two: each

coming from a different source and moving in opposing directions

— and yet melding, precariously, into one life . Bond of kin: each

moving out from a the same source, already melded and now

dispersing. Bond of those in a working relationship — whether well-

defined locally or vaguely defined at large. In pre-Enlightenment

ages, as well as in at least some non-Western cultures, we hear or

read talk of the multiple bonds of nature as though these were loves,

whereas we now call them forces (gravity, instinct . . . ) — with a

difference: if we can get these bonds right, we understand them to

be indissoluble, at most counteractable, so unlike the bonds of love.

Indeed, the bonds of love do not hold. Lovers quarrel. Families

seethe. Workplaces and whole cities simmer with distrust. Nations

war within themselves and with one another. Things fall apart.

1

Cyril Welch2

Dissolution is bothersome. Typically, we seek refuge in the

reliability of Celestial Mechanics, as our ancestors called the object

of our present-day astronomy, or that of the Terrestrial Mechanics

copied out from it and now applied all the way down to Genetic

Mechanics. Instead of seeking refuge, the more thoughtful among

us may ask why: Why are the bonds of love so fragile, so

unreliable? Or, perhaps more feasibly: How might we learn to

accept their fragility?

Immediately available is an of-course answer, one that gives

short shrift to the question: Each thing, at least every terrestrial

body, drives toward its own satisfaction — co-operates provisionally

with other things in its environment but in the end has no direct

interest in the satisfaction of anything else. Our Enlightenment

tradition insists that satisfaction is essentially individual rather than

communal. This contention seems especially well borne out when

satisfaction gets reduced to survival. Yet, in order to account for

opposing evidence (mothers and fathers who defend their children,

individuals sacrificing themselves for others), the insistence has

undergone so many amendments that it nowadays talks of

individuals wanting to transmit their genes (a kind of immortality

after all). — This answer you may read in books of the 19 and 20th th

centuries, although Nietzsche, reviewing all the traditions of the

West (and contrasting them with some from the East), detected

throughout what he calls the “will to power” (its historical

prevalence he then takes to justify endorsement of it as super

knowledge of everything). But you needn’t go so far into esoteric

literature for its central application to human affairs: you need only

read the various Charters of Rights available in the West, starting

with the American Bill of Rights.

The essentially intra-competitive function of our institutions

depends on the suppression of love as original bonding, the

reconsignment of it to private life, an optional component of

emotional life. I sometimes wonder whether this suppression does

not account for the current collective neurosis, especially evident in

Thinking East & West 3

the United States — a pathological condition, or mass hysteria,

familiar to historians, most recently in the Europe of the 1930s.

But I don’t want to get lost in consideration of macrocosmic

phenomena, essentially nebulous as these are, being themselves

outgrowths of microcosmic conditions. If any genuine under-

standing of those problems ever does evolve (at the moment of

overcoming them), it will issue from an understanding of conditions

closer to home — those in which we are directly and fully implicated

and no longer simply registering them at a distance.

Such as a lover’s quarrel — something which most any reader

knows first-hand. It can take many contrasting forms: quarreling

about intended or unintended slights, about what was said or

unsaid, done or undone, about how past events should be under-

stood, about what and when and how to be doing something; in

addition, among couples sharing the same quarters, about all kinds

of household chores (who should wash the dishes) and planned

activities (whether to watch a game or visit a relative); and of course

about real or imagined infidelities past, present or future, and even

attitudes.

Like two magnetic bars placed wrong end-to-end: reciprocal

repulsion, yet each also trying to twist itself to restitute the essential

attraction. Afterwards, or for others, an opportunity for reflection.

It’s when things go wrong that we find ourselves especially well

positioned to ponder what’s right — to seek out what we assume

prevailed and in some sense know to have prevailed, what has now

gone missing and might again be recovered. It’s when things are

missing that we no long take them for granted — that we wonder

about them, even at them.

There may be a disagreement, a difference in opinion or

volition, but that’s not enough to qualify as a quarrel. Were we to

assume that it did, we should brace ourselves for a lifetime of

quarreling — either that or monotony. No, for a disjunction to

qualify as a quarrel, one or both must be complaining about the

other’s opinion or volition, action or attitude. Complaint directs

Cyril Welch4

itself to the being of the other person — or, more exactly, to his or her

not being. A complaint strikes to the core, the substance of the

person — unlike objection, reservation or perception regarding

features of a person. It also issues from the core of the one who

complains — who has the complaint. And what’s at stake is the

being of each, their mutual bonding — not really what was said or

done, or is being planned, let alone the chores. At risk, more or less

seriously, is love itself.

Some other conflicts don’t qualify either. A child, even an

adolescent can have a crush: a delightful attraction-at-a-distance,

one not embedded in a life formed together. The affection may even

be reciprocal: a boy and a girl like each other. But unless they form

a third thing, a shared life, each will sooner or later discover many

unlikeable features of the other: there may then be a nasty parting

of the ways, but no love can be lost — because none has been gained.

Then too there are couples whose life together developed from

the desire for prestige, wealth or carnal satisfaction — sometimes all

three melted down into an amalgam of convenience. Again, the two

may in the course of time find themselves in love after all, in which

case they may then really quarrel — as lovers. Otherwise they can

only quarrel as merchants do.

And there’s what might be called troubadouric love — where

one or both are in it for the thrill of being in love, loving to love

rather than loving the other: a self-indulgent way of transcending

the dearth of one’s daily life, so that the prospect of daily life taking

over puts an end to the affair. I have heard stories of men who, on

their wedding night, were appalled at the sight or feel of pubic hair.

Here there’s not even the possibility of disagreeing significantly, let

alone quarreling. The troubadouric lover has a quarrel with life

itself, with its quotidian framework, and in the end wants nothing

to do with it.

At the heart of a lovers’ quarrel lies a genuine attraction — now

transmuted into a repulsion, just as genuine, even though distracted

by some supposed object of the quarrel. What makes the quarrel

Thinking East & West 5

genuine is the original unity of spirit that is now indeed dissolving.

Herein lies the distress of the quarrel — also, if we recollect it

genuinely, its attestation.

About this heart I have nothing more to say: it lurks constantly

in the background of any reflection on love but can only be endured

— any effort to comprehend it places us outside it, which then

falsifies it from the start.

Lately, though, I have learned something to say about what you

might call the brain of a lover’s quarrel.

Look — or listen — again: It’s not right that you didn’t introduce

me to your friend last night. It’s only right that you do the dishes

after I prepared the meal. You’re not right about the point at which

Eve seduced Adam. You’re not right about what our Prime Minister

advocates. — All, remember, in the tone of complaint: distress. The

speaker knows what’s right and charges the other with an error of

judgement. There is, then, cerebral disagreement nested in the

affective disharmony — even if, in desperation, one or both parties

retreat into volitional difference: I just don’t like it, don’t want it, will

not tolerate it (the “it” being what was said or done, or the attitude

behind the saying or doing, not saying or not doing). In short: I’m

right and you’re wrong. And you disagree — thus compounding

your guilt.

The brain of a lovers’ quarrel is this: as distinct from a dis-

agreement, it’s about who’s right — and this at the expense of what’s

right. In logical study we learn to distinguish between the two: “S

is P” and “I assert (I hold, I claim) S is P.” In the first, I turn toward

a subject, and bid you to do likewise — and discover what might be

discerned about it, predicated of it. In the second, I put myself

forward as the author of the predication — and, under duress (say,

in legal or academic proceedings), I must defend my own position

in regard to the subject. The interrelations are much different in

each case. The first stands as a proposal, one where the speaker and

listener may look together to discover what’s right — whereas in the

second the listener looks primarily at the speaker to determine

Cyril Welch6

whether he or she is right or wrong, perhaps deceived or even

intentionally deceiving.

You may recall the story of Arjuna in the Hindu classic Bhagavad

Gita. Arjuna is a mighty warrior called upon to take the lead in a

battle where, to his dismay, friends and relatives are lined up on the

opposing side, appearing as foes to be defeated. It’s not right, he

says, and refuses to fight. Yet Krishna, his divine charioteer, argues

with him: Arjuna has no business worrying about what’s right in

battle, his vocation is to do battle, and who’s there, whether friend

or foe elsewhere in life, is defined by the battle lines — and what

happens there, while exercising his vocation, is . . . well, that’s the

rest of the story. Warcraft is one kind of knowledge, or perhaps one

dimension of any kind of knowledge, but one especially prominent

in the story. The insight Krishna has to offer is yet another kind of

knowledge, one of prime importance to all of us, no matter what our

vocation. And there is also an in-between knowledge — the kind

that sorts out who’s who, who’s right and who’s wrong, even what’s

right and what’s wrong before and after the battle, i.e. apart from

tending to the matter itself — to what’s really right (taking care of

things). This third kind (the classifications are mine!), no matter

how intriguing before and after, just gets in the way. In Arjuna’s

way, at least. According to Krishna, at least.

The in-between kind is vastly troublesome: it’s the kind

manifesting our desire to get things right in advance of turning

toward them. Or to back off prematurely once we have glimpse of

what’s right. In either case it’s a kind that leaves us out of touch. So

that knowledge here (if we allow it to be so called) is essentially

nebulous.

Contrast this in-between kind with the first kind, which consists

in tending to the matters at hand and requires that we answer to

their exigencies. And with the third kind: when contemplating this

exigency (that we answer to their exigencies) we also learn our

exigency, and to answer to it rather than flee from it — as happens

when debating who’s right. And very obviously happening when

wanting above all to be the one who is right. Works like the

Thinking East & West 7

Bhagavad Gita engage us in this third kind of knowledge — a

knowing of the multiple exigencies arising within one’s vocation

while also knowing the one big exigency of being human. Neither

of which is a knowledge about anything — unlike the middle kind.

How quickly a lovers’ quarrel dissolves if only the two stop

concentrating on who’s right and turn to the matter itself in a joint

venture!

Which got me to thinking of the opening of Laocius’ Second

Meditation, where we read something startlingly contrary to

our disposition in the West, especially as this disposition takes on

enhanced forms in our intellectual pursuits:

The verses appear to recommend that we refrain from trying to

establish what’s right — that the effort itself is wrong. But wouldn’t

so many of our problems — both personal and shared — evaporate

if only everyone agreed about what counts as beautiful and good?

Can it be that this kind of universality is essentially ugly, not good?

But what then might be a viable alternative? Everybody having his

own opinion about these things? Lots of variety (which we already

have!) and perhaps colorful, but no efficacy, no unity. — Or not

being concerned at all about what’s right, beautiful or good? Lots

of stupidity (which already abounds!) and, if universal, even a kind

of unity . . . of indifference. — Or only some people knowing what

counts as right, beautiful or good? Lots of evidence that this is the

case for any given field, where those other alternatives appear

especially silly . . . but hardly worth contesting.

It’s puzzling, and I would like to pursue the puzzle in

conjunction with and contrast to our own disposition to prize

universality of judgement. But first let’s consider the reason stated

Cyril Welch8

in this Meditation — the reason that such universality is ugly, or not

good. The verses following directly upon those first two begin:

And this highest-level generalization gets illustrated with lower-

level ones:

difficult and easy complement one another

long and short test one another

high and low give rise to one another

consonance and dissonance harmonize one another

before and after accompany one another.

The illustrations of the reason (for concluding that universality

of agreement on what’s beautiful or good is itself ugly or not good)

make sense: we understand things by contraries like fast vs. slow,

alert vs. dull, warm vs. cold, private vs. public . . . As we are

learning a skill, we not only learn to distinguish between what’s

easy and what’s difficult but actually move within the difference,

aiming for ease of execution in what is giving us trouble — and, as

teachers, we do well to take account of our learnees’ progress in

reference to these two poles. Similarly, we will judge a walk to be

short or long, but these determinations are, as we say, relative to

each other and embedded in the situation (taking a child along?

rushed?). We consider a mountain to be high because we know

places that are low — and vice versa. Only the fourth escapes easy

orchestration, even translation — it seems to recall musical issues in

ways no longer intelligible to us.

Our academic work also unfolds within contraries. If eras did

not contrast with one another there would be no historiography. If

societies did not contrast with one another, there would be no

sociology. If animal species did not contrast with one another there

would be no biology. If the works of philosophers did not contrast

with one another there would be no philosophy. Each side brings

out the peculiarities, at least, of the other — but perhaps, with added

effort on our part, also their essentialities.

Thinking East & West 9

May we then rightly generalize — concluding that is and isn’t

(being and lack of being, presence and absence, having and missing)

generate each other? We find something like this thought

prominent throughout Laocius’ work, and also in other works of the

East. Indeed, we find something like it — at least its verbal

formulation — in ancient Greek philosophy: Plato and Aristotle are

often nuancing Heracleitus (¦ê ôäí äéángñüíôäí êáëëßòôçí

�ñìïíßáí: from contrariety the beautifulest harmony). Descartes

offers a pastiche of its Medieval version when he speaks of his own

peculiarly modern drive as placing him between supreme-being and

non-being (inter Deum & nihil, sive inter summem ens & non ens).

And, within the modern project, Hegel restitutes something of the

Greek version when speaking of the astounding power of the

negative (die ungeheure Macht des Negativen): life “comes to life” (has

being, becomes “positive”) only in the face of death.

And how might Laocius’ generalization help us appreciate the

significance of those first two verses?

First of all, though: How are we to understand “everybody

knowing what’s beautiful as being beautiful, what’s good as being

good? Again, speaking as a Westerner, I note the logical difference

between knowing something that’s right, beautiful, good (the three

super-predicates essential to our own tradition) — knowing the job

well done, say — and claiming to know that it is such. Declaring to

the world that it is such, I place myself forward as a believer in, or

even a defender of, its being such — and perhaps seeking the

company of others in the belief, in the defense. The original focus

(the job well done) may not yet fade entirely, but it certainly does

not remain front and center. Front and center is now the belief, and

perhaps my defense of it. The logical focus has changed —

peaceably, perhaps, but also, and easily, contentiously: I contend

with you rather than tend to the matter at hand, and engage in a

sideline contrariety.

Contention rightly does belongs to some circumstances. In a

court of law I must declare what I take to be correct determinations,

and I must be prepared to defend them (defend myself, as we say:

Cyril Welch10

so I am also drawn into the focus of the debate). Similarly in group

deliberations I must defend my proposals and be prepared to doubt

those offered by others. Students must submit their work for my

judgement, and I look to see whether they have formulated it

defensibly. And so on. In each of these cases the direct response to

matters has been suspended: jurors and lawyers bring into being a

floating world of discourse in search of moorings. Indeed, our own

traditions understand this strange ability to engage in discourse-in-

search-of-moorings as defining what it means to be human: as

constituting our rationality, or at least its framework. Indeed, our

notions of democracy build on this understanding of ourselves.

One result of “everybody” being certain about things as being

“true, beautiful or good” is that the mooring is no longer at issue.

Perhaps we would like to believe that our ship is now safe. But does

that mean we now enjoy the things themselves (e.g., the job being

done well)? Is it possible for us to construct a discourse that,

hovering over moments where things may or may not be right,

beautiful or good, can have settled in advance what it means for

them to be such? Our ancestors recognized our propensity to

dream dreams of such an achievement — dreams of having such

divine recipes (of being divine) — perhaps to distract us from our

actual condition as having to work for a living. Still, though, our

own modern tradition has recommended that we dream these

dreams — but only as heuristic devices, Kant called them (that is, as

guiding our efforts to build, say, computer programs for sorting

things out in complicated but always finite ways).

That we can always — indeed will, eventually — lose our

moorings, and not just individually but also institutionally: this can

be terrifying. Not losing them, or not yet having lost them, we

plunge into, find ourselves drawn into, the actual work where

what’s right is at issue: we tend to the job at hand, knowing full

well that things may turn out well or badly — no doubt distressed as

they veer toward the one end and pleased as they veer toward the

other. On the ground, it’s not a question whether everyone agrees,

and if many do agree it’s only afterwards, when there’s the danger

Thinking East & West 11

of complacency — hardly good. A fixed judgement doesn’t work

forward at all — indeed, the effort to get it to do so can become quite

ugly.

As in most of Laocius’ meditations, the next section presents

thoughts that read as though they followed from the foregoing:

Therefore:

the wise man

attends, without acting, his affairs

pursues, not talking, his teachings,

the myriad things are shaped but not distorted

reared, yet not claimed,

worked upon, yet not relied upon.

Each description of the best appears paradoxical. I take the first two

to be addressing how best to respond to things, the final two to be

addressing how things themselves are best to be understood, and

the intervening verse as taking us from the one to the other couplet.

However we sort them out, the five verses contravene our normal

understanding — which is to take care of things by acting and

spread our views of things by talking, so that the multitude of things

change by our working on them and thereby become ours, and

where, in the midst of so many uncertainties, we look for what

appears safe (whether person, circumstance, or method).

But what’s the context of our considerations here? Wisdom, we

read: what it means to be a true, a beautiful, a good . . . what? The

entire book — Master Lao’s Way & Power Classic is its traditional

designation — provides the answer: we are asked to consider what

it means to be a wise leader. First of all, a leader of a community:

a parent, a teacher, a foreman, director of an orchestra, president of

a university or a nation — a leader of people in some organization.

Perhaps also a leader of natural things, as on a farm — where, be it

noted, a master-farmer is also the head of a household teaching the

young how best to feed and milk cows, sow and harvest rice, and

the like. Within any one instance the question already recurs: What

procedure is most efficacious? Laocius’ classic raises the question

Cyril Welch12

overall — for anyone in a position of power. For only some people,

then? But each of us usually grows, whether we like it or not, into

some such position, one that introduces myriad frustrations

unknown by children — because we have the position but not the

power.

Key to fulfilled leadership is to take care of things and to spread

the way of doing it — but “without acting” and “without talking”:

What might that mean? After all, that’s what leaders do: they act

and they talk! And in unison of decision: they institute procedures

by decreeing them.

The three other descriptors give clues: things get molded but

we do not deprive them of their own being, they are enhanced but

we do not then lay claim to them as our own, they incite our

attendance on this or that particular but we do not then assume we

are done with them. We are tempted by the opposite: to undo

things as they are (for the sake of how they should be), to take

ownership of the things we have cultivated (our labor on them

makes them ours), and of course to assume we’ve settled accounts

with some of them, employing the ones to move on to others.

And these three temptations locate very precisely what our own

traditions uphold. Right at the start, with Plato, and all the way

down to the most conflicting of philosophies in the 20 century, our th

task has been to act and to formulate in such a way that we re-form

things, take them as our own and secure them — so that we ourselves

can proceed safely. Uphold them, be it understood, not as tempta-

tions but as projects — ones that we may of course betray. This

alternative deserves careful consideration as well.

But first . . . there’s a coda to Laocius’ Second Meditation — a

terse statement of how things go if only we become wise:

Results are achieved, but not lingered over.

Then only, when not lingered over, do they not depart.

As leaders we find ourselves especially committed to bringing

things to completion: our entire entourage and environment hang

in the balance. Yet such completions can have staying-power only

Thinking East & West 13

if we don’t linger over them, dwell on them. This too — this leaving

alone, this relinquishing of our “rights” over things — deserves

careful consideration.

Plato’s Republic also engages us in the question of the best way of

communal and individual life, and of the genuine power of

leadership. And in a manner that contrasts remarkably with that of

Laocius’ classic.

For one thing, it’s born out of a quarrel between points of view.

Socrates challenges Cephalus, now at the end of a long life, to

formulate what he figures is most important for a good life: he is

happy to have restored for his heirs the family fortune his father had

inherited only to dissipate, and generalizes this to answer that

what’s most important is to settle one’s debts — whereupon Socrates

cites simple examples of debts, the repaying of which would in fact

be harmful. So his son and heir, Polemarchus, still at the beginning

of life, proposes the needed amendment: what’s best is so to act that

you benefit your friends and obstruct your enemies — whereupon

Socrates asks him to consider what helping and harming mean,

what sort of people you want to be around, and who counts as a

friend or the opposite. — Every answer provides opportunities for

thinking more carefully about our actual condition of inheritance

and debt, helping and harming, friendship and enmity.

But now a third contender, Thrasymachus, a well-established

teacher of public speaking, bursts into the conversation, irritated

with the others for not admitting the obvious: doing well in life

means achieving power over others, since it’s always the stronger

one who dictates the ways things should be done and can thereby

have things the way he wants them.

And so Socrates asks Thrasymachus (and us, anyone who stays

— Cephalus has left for the sacrifices) what it might mean to hold

that “justice is the advantage of the stronger.” The big question for

any of us is: What really counts as advantageous? But Socrates

starts with the more simple-sounding question: What does it mean

Cyril Welch14

to be strong — to exercise power over circumstance? An adolescent

like Polemarchus might assume power comes from circumstance:

having been given money or position or weapons. Thrasymachus

is not so naive. He knows that power over things requires the

learning of an art, a ôÝ÷íç — what navigators, musicians, herdsmen,

horse-trainers, house-builders and farmers have (and Polemarchus

not yet). It’s an art (skill, knowledge) that gives us power over

circumstances: art is the ability to make things happen. Socrates

(and we ourselves) may then ask how the exercise of an art — this

power, this äýíáìéò — works. In each case, the power of the artisan

lies in, proves itself in, the promotion of the good of something:

getting the ship from one port to another, generating beautiful

sounds, raising healthy livestock, building a serviceable house, and

so on. In fact, then, power serves the well being of other people and

other things, and not one’s own well being — at least not in the

examples cited. Quite the opposite of the “might makes right”

which always and everywhere pops up its tempting face. And the

opposition does not depend on any sentimental or moral reason. It’s

the way life works (once it starts working).

But Thrasymachus notes that people — some or even most of us

— exercise their art for the sake of the returns they get from the

exercise. And one return is precisely power to do as one likes (or as

much as one’s particular remuneration allows). There’s a difference

of times: times of being at work and times of serving one’s own

pleasure. Sure. So Socrates then asks him about what it’s like to be

self-serving while no longer exercising the art — what it’s like to live

self-indulgently. We are then treated to an elaborate spectacle of the

dissolute life, the life of a parasite such as Cephalus’ father, even a

youngster like Polemarchus. All of which eventually leads Socrates

(along with Plato’s own two brothers, who are skeptical but more

engaged than Cephalus’ heir), to re-open the discussion on a

different plane — the question of why it is we come together to form

a community and then, most crucially, how we might raise children

with a view to educating them in the art of leadership so that the

Thinking East & West 15

community can actually thrive (after we, exercising the art already,

have primed the pump: a kind of circularity of event, then).

— The style is of prime significance. Plato’s scripting of the

question of power plunges us into debate among viewpoints.

Forever afterwards, what appears essential is the formulation of

what’s important — in addition to, sometimes even rather than, the

eventuation of it. Genuinely democratic forms of government rely

on debate of this sort. As does our democratic system of justice. As

does the advancement of our modern sciences. As does our under-

standing of education as opening the minds of the young to various

colorful palettes across time and space. Laocius would think we

were crazy.

Correlating with our Western style is an understanding of ôÝ÷íç

and äýíáìéò that subtly contrasts with that of much if not all

classical literature of the East. Reviewing the examples of artisan-

ship, Plato recurrently elaborates and refines the understanding of

art as “helping complete what nature is unable to finish, and does

this by following her” (Aristotle’s formulation of it in his Physics).

Or as rendering us “masters and possessors of nature,” as Descartes

later refined it onto another plane, dropping in all but name (with

which he was abundantly familiar) the coda to Aristotle’s

formulation. For, on the ancient reading, when exercising an art we

complete what things themselves strive to be. On this reading, our

own action is still a bit in accord with Laocius’ version: it is

understood as primarily one of following rather than directing things,

i.e. dancing with their power, their natural movement — as so

manifestly happens when navigators, musicians and the rest

succeed. To introduce power as contending with things, Descartes,

Galileo, Francis Bacon and other modern thinkers explicitly insist

upon developing a New Knowledge, one based in our own devices

rather than in those of the artisans who had hitherto served as the

paradigms of efficacy. A kind of knowledge dedicated precisely to

Thrasymachean power (Faustian, Oswald Spengler calls it).

Plato’s original break-away inaugurated a long and arduous

effort to establish three, as against two ways of living a good life.

Cyril Welch16

Hitherto, as still today in many situations, only two types of

vocation seemed legitimate: either you learn an art of making or

changing things within the exigencies of communal life, or you learn

an art of leadership, of taking charge and defending communal life.

Any other activity appeared idle, perhaps amusing but not essential

to anyone other than yourself (originally, “idiot” meant self-

absorbed, as Archimedes appeared to be, along with Socrates, Plato

and Aristotle).

If only production and action are fully legitimate, what are

Socrates and the rest doing? So the Athenians themselves

wondered, and rightly suspected them of corrupting the natural

order of things. What’s their ôÝ÷íç? What good do they do? What

do they help to thrive?

Plato and Aristotle answer by looking first to what other, less

seditious intellectuals were doing: geometers and astronomers, for

instance. Such people must develop an art to do their work, and

they come up with results. Their results don’t take the form of wine

or corn, or of getting ships from port to port. They take the form of

knowing how things are, knowing what undergirds production and

action — the nature of things, nature herself. Some such knowledge

is necessary for, and evident in, every productive vocation: we

intellectuals just do it purely. We may, as Thales reportedly did,

come up with more wine, but the real pleasure lies in the knowledge

itself.

So far, no harm done. But this new breed also meddles in

communal affairs. Socrates and his students challenge — not on a

level with other aspiring leaders, but on the sidelines. They don’t

help matters; quite the contrary: they appear to be haranguing,

maybe even jeering. And, instead of accepting the role of advisors

in communal affairs, these founders of our Western tradition

insisted on developing a third vocation, one having legitimacy inde-

pendently of service to production and action. Which is not to say

that it cannot offer such service; again, quite the contrary. It’s just

that, on the terms of this gigantic development, the new vocation,

the then-New Knowledge, refuses to be reduced to such service.

Thinking East & West 17

The name of this new vocation is contemplation. Its point of

focus is what abides, undergirding both production and action:

nature — whatever has a life of its own, with which artisans enter

into a dance and by which we will all sooner or later be crushed.

There’s a direct lineage, passing through the alterations effected by

such thinkers as Descartes, Galileo and Bacon, from the Greek troika

to the physics of Newton, Einstein and Heisenberg — to all the

chemistry and biology and sociology defining the principles of

education, fabrication and organization essential to communal life

today.

The Greek for production is poiesis — “poetry,” but the modern

term has shrunk to focus primarily on refined linguistic productions.

The Greek word for action is praxis — “practice,” but the modern

term has shrunk to focus on intermediary actions, ones only serving

something greater. And the Greek word for contemplation is theoria

— “theory,” but the modern word has shrunk to focus on sweeping

explanations of how things are: and lost the original sense of

beholding, as theater-goers would behold the drama of life unfolding

before them and thereby re-energize their own. In its original form,

contemplation answers to the human disposition to relax from

production and action, which absorb us into struggling with parts,

for the sake of actualizing the our relation to the whole.

This third kind of vocation is native only to what we call Europe

and its extensions, such as what we call the New World. Native,

that is, in literature and other cultural phenomena. Which is not to

say that India, China and Japan remain innocent of it; quite the

contrary. It’s just that when we go back in our literary traditions we

still stay at home even if we must learn to make adjustments in our

thinking — unlike what happens when we go back to (into) these

other traditions, where we find another kind of thinking entirely,

even if some of the resonances sound familiar.

It’s not that there is no third dimension in the East; quite the

contrary. Krishna informs Arjuna, all of us, of many truths about

life as a whole: for instance, that we have a right to the work but

not to the fruits of the work. But such admonition regarding our

Cyril Welch18

engagements in action and production serves these, does not intend

to engender a stand-alone manner of thinking fraught with its own

contentions and developments. Your only legitimate alternative to

producing or acting is to give yourself up to what undergirds these

two — as Cephalus already does, as monks and nuns are supposed

to do.

Chief among the many differences is the understanding of

language. Most obviously in the expectation of literature — of

books such as Laocius’. Without the ingrained commitment to

getting things linguistically right — as completely and accurately as

possible — and especially without the ingrained commitment to

doing so in fierce, even if constructive debate, these books engage us

linguistically in ways that contrast sharply with our own. Not a

small part of their charm. But a part that easily leads us down paths

of our own fantasy.

The difference in expectation is evident already in the staccato

formulations inherent in Classical Chinese We have a string of

characters that nearly always leaves open many of the desiderata we

would take to be essential to understanding the text: grammatical

number, voice, tense and mood. Here, for instance, is a rather

minimalist translation of a chapter from The Analects of Confucius:

Sage says:

Not keen, no unveiling.

Not stumped, no developing.

One corner lifted,

Not thereby turning to [the other] three,

Result: no returning indeed.

Evidently, these verses ask us to consider the conditions and

events of learning. But, as minimalist as the translation reads, it

already decides matters not decided in the original. The verb in the

prelude we could also read as said — in which case the whole reads

as a report about Confucius. The subject of the prelude we could

read as master — in which case we think of a teacher, and of

Thinking East & West 19

classrooms. And, oddly, the character itself most frequently means

child — one at the beginning, one considered as progeny. The

prelude could conceivably read: “Anyone embedded in his or her

own source will tell you . . . ”

The next two verses lay out parallel conditions for what we

would call genuine learning, or becoming insightful: being eager (or

keen) and being stumped (desiring, but unable to speak). Without

the one, the intervening veil will not be lifted, and without the other

there will be no progress. The initial negatives suggest what pre-

valently happens (complacence and glibness), so they invite

translation with the future tense — to underscore what can happen,

what’s at issue. The characters for what can happen clearly state that

the issue is an unveiling and an unfolding — not, for instance, the

absorbing of information, but an unfolding vision of what’s under

our noses, a movement toward it, not toward anything foreign.

(Philosophers in the West might recognize the “epistemo-

logical” question here: What does genuine learning mean? What

happens when we become truly insightful? There are, after all,

many look-alikes.)

The next sequence, which I have divided into two verses,

describes the unsuccessful effort to learn — now in a metaphor, that

of a carpet with the usual four corners. One corner gets lifted

(there’s no indication of who or how: it just happens), and either

there’s a move to lift the others or not. And if not, then there won’t

be any “returning.”

While the metaphor has a visual clarity, it’s not at all clear how

it bears on this last event — and so on how you might translate it

significantly. With one corner lifted, we catch a glimpse of what’s

underneath: the carpet conceals (veils) the floor (the ground).

Lifting the other three (our agency now, perhaps), we get a full, or

at least fuller view, perhaps in sequence. Whereupon there might

be a return. But a return to what?

The character I have translated as “returning” is: , fu .4

Mathews’ Chinese–English Dictionary offers various renditions: “to

Cyril Welch20

return, repeat, reply; again, repeatedly; to make good” — all verbal

or adverbial, rather than substantive. Perhaps the key phrase could

then read “no getting back to where you need to be” — to what’s

under the carpet, under the veil.

I find the same character in eight of the eighty-one meditations

of Laocius’ classic: 14 (getting back to no-thing, to what’s prior to

things), 16 (contemplating getting back), 19 (getting back to filial

affection), 28 (getting back to infancy), 52 (getting back to the

mother), 58 (things reverting to their worst), 64 (helping others to

return to what they have missed), and 80 (returning to a simpler

form of discourse). Although in Confucius’ verse the meaning of the

character remains wide-open, in Laocius’ verses (except perhaps 58)

it takes us back to what lies underneath the commotions of life. It’s

then something of a let-down, not to say down-right wrong, when

a translator fills in the gaps to obtain: “The teacher will not come

back to give you another lesson (since you have neither expressed

sufficient interest nor done your homework).” The question is how

we might pass from being genuinely at a loss for words, still caught

up in the commotion, to being genuinely articulate, now grounded

in and so speaking from what’s otherwise, and confusingly talked

about — or read about.

But fill the gaps we must. A translator from the West has a

peculiar advantage in this enterprise: to get an English rendering,

for instance, we must risk not only the choice of words but also the

grammatical number and tense, voice and mood. The sparsity of

visible indicators drives us to lift corners, or depend on ones we

believe we have already lifted.

In the philosophic grammar of the West, we can say that in

these classical Chinese texts the subject is conspicuously absent. The

characters themselves, whether construed as nouns or verbs,

adjectives or adverbs, serve only as predicates — sayings in search

of a subject, or ones drawing the reader into the search. And to our

Western eyes and ears the Eastern texts seem unfair — “mystical,”

talking about something beyond our ken. Actually, though, anyone

who carefully considers the few corners lifted may well come

Thinking East & West 21

to suspect the opposite: these texts bid us to return to what’s under

our noses. Their “mysticism” consists in refusing to do the work for

us. And such return does in fact exact from us efforts of greater

magnitude than we might suspect.

It’s quite rare that we find ourselves able to work on things

while letting them be themselves — as must happen in the most

arduous situations: climbing mountains, training horses, raising

children — where each thing has its own being (so we must

discover), and where we may easily betray it (to our own peril). I

understand that intervening verse of Laocius’ to be addressing the

question:

Things are there — in multitudes. Our task in any case, whether as

leaders or artisans, is to form them — each in its turn. In doing so we

run the risk of violating them — in effect, forgetting their own being.

And what their own being is — this we must in each instance learn

to acknowledge. And on the spot, not in advance.

Plato — not just Plato, but our entire Western tradition — devises

another answer to this question of being: in each instance of our

dealings there is a way of its being that the artisan dealing with it

must learn. Contemplating artisanal work, including the exigencies

of that overarching work called leadership, Plato and Aristotle

detected that any master of his craft has already learned the way

things really are (º Ðíôùò ïÛóéá: what underlies crops of various

sorts, livestock of various sorts, songs of various sorts, people of

various sorts, and even communities of various sorts). Such masters

not only acknowledge things as having being in themselves (áÛôÎ

êáè’ áßôü), but also know their being — and thus should be able to

learn to talk about it significantly. This in addition to their

marvelous ability to help the things under their care thrive.

In short, the life of contemplation trumps the lives of production

and action. Trumps them because it ferrets out and articulates the

kind of vision accounting for their power: the vision of how things

Cyril Welch22

really are, i.e. must become. Language itself, our ability to engage

in discussion, both reflects and depends on our commitment to such

extra-curricular vision of what must come to be — whatever our

vocation (Sophist, 259E & passim). But only in the life of

contemplation does it, ëüãïò, figure as the medium itself (thus the

need to defend it against its counterfeited versions).

But surely, you will say, the classical Chinese literature we are

considering also engenders contemplation. What else are these

works doing? How else are we to read them? As Plato says of

Homer’s epics, these works do not provide discourses answering to

the exigencies internal either to production or to action. Rather,

they address questions regarding the whole of our involvement with

things. And isn’t that what contemplation is all about?

Yes, but even a casual reading of any of the works by

Confucius, Mencius or Laocius leaves the reader with at least one

impression: they tell us “Just do it!” We know, in context, what’s

right, and debate will only distract us from the issue. True, we read

about “superior people” (those who do things right), in constant

contrast to their opposites. But these works do not lay out possible

understandings and bid us consider and decide, within this third form

of life, what’s right. Of course, within the exigencies of production

and action there are abundant opportunities for such consideration

and decision, and these works urge us to rise to each occasion,

constantly drawing lines between best and less than best. But no

argument, no effort to settle questions at this third level, this form of

thinking-at-a-distance. Plato defined philosophers as those who

engage in the “art of dialectic”; in so far as this definition holds

throughout the great thinkers of our tradition, we cannot call

classical Chinese works philosophical. We do justice to them

philosophically by drawing them into our orbit while also pre-

serving their difference. Just as Plato and Aristotle drew artisanship

and leadership into their orbit without confusing the three kinds of

art.

It’s not that classical Chinese texts don’t allow for differences.

It sometimes seems that every verse of Laocius presents contrary

Thinking East & West 23

possibilities (rears, doesn’t claim; forms, doesn’t distort): we are

inundated with such contraries, these understood as hovering over

whatever we are doing, and differentiating the right way from its

opposite. Alternatives to think about, but not to quarrel about. You

either know already, or you don’t.

Juxtaposing their works, you can also note how Laocius differs

from Confucius in the understanding of what’s basic to doing things

well. Since translators sometimes render the key characters with the

same English word, I first present them with one name each:

The first, te , figures in the title of Laocius’ classic: the work2

addresses the question how I, in a position of power (teacher, father,

leader of any organization), might also be effective. The second,

ren , incessantly recurs in Confucius’ work: it addresses the2

question of how to be a good person, and especially how to be good

with others. But both terms are often translated as “virtue”:

justifiably, if only readers would recall the Latin smothered in our

English — matured ability to effect things — and not fall back on the

banality of raising children to conform to expectations regarding

honesty and the like. Precisely any genuine embodiment of ren2

exudes strength: the ability to handle rough situations both firmly

and kindly. And both te and ren contrast, in the literature with2 2

mere force, li , which we might then call “brute force” in the never-4

ending effort to distinguish genuine power from its sometimes

impressive look-alikes.

But, to call attention to a marked difference between these two

works, let me cite Laocius’ remarks on Confucius’ favorite term:

Heaven and earth are harsh, not benevolent. 5

A ruler is benevolent with the people. 8

When the Way is lost, benevolence becomes an issue. 18

Drop insistence on virtues,

the people become benevolent. 19

Cyril Welch24

Failing the Way, one resorts to benevolence,

failing benevolence, one resorts to morality. 38

We might read an objection in these verses: Don’t make a big deal

out of this virtue called benevolence, you just generate its opposite

— and, anyway, your job is to meet harsh circumstances.

Consider also the talk of what we in the West — I mean our

tradition of philosophy, also its insinuation into Christian theology

— understand to bear on ultimates: talk of the soul, of dying, and of

the dead. Here again are three characters found in our texts:

Confucius declares outright his refusal discuss any of these concerns

(Analects, 7:20 & 11:11). He does however respond, dismissively, to

them: “if you can’t serve the living you can’t serve the dead” and “if

you don’t know life you don’t know death.” His work directs us

always back toward what we need to face in our actual circum-

stances, in production and action: not only the idle talk about these

things in barrooms and livingrooms, but also the careful talk we find

in Plato and Augustine, intend and effect an extraction from such

immediacy. In contrast, Laocius does in fact address, ever-so

tentatively and (as always) elusively, our concern for shen and su ,2 3

spirit and death, and even our concern for kuei , the dead:3

Valley [receptive] spirits don’t die. 6

Dying, yet not perishing, one endures. 33

Aiming to live, you die. 50

In the reign of the Way, the dead cease being spirits. 60

Strength and firmness bring death. 76

Let people take death seriously, not run off. 80

Even without attending carefully to each of the fuller statements,

you can sense in these samplers, as well as those on benevolence, a

thinking of ultimates, a kind of thought immersed in the dark side

of life. Their timbre you will never hear in the practical advice and

anecdotes of Confucius’ Analects. Moreover, in the juxtaposition of

Confucius and Laocius we easily detect incompatible doctrines

Thinking East & West 25

regarding living and dying — and regarding the leadership

encompassing these.

But there is no effort in any of this literature to dispute

doctrines, let alone refute them. To do so would imply that some

author “got it right” — some doctrine, some formulation, was in

itself right. All at the expense of what’s right. All in contravention

of “doing it right.”

The never-ending challenge is to get back to things: to return.

And all the more for readers and writers engaged in talking about

it — about the task, about the event, about the urgency, about the

failures and the betrayals.

To return in order to begin — to catch on, hook in — rather than

drift along. But how can we, in the West, understand this

challenge — in parallel, so to speak, and thereby let the differences

highlight the task?

Our own tradition is one of disputation and refutation — in

order to get at things. Plato sets Cephalus, Polemarchus and Thra-

symachus against each other. Under the antagonism of Socrates,

and ourselves as the protagonists, we may learn to focus on the

matter itself — but all the while as though the task were to achieve

a proper formulation.

“As though,” I say: the ultimate intent is to get us to respond

to the matter itself. Yet, unlike our Eastern counterparts, we assume

— our traditions have assumed — that such response is intrinsically

linguistic (“logical”), so that one necessary condition is that we learn

to get the formulations right. Right not in reference to accepted

standards: these always drift and beg for moorings (for our return

to them, the erstwhile beginnings). Right in reference to the matter

itself.

Our faith is that the clash of familiar standards serves well as

a catalyst, in any event as a reminder of the inadequacy of pre-set

formulations. So that, while our counterparts have practiced the art

of calligraphy, we — our intellectual traditions — have practiced the

Cyril Welch26

art of logography: the design of formal languages intended to

endure throughout varying situations and to provide a reliable place

to stand while dealing with their vexing vicissitudes. As a logician

myself, I recognize logography as enunciated in Leibniz’s dream of

a “new logic, a new Scripture,” as actualized in Russell’s axiomatics,

and as materialized in today’s computer programs: formulations as

functions awaiting instantiation.

What we may miss in our counterparts is what we find and

admire already in Homer, where clashes of viewpoints already serve

to focus our attention. I especially like the passage in the Iliad

(10:225) where the warriors are debating how best to enter the

Trojan camp, and Diomedes agrees to undertake the task but also

asks for a companion in the nocturnal venture:

óýí ôg äý’ ¦ñ÷ïìÝíù, êáß ôg ðñÎ Ô ôïØ ¦íüçógí

Óððùò êÝñäïò §®q ìïØíóò ä’ gÇ ðÝñ ôg íïÞó®,

�ëëÜ ôÝ oÊ âñÜòòùí ôg íüïò, ëgðô¬ äÝ ôg ì­ôéò.

When two go together, one sees before the other

so that the best may come to be. Alone one might see,

but one’s sight is shorter, and one’s discernment limited.

“One sees before the other”: that is, each viewpoint reveals a limited

range, and two in competition will widen it. Quantitatively,

perhaps, but also qualitatively: precisely because our lines of vision

cross, we achieve a focal point (by triangulation, as it were).

And the beauty of formalized language, language as composed

of functions, lies totally in its serviceability, its potentiality free of

actuality. A function does not name anything: a + b says something

only on two conditions: first, that its two variables get instantiated;

second, that it stands within an assertion. To satisfy the first

condition, we must also stipulate a domain, which also serves to

clarify the operator (if “numbers” is the domain, the likely operation

is that of addition, just as the symbol “+” conventionally stands for

it — but we could stipulate “furniture of a house” as the domain, and

the operator may then stand for juxtaposition). Then, to satisfy the

second condition, we must place that one function into relation with

Thinking East & West 27

something else, e.g. b + a (to remain within our formal language), or

even simply a predicate all our own, e.g. “ is a number” or “fits the

color scheme well.” Without instantiating the two variables, we are

not yet focusing on anything (except our own performance, of

course: a large part of the pleasure in any case — once you’ve

learned to perform gracefully). Without making a claim, we offer no

challenge to see better than another.

Our question — the question since Plato and right down to the

20 century — has been: under exactly what conditions does ourth

language become referential? In other words, what happens when

our talk regains its moorings, actually focuses on something —

focuses us on something? At the end of our tradition, we have

decided not to raise the question — always the most effective way of

dealing with a problem. We get the formulations — the functions —

right, and it’s up to time and circumstance, above all up to others to

put them to work. If they work, that’s reference enough; and if the

job is a tough one, what more do you want?

What our own ancestors noticed was that names of things may

not name any thing at all. In fact, one of the marvels of literary

language is that it talks about things that don’t exist, things that

might exist, things that no longer exist — and often does not

distinguish among these possibilities, as in playful fantasy and

intentional deception. About names of people — nicknames for

panoplies of achievement — Plato offers the image of a deluge that

only mountaineers survive: they have the names (as we have

Aristotle, Jesus, Descartes, Thoreau) but don’t know their §ñãá —

their “workings,” their functions, the functions of what the names

name. To recover the function of a name (of things and personages

both), we ourselves must work — must learn to return to what the

name names. The clashes of dialectic intend to put us to this work,

to get us to return.

Later on in our traditions this ancient thought of empty words

is put to other uses — as in these beautiful lines from the 12 centuryth

poet Bernardo Morliacense (which I only have from Umberto Eco’s

explanation of the title of his novel The Name of the Rose):

Cyril Welch28

Est ubi gloria nunc Babylonia? nunc ubi dirus

Nabugodonosor, et Darri vigor, illeque Cyrus? . . .

Nunc ubi Regulus? aut ubi Romulus, aut ubi Remus?

Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus.

Where now is your glory, Babylon? where now terrible

Nebuchadnezzar, and strong Darius, and famous Cyrus? . . .

Now, where is Regulus? where Romulus, where Remus?

The rose of yore remains a name — we cling to bare names.

We cling to names in lieu of their functions: the places and people

they name have vanished, just like yesterday’s rose. Or yesteryear’s

snow as, in François Villon’s still later image: Où sont les neiges

d’antan? But in these literary instances the intent has passed from

the logical to the religious and finally to the sentimental.

Names, we must now struggle to recall — now, after the halcyon

days of formalism — are manners of relating to things, not primarily

(only derivatively) items in our vocabulary. Thus there is such a

thing as a false name — one naming things falsely, meaning either

that we are not relating to them at all (a person can be a philosopher,

a tool can be a screwdriver, an organ can be a kidney, a work can be

a poem “in name only”); or that we are, in the naming, relating to

the thing poorly, partially, even deceptively. When speaking of the

three principle ways we get off track, Augustine names one of them

variously as “curiosity,” “spectating,” “concupiscence of the eyes”

and fallax nomen scientiae: “fallacious name of knowledge”: as when

we believe we are knowing Africa by attending an illustrated lecture

on its geography and history, knowing the tasks of government by

listening to the news on the radio, or knowing the human condition

by watching soap operas on television. Names galore, all leaving us

decidedly out of it. Knowledge in name only: knowledge deserving

the name must be earned.

In what Plato and Aristotle called ðïßçóéò (making / doing:

production), names float “naturally” into and back out of their

proper naming. Children grow into being farmers or blacksmiths,

even skiers or pianists, and all the while the names they hear and

Thinking East & West 29

utter align themselves (and the children) with matters at hand.

Under such conditions, we may drift, but then the matter itself, in all

its diversity, will soon enough balk at us, and we either return to it

or pass on to something else.

In what Plato and Aristotle called ðñ�îéò (leading / organizing:

action), names hover over situations — adults now have to tend to

them as futural, as human affairs that may or may not cohere, and

talk takes the basic form of propagating faith, ðßóôéò, for good or for

ill (for the good of the whole or for the good of some individuals as

the expense of others). Names can be fallacious because they are,

here, essentially shaky. Yet time will tell: the unworkable, even the

deceitful, will sooner or later bring the enterprise to ruin, along with

everyone in it. As one line in Matthew reads: in the fulness of time

we must render an account, a ëüãïò, of our every word, ð�í Õ­ìá.

It’s in what Aristotle called èåùñßá (beholding at a distance:

contemplation) that names — we ourselves — run the risk of losing

all moorings, taking on a life of their own that can conceal rather

than reveal: can conduct us, in apparent safety, to the end of our

days in this false life. Thus the incessant insistence, right from the

start and all the way down to the frenzied sciences of today, to

justify theoretical discourse, align it after the fact, show how it does,

after all and for all its apparent aloofness, prove itself on the ground,

contribute to production and action. To keep the engine running

rather than idling: Die Verwirrungen, die uns beschäftigen, Wittgen-

stein says, entstehen gleichsam, wenn die Sprache leerläuft, nicht wenn

sie arbeitet: it is not enough just to firm up our terminology.

Whatever the virtues of our Western ambition to establish this

third way of life, it is not native to classical Chinese thinking, the

sole intention of which is to get us back into production or action.

Like Plato’s Republic, it is addressed to us as actual or potential

leaders, but unlike its counterpart in the West, it makes no claim to

self-sufficiency — to embolden a life of its own. If you were not

leading, then you composed something in paint or sound, or

arranged an elaborate tea party, and any discussion would take the

form of propriety. Indeed, Oriental propriety appears to us as eerily

Cyril Welch30

analogous to the formal language of functions we have developed

in the West: it awaits the essential. Yet, trading formalism for

propriety, our own literature may blaspheme and vulgarize with

few if any recognizable limits.

In classical Chinese literature we read over and over again

about the role of names — about our own, as literati, in their

functioning. Most famous, perhaps, are those lines in the Analects

(13:3) where, asked what he considers to be the first thing to be done

in government, Confucius answers: “To rectify names, of course!”

It may be worth the effort to consider exactly what this can mean,

since the first reaction of his own interlocutor might well be ours

(namely, it’s crazy to think governors should start with attention to

lexography). Confucius picks up the challenge:

And, he goes on (more smoothly now): “affairs not flourishing

result in the fine arts [as we would call them] not thriving, fine arts

not thriving result in disciplinary measures not being taken

[standards not being upheld], disciplinary measures not being taken

result in people not knowing what to do with their hands and feet.”

This last image suggests what might be essential for coherence in

joint effort: each can respond directly to current exigencies — not at

all assured, and in any case leadership is sorely needed.

Everything depends on how we understand “rectify”

(“uprighted”). We easily assume it means we should pronounce

and write words correctly in order to maintain their meaning — so

that we can listen and speak, read and write clearly and effectively,

appreciating the complexities that require elucidation as we deal

with vexing circumstances. That is, we assume that the task to

which Confucius calls us is to get the terms right and then return.

It doesn’t work. At least not when reading the classical

literature of China. You might be able to translate the Analects in the

Western spirit, but Laocius’ Tau Te Ching makes no sense at all in it.

In fact, though, the character we often translate as “rectify” means

Thinking East & West 31

something closer to our “align”: directing us toward what engages

the talk — resonating with whatever itself demands attention. And

this first of all, not after straightening out our vocabulary. Names

are to be “righted,” then — where the contrary of “right” is “self-

contained, free-floating, empty, gaseous” and not simply “wrong”

(a phrasing that makes no sense to us in our contemporary “cor-

respondence theory of truth,” according to which only statements

can be right or wrong).

Laocius picks up on Confucius in a suggestive way. About talk

at its best, genuine talk, uprighted talk, we read (Meditation 78):

Or perhaps “Aligned talk resorts to opposites, brings out its own

contrary.” This statement follows upon a metaphorical extension on

the recognition that water, apparently so supple and weak,

overcomes the hard and strong (as in the sea’s erosion of cliffs) — so

too the good ruler proceeds, firmly but gently. The wise ruler

accepts the filth and trouble of his realm, and thereby becomes the

caretaker of its sacred soil, its true king. “Strange as it seems,” we

ourselves might have concluded the meditation: life is full

paradoxes, unexpected truths. But Laocius’ conclusion bears on,

directs us toward, the nature of talk: it does its best work by

bringing out what contradicts our expectations, namely the matter

itself rather than our own formulations about it. These four

characters describe precisely the language of the entire work.

As logicians we might note the effect of translating Laocius to

be saying: “Any true statement elicits its own contrary.” With-

drawing into our third form of life, we would then ask whether this

statement about statements elicits its own contradictory, namely that

some, at least, say exactly what they mean. — Another game.

Seven of Laucius’s meditations talk of names, the first five of

which clearly in regard to the naming of the “way” under con-

sideration. The final one, Meditation 47, concludes the thought

beginning, “The wise, not traveling, still know . . . ”:

Cyril Welch32

Two challenges: first, it’s not necessary to go to things for naming

them properly; second, things can flourish under our rule without

our having to act. How can we make sense of this talk? How can

we possibly rectify, align it?

Of course, the character-by-character translation remains

especially gaseous and must be rectified, together with our own

vision. Does first-hand inspection of anything suffice to assure we

know it? Even our own tradition answers in the negative: rather,

we must take stock of the whole in which the detail can make sense.

Naming — focusing on — what demands attention (engaged as we

are and not merely looking on) accredits that, and accreditation we

can do without traveling (perhaps only reading a book or writing a

letter). The work itself engages us in naming, and we can learn to do

this in the quiet of our study. — The second half complements the

thought, one reiterated in various forms throughout Laocius’ work:

the flourishing at issue under our rule we do not understand as a

product of our own agency (or, if we do, we undo it: another

contrary to ponder).

Consider this possibility: Whatever great literature we read,

whether under the name of Plato or Christianity, that of our own

Enlightenment or that of Laocius’ time, it appears to us through a

haze of shortcuts, not exactly wrong in themselves but already

serving to relieve us of the onerous demands the originals place on

us: Plato believed in a world of ideas above the things we perceive,

Christianity teaches us to behave properly so that we will enjoy an

afterlife, Enlightenment thinkers recommend a self-centered

rationality for understanding nature, Laocius represents Oriental

mysticism. Consider, too, the possibility that this haze of short-cuts

prevails not only among the half-learned, but also among the

professionals. That, in effect, we all begin, each morning, in some

such haze. That there is no such thing, as far as we are genuinely

concerned, of starting out immediately with the full version — that

Thinking East & West 33

in fact we come back anew each day to the task of resuscitating it:

or don’t, perhaps cannot, even actively resist any suggestion that

coming back anew might be helpful.

Then we will at least begin to move within the spirit of classical

Chinese literature. For it invites us to enter the spirit of conducting,

in our musical sense of the word: we have a score and our task is to

turn it into music. Not only to comprehend all those scribbles so

that we can read them as notes in the spirit more or less indicated on

the score (inserting our own indications as well), but to get them to

play, get others to get them to play in concert. So long as the work

works, it works, it’s not a work of our own agency. And when the

concert is over the full version of the score is no more: we have to

keep coming back — remember and anticipate what now appears as

our agency.

If you wish to name a third way of life embodied by Laocius

and others in the East — a life analogous to the contemplative life in

the West — try something like “rectification of inherited names.” So

that, in Confucius’ sequence, talk may regain its punch, so that daily

affairs may make sense, so that there’s a solid place in life for works

celebrating sense-making, so that there are measures to uphold, and

finally so that we know what to do with our feet and our hands as

well as our mouths.

The enemy of this form of life is banalization — neither the

forces of nature nor the injustices of rulers nor the errors of other

readers and writers. Thus, I suggest, the constant contrariety

internal to the Tau Te Ching: “this rather than that.” A placid form

of discourse, we likely think. Placid precisely because it’s intended

to free us back into the often violent exigencies of ruling where, once

again, the intent is to free people, anew each day, into the

unbrookable exigencies of their own hands-on work.

To us today this form of life appears as backward-directed and

as miring its practitioners in the past. That’s because our own life of

contemplation developed precisely in the efforts, initially crowding

around the year 1600, to institute a form of thinking (theory) that

Cyril Welch34

intends the opposite: intends, namely, to turn us into agents of

change, especially in the sciences of health, mechanism and

organization — the new medicine, the new physics and the new

politics. Until that year, the office of literati such as ourselves bore

some resemblance to that of Laocius. The last of the fully powerful

works in this tradition were those of Thomas Aquinas and Dante

Alighieri.

Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose depicts our own

tradition of backward thinking in the figures of two aged monks,

Jorge and the Abbot, who object to the younger monks’ keen interest

in discovering the new. The Abbot rightly insists that the mission

of the Benedictine Order is to “conserve, repeat, and defend the

treasure of wisdom entrusted to us by our fathers” — to be

“custodians of the Divine Word.” Of course, only creative efforts

can effect this conservation, and these the aged monks have already

forgotten in their attacks on the youth. Yet precisely the fuller

version of the task belongs to our Platonic-Aristotelian tradition of

a self-sufficient realm of contemplative discourse.

We in the West today can hardly get back into the thought of

either Dante or Laocius. And, apart from the healthy exercise it

affords, there is hardly any need to get back into it. Our task, I

propose, is to back into our own — back to the basics of the kind of

thinking all-too familiar in our own tradition, itself constantly short-

cutted in caricatures of our own making. Laocius’s work offers a

suitable foil, a contrariety reciprocally elucidating.

Why the first regression, the banalization? Well, there’s Plato’s

image of the flood leaving only mountain people, and these

only with the names. But that is only a myth, as we say. Aristotle

offers a reason: we actually know things only in the doing, in the

knowing, in the activity essential to making contact. The knowledge

we afterwards “have” counts only (impressive enough) as the ability

to know. So we hear talk of actual vs. potential knowledge. Off

work (not training our horses, not leading our group, not reading or

Thinking East & West 35

writing carefully) we “find” things much differently — we have half

lost them, lost them in their actuality. And our off-work talk, unless

put back to work again (now in recollection and anticipation, as

when genuinely writing or genuinely teaching) seeks out safe

formulations in lieu of the originating engagement. As Plato so well

put it toward the end of the Republic, the chief measure of such

unengaged linguistic composition is the pleasure of others in the

same uprooted condition.

Unengaged, unactual?. We were just considering Laocius’ verse

stating that, in the best talk, naming does not require seeing: we

can, and do, mind things at a distance — recall and anticipate, decide

and love, without visiting them on the ground. In whatever way

Laocius and his tradition accounts for this, the Platonic account is

distinctively ours. It distinguishes, namely, seeing with the eyes

from the seeing evident in master artisans, who see what the eyes

in their heads cannot see, namely where things are naturally

heading — the goals of their own development. Plants and animals

and the human organizations for dealing with them begin and end,

not just in time but in growth potential. Those who have learned to

deal with them see doubly: they foresee what they see, and thereby

can participate in the birth and death of things (death meaning their

failure, inevitable, to live up to the end that defines their growth).

This foreseeing is a distinctively human vision. As distinctively

human, this vision accounts for our living all the while in discourse

(ëüãïò), not just occasionally — in speech, even quiet pondering and

calculating. Speech emerges for us by way of, as the interweaving

of foreseeings with one another:

äé� ã�ñ ô¬í �ëëÞëùí ôäí ¦éääí óõìðëïê¬í Ò ëüãïò

ãÝãïígí ºìÃí. (Sophist, 259E; see from 253B)

Among the many significances of this formulation, worked out over

the centuries, is that we intellectuals can be at home in our third

form of life: once we learn to do our job well, we make good on our

own nature, whereas leaders and artisans only make use of it. As

Mallarmé could still say in the19th century, language is essentially

ours, and only temporarily let out for daily affairs. Banalization is

Cyril Welch36

degradation, and we counteract the decline by firming up our

formulations, whether in literary or scientific ways.

Our own most recent tradition aspires to hold the contemplative

life accountable to the others. Science now earns its way by sup-

plying formulas for production and action: proves itself in its ability

to produce things (there’s no such thing as understanding tissues,

a biologist has insisted, apart from the ability to make them). In

general, an educational discipline must earn its keep similarly. And

the very bastion of contemplation, language itself, thinkers in the

modern vein must assume evolves from the exigencies of co-

operation and negotiation — from banality itself. The question now

is how to understand language in its non-banal forms — a way of

assuring that these, whether poetry or chemistry, remain in proper

service.

Yet every reductive effort is itself a logical enterprise, and so

assumes the primacy of what it aspires to overthrow. The only self-

consistent reduction requires us to confine ourselves to wiggling our

fingers.

Which is not to say we need not think carefully about our

Platonic commitments. Quite the contrary. But just where can we

stand when doing so? Or move, for that matter? My suggestion is

that we re-learn, and learn to love it, in dialogue first of all with its

own multiplicity — and then also with traditions wholly foreign to

our own. And all the while remaining wary of reducing them to our

own most recent ones. And of course not to banality either.

Yet in every case we need some common ground to stand and

move on. And here’s a suggestion of one in Laocius, a verse that

especially inspired these reflections on knowledge:

What’s remarkable about this formulation is that it attributes to the

Way (the path, the doctrine, the way of being at issue in the entire

work) both our distinctively human ability to foresee (to know

Thinking East & West 37

beyond the obvious, and to engage others in this prescience and

premonition) and our distinctively human ability to obscure (to hide

ourselves from things, to hide things from others). Even more

remarkable is the fact that the attribution does not depend on our

own commitment to a world of ideas, more or less apparently self-

sufficient.

Foreknowledge is the flower of the Way: it’s only because we

are properly underway that we can see where things are going (and

we with them). In a vaguely Confucian work called The Doctrine of

the Mean we read (Chapter 24) that fully developed people know in

advance (same character as what I translate as “fore=”) how things

are going to turn out: whether well or badly. Which makes sense in

many practical affairs: an accomplished musician can tell at any

moment what’s coming next, and whether a performance is going

to come to something. Yet the author not only pins this advance

knowledge on the reading of omens but says that it marks us as

“spirits” (the same character as in “valley spirits don’t die” and

“ghosts cease being spirits” once we are well underway).

This sort of fore-knowledge we have learned to associate with

superstition: looking into the entrails of animals or the starry

heavens, to the creases in one’s hand or the arrangement of tea

leaves at the bottom of a cup. We easily note that such double vision

does not embody an activity engaging us in the actuality of things:

it’s a sideline passivity that understands things only as affecting us,

not as being themselves in their own actuality. The vision is indeed

double (tea leaves and happy marriage), but there’s no inner

melding of the two sides (my horse and what it needs).

And this kind of “spirituality” we have learned to associate

with false prophets, soothsayers in for the pay of it, or for the dis-

traction it affords. But it’s a common enough propensity, if not

always a profession. Dante places its practitioners deep down in the

Inferno — not because they fool themselves or defraud others (who

knows, they may even say true things!) but because they are trying

to twist matters of divine judgement into human satisfaction:

Cyril Welch38

Chi è più scellerato che colui

che al giudicio divin passion comporta?

Who is more wicked than he

who matches his passion to divine decision?

For self-assertion is the worst thing of all where conformity of one’s

own to God’s will is the path of beatitude, as in the Paradiso.

But even the folly originated by the Way does not carry the

same force as it might for us. The character receives high marks

elsewhere in Laocius’ work: it’s the tranquil acceptance of not

having to decide everything — the opposite of the insistence on

knowing everything; it’s what practitioners of the Way cultivate in

the people they lead — since, once again, know-it-alls are a major

source of social unrest. My dictionary prefers “dull” in its contrast

to “clever.” Assuming that the verse intends a contrast between

flower and folly, within folly we might then contrast simplicity with

simple-mindedness, the simple with the complex, the artless with

the affected, the open (even if naive) with the pretentious (even if

competent) — both these versions grounded (as we would say) in the

foreknowledge sprung from the Way.

We then simply accept our condition at this double fork in the

road: foreknowing still easily going down the path of folly, and here

again forking either into a healthy simplicity or a perverse stupidity.

At this peculiar fork our task as rulers is to tend to the exigencies of

the realm — ones the realm itself will reveal. And our own fleeting

task (as thinkers at the moment) is to help rulers return to those

exigencies: our own task is not to establish a knowledge of that

realm for the instruction of rulers.

Yet in the West that is precisely our task as thinkers, set to us

again by Plato in his Republic. At the very end of Book 9 Glaucon

objects that the city they had worked out in their discussions (ëüãïé)

would not likely ever have a place on earth. Socrates replies that

there may a paradigm of it laid away in the heavens “for those who

wish to view it,” But “it makes no difference,” he goes on: “It’s the

only city in which intelligent people will take action.” And don’t

Thinking East & West 39

think for more than a minute, Reader, that this isn’t exactly what we

are still doing today. Probably the Chinese as well. And despite the

critiques of it leveled by thinkers from Machiavelli through Marx.

For the intelligent today, who engage in action, the world is one of

interweaving visions of possibility and desire, a hovering complex

of foreknowledge, posing both technical challenges and moral

conundrums. It seems we have no way of getting back.

Consider the verses in Laocius’ Meditation 54:

Tend to: maintain, cultivate — not figure out, not transcend to

return with an empowering ëüãïò. Each of these things has its own

power: nobody needs to tell us about it, any more than somebody

needs to tell a horseman or a automobile mechanic what the power

is. Our task, whether as makers, leaders or even (fleetingly)

thinkers, is to acknowledge their power: herein lies our power. And

each person, each family, each community, each realm (“state,” we

would like to say, following Machiavelli) is under heaven: “heaven”

is the name for what lies beyond our power, beyond our care, beyond

our ken — what limits our power. Our abiding task, in any of the

three forms of life, is to return — ever again. Otherwise we float

away into the blue, eventually into the night, enfeebling both

ourselves and what’s under our care.

Of course we want to know, in advance, how to effect this —

how to return. And this desire of ours marks the difference between

Cyril Welch40

our expectations and those addressed in Laocius’s work. And the

difference between a fruitless and a fruitful reading of its very first

couplet:

Character by character: Way can weigh, not abiding way.

Name can name, not abiding name.

Which hardly means anything in English. In the parallel, we must

chose between singular or plural, any or one: way or ways, name or

names. And while “name” can serve as both noun and verb, “way”

does not (“way” as “circuit to follow” does indeed stem from the

same source as “weigh” as “assess, ponder”). Active and passive

voice (weigh or be weighed, name or be named?). At least we don’t

have to choose among possible tenses: it seems clear that the

couplet speaks in the “eternal present”: about the task of and

limitation on thoughtful discourse of the past, the present and the

future. Indeed, the two verses preface the whole work, stating in

advance what will be developed, or at least encircled, in the

remaining verses of this first meditation — and then in the following

eighty. And their sense depends on how — and whether — we have

made sense of the work as a whole. Twelve notes from which we

must learn to play the whole symphony, or remain with easily

dismissed cacophony.

The peculiarity of the two thoughts is that each opens with the

affirmation of a possibility — our potentiality — and then abruptly

negates one. So we might prefer a contrasting clause: even though

ways and names (or a way, a name), there’s a limit.

While ways can lay out, no lay-out is steady.

While names can point out, no pointing-out is steady.

However else we in the West may learn to appreciate this

couplet, we will notice that it contrasts starkly with our own ex-

pectations. Even if we have learned to admit that no work, even our

own, can do the work for us (any more than a musical score suffices

Thinking East & West 41

for the making of music), we expect of a “theoretical” work to

establish the measures at work (so that, with proper training, we can

play the music — during which the elusiveness has been “captured,”

as we are so fond of saying). It was Plato who first established the

possibility of “theoretical” work constituting a third form of life, a

way that can talk about itself self-sufficiently — as adequately as a

navigator or a statesman might do (without thereby relieving

apprentices from the task of relearning the respective arts for

themselves).

But what exactly do these two verses negate? Most literally: the

ability of any way, any pondering, any name, any naming, to “get

at” its subject “abidingly”: dictionaries and scholars assure me that

the character being negated has a sense close to “steady” or

“constant” and does not carry the weight of our “eternal”: a

Platonic term, one that evolved reluctantly to express the contrast

between this or that pool, stream, lake, ocean (ever changing) and

2what always remains the same in them (H O); already in the New

Testament between this or that age or generation (both understood as

“times” that group people) and what holds for all ages, every

generation — throughout them all: above time. Again and again in

Laocius’ work we will read about our own abiding with what

abides, always a returning to actual circumstances — to our own

person, family, community, realm and even, if we can effect these

rudimentary returns, to “what’s under heaven” (“all over the place”).

A brief word of agreement with those scholars who have

objected to one translation of this couplet, already inaugurated at the

end of the 19 century when British scholars first brought Chineseth

texts to systematic attention in the anglophone West. They read it

as outright negation, introducing subordinate clauses to the effect

of “The way that can be told . . . ,” “The name that can be named . . .“

— which immediately castrates the whole work, transforming it into

mysticism if not escapism. Apparently, such a reading does not

accord with Chinese grammar (Peter A. Boodberg, “Philological

Notes,” in Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 1957, p. 605; Günter

Debon, translator, Reclam Universal-Bibliothek 6798, 1961, p. 113;

Cyril Welch42

John C. H. Wu, St. John’s University Press, 1961, who translates:

“Tao can be talked about, but not . . . , Names can be named, but not

. . . ” etc.). On the other hand, a Chinese colleague of mine,

confronted with the grammatical argument (“the fundamental

axiom of Chinese grammar: modifier precedes principle”), cited

some exceptions to the rule in poetry — and noted that the Chinese

themselves, translating Laocius into modern Chinese, often insert

the relative clauses preferred by some English translators. I myself

cannot judge — except that such translation needlessly adds to the

difficulty of playing the remaining notes in Laocius’ work in a way

according with the flourishing of which it speaks.

The second couplet picks up on the naming introduced in the

first couplet:

The origin of heaven and earth has no name.

The mother of the ten thousand things has a name.

What does it mean to “have a name” — affirmed in the one case and

denied in the other? Our own tradition labored hard to transfer the

question of truth from naming to stating: for us, only a statement

can be true or false, whereas in most other traditions, including our

earlier ones, naming remains essential to locating the question of

truth. True naming not only points up what it names, but engages

us truly in the pointing. False naming (Augustine’s example:

calling knowledge what’s really distractive looking-on) sends us off

in the wrong direction, so that we not only miss the thing

supposedly named but also lose ourselves.

While every effort on our part flourishes only when our feet and

hands are lying firmly on the ground of the matter itself (rather

than, say, floundering in fantasies), we can easily misconstrue the

“preliminary” task of achieving such footholds and handholds. Are

we going back to the origin of everything at once, of things in the

sky above as well as of things on the earth under our feet? Such far-

reaching speculation is always tempting: it leaves us safely out of

the picture — in which case there can be no true naming. The

alternative is, we read, to go back to the mother of the myriad things

we actually encounter: get back to the mother, take the side of the

Thinking East & West 43

feminine, know things as children and as requiring attention

accordingly — in order to get back to their origin we must accept

ourselves as co-parents of them.

The third couplet fits. “Truly,” we read:

Abiding without desire, we see their subtlety.

Abiding with desire, we see their surface.

The difference between seeing things fully (as themselves) and

seeing them partially (their “attributes” only, as logicians say) lies

in two possibilities of our own: seeing them through eyes clouded

by our own plans (which we will always “have” in some way) or

through the eyes proper to things planned. Not so simple a choice

— if it can be considered a choice at all. The two differ in name but,

we go on to read, they issue from the same (just as foreknowledge

and folly do) — and mark the gateway to all possible subtlety

(through which we must ever-again pass).

We are always treading some path, some procedure for

handling things, some way of life. In production the ways dominate

clearly, and in the West we have devised ever more elaborate

devices that can run on their own, originally out of more or less hard

metals and more recently out of their electronic counterparts

(software): whether operated by hands or electronic impulses, such

ways are essentially functions: we insert something into one end

and something comes out the other end. In action too: What are

customs, laws and institutions but ways of life, procedures for

handling social exigencies, paths to be tread? And finally in

contemplation of the now daily sort: research into the ways of the

universe, macroscopically and microscopically — formalized

accounts of how things came and come to be, and recipes for inter-

vening in what’s coming: recipes I say, because contemplation of

the banal sort has now come back to the exigencies of production.

And all along there’s the temptation to assume that there must

be, for each instance, one right way — and, consequently, one right

set of formulations. The temptation arises before and after the

treading, i.e. at moments of abandonment — of frustration perhaps

Cyril Welch44

but also of fatigue. We might then turn to books or gurus in search

of the way — whether for making furniture or coaching a team, even

living life itself or knowing everything.

Amusing perhaps. Distracting too. Or even distressing — as,

when failing to find what we are looking for, we begin to suspect

that there is no one way after all. As indeed there manifestly isn’t —

manifestly for those who have actually treaded paths on their own,

and carefully (not so for those who have only been treading the

paths laid out by others, even carefully: certainly the case for

children and generally the case for adolescents, and even beyond).

And then? Is there no reason to think about ways of producing,

acting, contemplating? Quite the contrary, I say. The question is

how we are on the way we are on. Or, rather, how we can “handle”

even understand the trip we happen be on. Well or badly, as it

always turns out. Well meaning true to circumstance, to our fellow

travelers, to ourselves. And badly meaning missing, perhaps even

betraying or counterfeiting our circumstances, our fellows, and

ourselves. And to the adolescent who asks just how to do it right,

we can only answer: this one way. And wait. It is only a grown-up

who can know that there is no one way — and that searching for one

only distracts from the re-embarkation.

The way of the West happens to be my way. Precisely by

traveling it well I can value the way of the East, even find good

company with whom to walk a few miles of it. And in good

conversation letting each bring out the exigencies of the other.

Knowing not your own way, you can never learn from the ways of

others.

Returning: in our own literature — dating clearly from Plato,

passing through Aristotle, Augustine, the whole modern

development from Descartes and Bacon through Kant, Hegel and

Nietzsche — this one question subserves the question of knowledge,

lurking rather inconspicuously in the background.

By contrast, the question dominates the literature of the East (for

Thinking East & West 45

which I take Laocius as my guide), while the question of knowledge

lurks in the background (knowledge of action: nary a word about

the knowledge of production).

This difference again poses a challenge to those who would like

to think the two through, perhaps a challenge more difficult for

those of us who must read eastward, passing through the European

heritage.

In the West, returning most originally means getting back to the

way things really are (º Ðíôùò ïÛóéá) — from the way things appear

through the lens of accumulated social vision (äüîá). The name for

what allows it was “intellectual intuition” (íïØò): eventually called

a faculty, a power of our own, although initially understood as

divine in origin. With the New Sciences of our Enlightenment, the

image of returning no longer serves our understanding of getting at

how things really are: “research” henceforth means getting ahead,

discovering things beyond rather than within what we already

know.

In Laocius’ Tau Te Ching, returning requires what we could

formulate in terms directly opposing our own: getting back to “non-

being,” to “what’s not a thing,” (Meditation 14). Weird? Yet

one advantage is that such returning lets things themselves be —in

their own terms (momentarily, at least). Of course, this is not the

only formulation, and I have already taken this one out of its

context. Meditation 28 offers a triad of images, each culminating in

an explicit, if seemingly only metaphorical statement of what it

means to return. Again out of context:

Getting back to being children.

Getting back to what’s without limit.

Getting back to raw material.

What can we, in the West, make of these images? Is our task, at this

stage at least, not to grow up? And doesn’t any proper assessment

of circumstance require that we delimit (give definition to) what we

are dealing with? And what’s to be gained by concentrating on

Cyril Welch46

things-in-the-rough: isn’t this condition, whether of ourselves or of

circumstances, precisely what we must overcome? Indeed, in each

case we can cite thinkers in our tradition who have taken issue

precisely with these images of returning.

But not so clearly at first. Aristotle notes very clearly that one

task of handling things properly consists in grappling with their raw

material (àëç: remarkably the same root meaning as the Chinese:

“wood, lumber”). Both the artisan and the statesman must have

developed a sharp eye for seeing what’s just there so that they can

proceed to form or reform it. I like stories about Cézanne (among

others painters, of course) who insisted on working sur le motif: right

there with what motivates the formation: the things themselves, not

something internal to the artist.

Famously, too, it was Anaximander who insisted on the priority

of the unlimited:

�ñ÷¬í . . . gÇñçêg ôäí Ðíôùí ôÎ �ðgéñïí . . . . ¦î ôí ä¥ º ãÝígóéò

¦óôé ôïÃò ïÞóé, êá ô¬í nèïñ�í gÆò ôáØôá ãßãgóèáé êáô� ôÎ

÷ñgþíq äéäüíáé ã�ñ áÛô� äßêçí êá ôßóéí �ëëÞëïéò ô­ò �äéêßáò

êáô� ô¬í ôïØ ÷ñüíïõ ôÜîéí.

The origin, he says, of beings is the unlimited. . . . From

wherever there’s the generation of beings, into the same

generates their destruction, according to necessity. For

each pays the others justice for its injustice, according to

the order of time.

Again, a plausible account of how we understand the daily genesis

and destruction of everything from cornfields and cattle to families

and cities (assuming we accept our mortality): each thing starts out

undelimited, gradually takes on form in competition with things

around it, and returns to its origin (we might prefer to say it loses its

originating power). And so we are to understand time.

Returning to being a child — to being a little girl or boy? Here

I can only recall those famous lines from the Sermon on the Mount:

¦�í ì¬ óôñán­ôg êá ãÝígóèg ñò ô� ðáéäßá,

ïÛ ì¬ gÆóÝëèçôg gÆò ô± âáóéëgßá ôäí ïÛñáíäí.

Thinking East & West 47

Unless ye be thrown over, becoming as children,

ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.

Which would require us to consider carefully what it means to be

“thrown over” (as in a wrestling match: “converted” sounds like

there’s a doctrine to be endorsed), what it means to enter into the

kingdom of heaven (again, like our Platonic tradition, and unlike the

Tau Te Ching, our Christianity speaks of dwelling in it rather than

under it), and then of course what it means to become as children.

In any event, the Sermon does not primarily address rulers.

In Meditations 55 we read that one steeped in power is like a

naked babe, . Both versions direct attention to what we our-

selves do or undergo when returning to what’s without being, to

what’s without limit, to what’s raw. They contradict the adolescent

insistence on knowing what’s basic without knowing oneself in it.

Indeed, we might understand Laocius here as offering a thought

analogous to the Socratic tradition insisting that all genuine

knowledge of things we deal with (vs. fallax nomen scientiae)

develops in exact parallel with knowing ourselves as likewise

beginning with them.

Mencius too endorses the thought, and rather emphatically

(Book Four, Part 2, Chapter 12):

“Great are those who don’t lose the nakedness of their child’s heart.”

But surely, you and I will want to say, there’s something to

prize in growing up: you learn to contribute to on-going affairs

rather than only living off them, to take responsibility yourself

rather than only holding others responsible, to face disagreeable

circumstances squarely rather than bawling your head off.

Above all, and all the while, to focus attention, your own and

others’, on what’s right rather than on who’s right.