Eric S. Nelson: Review of Ames and Hall, Dao de jing

Eric Sean Nelson, Department of Philosophy, University of Massachusetts Lowell

Review Essay: Ames, Roger and David Hall, Laozi, Dao De Jing: A Philosophical Translation. New York: Ballantine Books, 2003. 256 pages.

Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, Vol. II.3, Winter 2003, pages 143-145

Roger Ames and David Hall’s recent work on Dao De Jing (Ddj) is a valuable contribution to understanding its philosophical significance. Their edition provides a substantial and fertile basis for thinking with and working through the text. This volume includes an historical and a philosophical introduction, a detailed glossary of basic terms, a translation with accompanying commentary and Chinese text, and the related Guodian cosmological text The Great One gives Birth to the Waters (Taiyi shengshui). Their translation relies on both the received text and new textual materials from the recent archaeological finds at Mawangdui 馬王堆 in 1973 and Guodian 郭店 in 1993.

Ames and Hall emphasize the emergence of the Dao De Jing as a radical and powerful alternative vision in an epoch—the Warring States Period (403-221 BCE)—of conflict and uncertainty. Although not a pacifist work, it turns from the assertion of power and/or moral coercion to questions of self-cultivation in general and the cultivation of the sage and true king in particular. Ames and Hall agree with the later Chinese tradition that the primary focus of this book is self-cultivation, even if it is the cultivation of spontaneity, which they interpret as coming to feel at home in the world and making this life in its immanence significant in order to intensify and optimize experience.

Recent evidence suggests that this work, attributed to Laozi, must have been standardized as a classic fairly early (4-5). Its genre is that of “proverbial” wisdom literature that “stimulate[s] a sympathetic audience to conjure up the conditions necessary to make its point” (5). That is, it does not present us with doctrines or propositional truths, whether religious or philosophical, but with an art of nondogmatic philosophizing that calls for noncoercive collaboration such that listeners are required to enact the text in their own concrete and unique ways (8). This way of thinking evokes and indicates its own enactment through a prescriptive “regimen of self-cultivation” (9).

Ames and Hall reject many traditional translations of key terms in the Dao De Jing, because they impose distant religious and metaphysical assumptions that close off rather than open up the work. Although informed by western process philosophy, and thus open to the same charge, their translations of key words often provide a salutary fresh perspective on them. In the introduction, they provide their reasons for interpreting dao as having the character of a field and of being underway. They translate dao as “way-making” in order to emphasize that it is an interconnected and dynamic process of transformation (57-59). De, traditionally translated as virtue or power, is articulated as the insistent particular or singular which orients a perspective in/on the field (18-19; 59-60). The very title of the Dao De Jing thus calls its readers to attend to this focus and its field. This language also has its Western context, since it evokes the figure/field distinction of phenomenology and Gestalt psychology. The question we need to consider is whether words with these Western associations bring us into the issues of the text more genuinely than other words with different connotations.

The Dao De Jing calls for “responsive participation” both in the text and in the world (21). Ames and Hall elucidate this responsive spontaneity as a creative mirroring response to the other on its own unique terms (24). They thus connect two of the primary senses of ziran 自然—spontaneity and the intrinsic uniqueness or “self-so-ing” of the other—through responsiveness (68-70). They also link the oneness and interdependence of beings with their singularity and uniqueness. However, the primary metaphor that governs this connection is not that of the organism but of the family. The Chinese cosmology of this period, both Daoist and Confucian, sees all relations as familial. The person is thus inherently constituted in a web of relations in which she has a unique place and position. The primary familial metaphor of ru 儒 or Confucian thought is that of father and filial son, but mother and child take precedence in early Daoism (23). This explains the repeated appeals to the feminine (Ddj 5, 10, 28, 61), the maternal (Ddj 1, 20, 25, 28, 51, 52, 59), and the child-like (Ddj 10, 20, 28, 49, 52, 55) in the Dao De Jing—that is, to the creative and fecund, the receptive and affirming, the natural and the spontaneous.

Early Daoism does not lead to the dichotomy between systematic totality and the abstract isolated individual that dominates Western metaphysics or what Ames and Hall describe as the “one/many” metaphysics (12). Instead the focus/field relationship brings out the singularity in contextuality or the dynamic interconnectedness of particulars. Ames and Hall make the significant argument that the dao implies the mutuality of the singular and the whole rather than the dominance of one term (11). It thus evokes the hermeneutical circle that indicates the movement between singular and whole without the possibility of closure or reducing it to the priority of one of its terms.

Another important part of the introduction and commentary explores the significance of the wu 無 words. These terms do not imply some kind of indifference or inactivity. For example, they translate wuwei 無為 not as “nonactivity” but as “noncoercive action” in order to highlight its receptive and responsive character (44-45; compare, for example, how Ddj 43 is translated). Wuyu 無欲 does not imply the negation of desire but “the achievement of deferential desire” (42). Nor does Daoism demand a governing principle or archē, since this kind of wisdom or knowledge (zhi 知 ) is rejected as the growing absence of the dao (Ddj 18-19).

Wuzhi 無知 does not mean embracing ignorance but is rather an “unprincipled knowing” involving receptive and responsive mirroring. This is crucial to a proper understanding of the text. For example, this interpretation helps clarify the controversial Chapter 3, which seems to justify the oppression of the people, and which is thus incongruent with the emphasis on noncoercive and even compassionate action seen elsewhere. However, the denial of knowledge and desire in this passage reflects the assertion of the value of anarchic knowing (wuzhi) and objectless or deferential desire (wuyu). This passage accordingly should be read as suggesting liberation from knowledge (wuzhi) and desire (wuyu) through noncoercive action (wuwei) that is advocated throughout the work. For Ames and Hall, the political implications of this text are anarchistic and minimalist in the sense that they suggest noncoercive political structures (102) as well as tolerance and appropriateness (82).

Daoism involves the ontological parity of beings, which in Zhuangzi is presented through the principles of difference or perspective and equality or parity between beings. Another consequence of this unprincipled and anarchic knowing (wuzhi) is that the myriad or ten-thousand things (wanwu 萬物) are to be understood as processes and events (15, 67). They are happenings that involve both transformation and integrity (15-16). The dao is thus creativity—or fecundity and generativity—itself, which Ames and Hall explore as self-creativity and co-creativity.

The Dao De Jing is radically nondualist, since it insists on the unique particularity or difference and the interdependence of things. This dynamic nondualism is a wider feature of Chinese thinking, as one can see with the word xin 心. Xin is usually translated as heart and/or mind, but Ames and Hall bring out its process character by translating it as thinking and/or feeling (26). They also stress how this text realizes the aesthetic harmony, balance, and need to keep the center precisely in embracing the transformation and change, the fluidity and flow, of this world (31-33). One is thus centered in being decentered and spontaneous in being receptive and yielding. Daoism embraces the mutuality of opposites (28). It speaks through saying and unsaying, affirming and denying, in order to evoke the nameless (wuming 無名), the namelessness that is the “fetal beginning” (Ddj 1).

Laozi’s Daoism is a provocative philosophical way of thinking, since it presents us with a form of nonreductive naturalism. It is nonreductive, since it embraces both the wholeness and singularity of nature. It is naturalistic, since (1) it does not devalue immanence and (2) it avoids and critiques the humanism (in its Confucian guise) which reduces the significance of things to human purposes and values. The Dao De Jing is antihumanistic without being anti-human, since humans find their significance in relation to being underway themselves. The text also develops a critique of morality that is still in some sense ethical. Although intervention in the name of helping all things is rejected when it undermines the sage’s own course (ziran 自然) in Chapter 64, compassion is seen as the fruit of noncoercive activity in Chapter 67.

The criticisms of conventional and Confucian ethics are not so much antiethical as they are arguments about the degeneration of the ethical into moral rules and conventions (Ddj 18-20). Some passages speak of going beyond good and evil and others of treating the just and the unjust alike, but these suggest overcoming conventional discrimination and being equally responsive to all. Thus, for example, the commentary on Chapter 5 lays out the different interpretations of the controversial reference to “straw dogs” in this passage (84-85). Ames and Hall highlight the reverential aspect of the ritual, where the straw dogs are given their moment and then returned to nature. This suggests that nature and the sage revere the singular in its passing moment, rejecting institutionalized morality not for immorality or moral indifference but for moral spontaneity. After all, a work that criticizes the exploitation and oppression of the people by their rulers, the decay of ethical responsiveness into an adverse bureaucratic morality, and the unforgiving consequences of war is not being simply unethical or nihilistic.