A New Look at old Tao Te Ching

I attended another talk at the HKSHP last night. It was given by Dr.Wong Kin Keung on one of the shortest but most influential texts on Chinese philosophy, the Tao Te Ching ("TTC") on the relationship between the Tao and Life.

Dr. Wong started by emphasizing that we should never separate Te (德) from the Tao (道) because the two of them form an inseparable pair, the two sides of the same coin. In the same way that the Te can never be considered from the Tao, the Tao has no meaning apart from the Te. "Tao gives it birth, Te nurtures it" (道生之，德畜之 )(cap 51 TTC): one gives birth to everything (, the other helps them to grow and develop. Everything goes about in cycles and whilst everything goes in one direction, there is also in that going a tendency to go in the opposite direction. The more it goes in one direction, the more will the force going in the opposite direction grows because one of the rules of traffic of the Tao is its tendency to go in the opposite direction. The relationship between the two poles is that of am inverse proportion dynamic on a sliding scale: the more the positive pole expresses itself, the more resistance it will encounter from its negative pole. There is always a relationship of competition and complementarity at the same time. Throughout the history of philosophy either in the East or in the West, thinkers have usually concentrated their attention on one side of the eternal pair Yin (陰 )and Yang (陽) by paying attention only to the positive Yang pole. The Taoist wants to redress the balance by emphasizing more the Yin pole because one of the fundamental rule of the universe is that the Tao always moves in the opposite direction (反者道之動) (cap 40 TTC).  There is a tendency for everything to go back to its origin, its inborn nature or destiny (復命). LaoTzu says: "Everything works together, I see their return. Everything will return to its roots. Returning to its roots is silence/inactivity, is return to its destiny (萬物並作, 吾以觀復。夫物芸芸，各復歸其根。歸根曰靜 ，是謂復命) (Cap 16 TTC)

Dr. Wong attempts to explain the operation of the Tao and its expression in the world through the angle of phenomenology. He says that in this respect, there are three important thinkers, Dilthey, Husserl and Heidegger, with the last synathesizing the two strands of thought of the two earlier philsophers. It was Dilthey who first thought of remedying the tendency in Western philosophy since the empiricism of the Renaiisance and rationalism of the Age of Enlightenment to concentrate only on the visible world and its tendency to set man against man and to set man against nature by returning to an earlier world in which man is not yet so clearly set against nature and the external world. That world is what Dilthey calls "lifeworld" characterized by what he calls "life-nexus" (lebenszusammenhaugl), the close links between everything and their pre-separation, pre-cognition, pre-volition connections and their unity. At that stage, man only has what he calls a "reflexive awareness" of the world in which he has not yet clearly thought of himself as separated from the world because of the very close natural bond between himself and the world. That is a bit like a baby in his mother's womb. This is a world of natural unity between the subject and the object, the self and the non-self or the world. This is also the kind of world the Taoist advocate we should constantly strive to return to because in that world, there are all sorts of possibilities. The further we travel along a particular path, the more difficulties we will encounter in going in a new and different direction which may offer us oppourtunties for newer, fresher opportunities for better or more complete development in some other ways.

Dr. Wong says that very often, when scholars talk about existence /being (有)  and non-existence or nothingness (無), they think of them as a pair of opposites. This in his view is a misconception. According to TTC, everything is born from nothingness. Nothingness is merely the state everything is in before they are born, before they take on definite shape, before they develop further, before they take on a more and more elaborate shape, before they are fully formed. The basis of this view is cap 21 of TTC where Laotzu says: "The way the Tao creates everything is through trembling, going to and fro, going in and out. Thus the image appears. Thus things emerge. Dark and deep is the essence. Its essence is real. Within it is faith. (道之為物，唯恍唯惚。惚兮恍兮，其中有象；恍兮惚兮，其中有物；窈兮冥兮，其中有精。其精甚真，其中有信). The way the Tao works is faithful: it always sticks to its own principle and its own inherent nature and always obeys its own rules of operation. Before everything is born, there is only the principle of birth, of life, of creation ie. the Tao in its pre-manifest state. After it has given birth to the first thing, it become Te.

LaoTzu sets out very clearly the different stages of how how everything comes into being. The Tao gives rise to One, One gives rise to two, two gives rise to three, three give rise to everything (道生一，一生二，ニ生三，三生萬物) (cap 42 TTC ). First there is only the Tao, a unity. That unity divides into two: positive/negative, yang/yin/heaven/earth etc and then everything else is born or comes into existence each according to their nature and kind. The lifeworld of Dilthey corresponds to the first three stages mentioned in cap. 21 whereas the visible world of being, of things, of the world correspond to stage 4 in that passage. The essence of Taoism is the insight that everything must strive to return to its earlier stages, before division or further division has emerged so that differences, divisions, conflicts, self interest and by extension, the interest of different social groups in the world may be reduced.

According to phenomenology, all men have volition or will and intention and it is man's will and intention which sets him apart from the world. A man's world is a teleological and dynamic world, not a purely static and objective world. That subjective will always encounters things, matters, events which does not conform to its own subjective intention or desires and it is through such opposition that man first learns that he is different from the objective world and sets himself apart from that world and from the will of other men. Phenomenology restores man back to the central place of in his philosophy and his perception of the world., a world from which he has been progressively ousted since the rise of rationalism (which gives rise to mind/matter dualism) and the reductive scientific outlook on his world (where the focus of man's attention is on the object and on matter or material things and substances and as far as possible man is excluded until the arrival of quantum theory, when the role of the observer is again taken into account) whether it be the world of Adam Smith, the world of Freud, the world of Descartes, the world of Hume, the world of Hobbes, the world of John Stuart Mill. We must always remind ourselves of our pre-cognition, pre-separation unity with the world and do our best to go back and restore to ourselves that sense of unity with others and with the world. Therefore to this extent, such an attitude is ultimately a very "religious" attitude. What the Taoists advocate is therefore not very different from what the Buddha advocates and what Christianity advocates. The only difference between the three religions is the metaphysical foundation upon which such advice and such aim is based! It seems to me that the lifeworld and the world towards which the Taoist urges us to return to is not very different too, from the world which many artists try to show to us: our pre-division, pre-cognition, pre-ego-dominated world of pure perception of what the world really looks and feels like!