Ep. 311: Understanding the Dao De Jing (Part One)

0:00 Mark: Tickets for the Partially Examined Life live on Dostoevsky's novel the Brothers Karamazov on April 15th in New York City are now on sale. Go to partiallyexaminedlife.com liveshow. You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who are at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 311 is something like what is the wisest way to understand and act in the world? And we read the Dao de Jing, traditionally attributed to Lao tzu, somewhere between 400 and 600 BCE. For more information, please see partiallyexaminelife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer using an uncarved block as my teddy bear in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:44 Seth: This is Seth Paskin emptying his heart, mind and filling his stomach in Austin, Texas.

0:50 Wes: This is Wes Alwan feeling like everything's going to be Wu Wei in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:55 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey just wanting to get five or six miles down the road in Madison, Wisconsin.

1:02 Theodore: And this is Theodore Brook rocks, blunting the sharpness, untangling the knots and softening the glare, merging with the dust in Broken Hill, Australia.

1:10 Seth: Welcome, Theo, welcome.

1:12 Mark: I put on a call on Facebook, who among our listeners has spent a lot of time with this and you had strong opinions, say, about our translation that we picked, which I should say is by Roger T. Ames.

1:24 Theodore: It is the and Hall.

1:25 Mark: Yes. And David L. Hall. I'm sure we'll just refer to Ames throughout here, just for simplicity's sake, called Dao de Jing, making this life significant. A philosophical translation. And he doesn't even put Lao Tzu on it because they're like, that wasn't a real person. It just means old master. It probably was more than one person. They don't even have plural versus singular in the ancient Chinese. So of course he mentions it in the intro. But like it's not on the spine.

1:50 Theodore: It could actually be also a pun or a bit of a pun because the TZ can also be used to represent the child. So it could literally mean old child, which is a very kind of Daoist joke.

2:02 Seth: Theo Marx said you had very strong opinions about this. Is that characteristic of you in general or just about this thing? Are you someone who characteristically has strong opinions?

2:12 Theodore: Oh, well, that would be very un-Daoist. No, I mean, Ames was good for me to read because I tend to read the text as a much more cynical mirror for princes. He's reading it much more sincerely, perhaps making it much more usable by Daoist philosophers as well. Patching up the deficiencies in Daoist philosophy using the Tao Te Ching, which is not invalid because there is a lot of Confucian stuff in here as well. It kind of depends on what chapters and what weight you give those chapters. He reads it against the grain. As far as I see it, I'll

2:47 Mark: claim responsibility for picking this translation just because we had read it of the Analects. When we did our Confucius episode. It was recommended by our guest Shushen, who's actually going to be the guest on our next episode here. And so I felt like we could do the same here. But man, it ended up being much more burdensome to get through what Ames and Hall had to say pretty early on. I was just like, let me just pick up my old translation that I read in undergrad and experience that first. Because the whole book is like. It's a two hour audiobook. It's like a short thing. But if you read it with all this commentary, it's like 300 pages in the.

3:20 Seth: Ames and Hall, the version of the text that you made us read, you abandoned the guest didn't want to read, says, it's not right. This better not be two hours of us talking about fucking translation choices.

3:32 Wes: It's only 135 pages with the translation, excluding the introduction. So with the commentary.

3:38 Dylan: But it fell like 300 pages, 80

3:41 Mark: pages or something to get through that? Yes.

3:44 Seth: Oh, my God, you guys, really? Was it that bad?

3:46 Wes: Did you read it?

3:48 Mark: Yeah.

3:49 Seth: Wasn't that terrible?

3:51 Mark: He quoted Whitehead a lot. It read like Whitehead. I felt like.

3:54 Seth: Which is why it was awesome.

3:56 Wes: We don't. Yeah, we don't have to concentrate on the commentary, obviously.

4:00 Mark: The reason I didn't want to do this long ago why we did the Zhuangzi instead of this was because I knew that it's a very terse text. There are lots of different readings. As sort of. As I got into the prep for this, I was appreciating like, okay, that's actually one of the interesting things about this is it's been translated so many times. It's been used for so many things. The original Chinese characters are so ambiguous again, no tenses, no singular versus plural. You know, multiple source versions of the text that have differences between them.

Parts of it. Is this even written by the same author? It seems, you know, so if you assume they're all written by the same author, then you want to make them harmonize. If you think it's a collection of sayings, then you don't care about that just so many hermeneutic questions in just approaching this, it's hard to get through all that thicket and decide, do I actually like this? Do I actually think this said something wise that I want to pay attention to?

4:55 Theodore: There is ways to make the text, you know, you can add qualifiers to say, you know, this is plural, this is singular and such, but the text purposely doesn't. So it is reveling a bit. Even the language itself has these ambiguities. But I think the poem itself is. Or the poems or whatever is playing into the ambiguities of language.

5:15 Dylan: Yeah, I mean there's, I think that poetic nature of it and there's a kind of. It feels like a self conscious. Because you wouldn't imagine writing a self conscious sacred text. Right. But you'd. Writing something poetic that's intended to have a multitude of meanings seems to be done on purpose. I mean, especially with the explicit contradictions. Right. There's this putting things juxtaposed against one another on purpose for the sake of trying to get at something that I would interpret as getting at something that is hard to say. But the attempt is to get at it poetically.

5:48 Seth: It's not unlike the older parts of the Bible in Aramaic and Hebrew, which are ambiguous in certain ways, not to the same extent. But the virtue is not that it's ambiguous from the perspective of fixing a meaning, but that it's fecund from the perspective of interpretation. So ambiguity is only seen as a vice from the perspective of somebody who's trying to come up with a meaning or the meaning or fixing a referent. And from the perspective of having a living document that is also a teaching document to some extent. Right. A seeking, finding document. There's a virtue in having many paths available to than what reads the dao

6:34 Mark: that you can just state unambiguously what it means is not the real dao.

6:37 Seth: That is correct.

6:38 Mark: Wes, you were a little trepidatious getting into this. Did you end up getting swept up in the Chinese fever?

6:46 Wes: Chinese fever.

6:48 Seth: There's a million ways that that could go wrong. So just don't.

6:51 Wes: Could really get us. Get us in trouble. I wasn't trepidatious, but I guess I'm probably the least excited about Eastern philosophy and more generally, anything that's religious or seems like it might be a form of mysticism. But each one I've done, I've enjoyed. In this one, I enjoy it as well. It's short and sweet. We have to see what we can get out of it. In A way it's a self help book which I actually kind of like. But we'll have to figure out what we get out of it other than don't force things, man. Take it easy.

7:21 Dylan: Live in moderation.

7:23 Mark: Yeah, it's easy to compare this to the Stoics and the Epicureans. Also some of it like this came out during the Warring States period. We did our Sun Tzu episode and at least a few of the chapters seem explicitly about conducting yourself in war. And a larger number of them are at leaders, just like the Analects was. So possibly this whole thing was intended to be a guide for leaders, but certainly you don't have to read it that way. And just like people read the Sun Tzu that are not at war, you know, that are reading it for business success or whatever, this is very open ended.

And just the whole how can I live in accord with nature or how I used to say the question of this is what is wisdom? And Seth didn't like that because you know, that's the kind of thing that Socrates asks. So what is the wisest way to understand and act in the world? Is my new clarification of what is wisdom? In other words, this is a wisdom tradition. And at the very least coming away from this, knowing some of these prime concepts like what is the dao according to these guys? Or at least what are some ideas that people have made out of it? Wu Wei, the emptiness, non grasping.

You know, it's always interesting to just approach things with no Greek background, preconceptions or any of that stuff. Just, you know, to see a whole fresh conceptual scheme.

8:42 Wes: Yeah, although as you mentioned, you could think of it as a virtue ethics. Although the word what's often translated as the word virtue de, right. Is translated in our text as character. Mark, you were saying living according to nature. That's one of the less common associations with Stoicism I think. But it's central to Stoicism as well, this idea of living according to nature. I like the points where there's smackdowns of Confucianism. That makes it interesting, the tension between those two. And to read it in some ways as a counterpoint to Confucianism is really interesting.

9:16 Mark: I wish they had quotation marks because some of the passages like when virtue is ascended in your state, things are shitty. That's my translation. But it should be when virtue, in other words, what the Confucians call virtue. These punctilious little status oriented, distinction drawing bastards who rule out the effective participation of the majority of the people. You know, you can read in a very egalitarian way. Whenever anybody offers a distinction, a goal to shoot for, just say, just take the lowest rung.

9:49 Dylan: There's a big part of it that's just sort of a little bit libertarian, like just leave me alone and let me just do my thing.

9:55 Theodore: That's also balanced by. It's actually a lot of it is advice for a prince or a ruler or there is a census. They want the state run. On the other hand, there is this libertarian aspect as well, as you say. So it's always balanced with competing tensions

10:13 Dylan: and wanting the state run in the sense of it not being a problem. You can kind of see why, you know, what is the Warring States era? What is it like 300 years or 500 years of sort of continuous.

10:25 Theodore: Depends how you count it.

10:26 Dylan: Yeah, continuous war going on and instability. And it's not the only lens you can interpret it in, but you can definitely see somebody sitting around saying, look, you state leaders and stuff like that. You're such a pain in the ass. You're constantly mucking things up. I just want to sort of do my thing. And you're constantly interfering with stuff. You're interfering with each other, you're interfering with me, you're making my life difficult. Your job is just to keep things simple and tranquil.

10:54 Wes: Yeah, less is more. Right. So the idea of running. What does it mean to run a state that changes the head of state in a way is only supposed to lead by example or they should have to do nothing. Essentially. You could remind a little bit of anarchism and who did we do? Kropotkin. So for Kropotkin, revolutions were dangerous because the status oriented people would rise up afterwards and take over and people would starve to death. When really what you want is this emergent force to take over people's sort of better natures that will emerge if they're not being suppressed in a way. I think that's what I think leading means in this context. From those passages about, yes, princes. It's a matter of doing nothing and somehow letting the natural order emerge as it's inclined to do when it's not messed up by people.

11:49 Seth: Yeah, I'm not sold on that amount of passivity and that characterization. I don't think it's doing nothing and letting things happen. I think there's a kind of shepherding concept to it.

12:00 Wes: Shall we read the passage?

12:02 Seth: Please.

12:03 Mark: I will link folks to. I just found it helpful at least when I was going through like the first dozen or so, you know, I did go back and take all my notes on the Ames version, and I at least skimmed everything that he had to say. When it was getting toward the end of the book, I was like, this is very redundant. There's this document online that somebody put a book that has eight different translations. If a word looks weird, just look at how a bunch of other people phrased it. And, like, you'll probably find one version that makes sense to you. I found that a useful. I don't want to make that our exercise here, Seth. Sorry. I assure you, I do not find that the most interesting part, but I think it's part of the experience.

12:40 Wes: And I started looking at other translations as well, because when you see phrases like institutionalized morality, you realize that this translation is doing something a little bit different. And there are lots of other phrases like that. They're much simpler, more straightforward translation. I appreciate this one, but I want to know what the less interpretive translation says, you know, so imagine if Walter

13:00 Mark: Kaufman translated Nietzsche to remove anything that looked offensive. Like, not even just put a footnote to explain why Nietzsche is actually not an asshole, even though he's saying this, but to actually put that in the words themselves. The relationship between the ancient Chinese characters and what we have now, I think gave Ames and Hall the opportunity to do that in a way that nobody would do with a modern text.

13:24 Dylan: There's a version of the Dao that I read years and years ago, just by itself was one of these really interpretive ones. And I remember putting it down and just saying, I'm sorry, because there was something about swerving electrons or whatever like that. Like in an analogy in the rendering, I'm like, that's not possibly a translation. Right? It's not even possible. It's not even like the realm of translation. It's interpretive, maybe.

13:50 Mark: All right, so let's read some politics to get into this, and then we'll talk about the hard stuff, the Dao itself later.

13:56 Seth: I have 17 in mind with the most excellent rulers, their subjects only know that they are there. The next best are the rulers they love and praise. Next are the rulers they hold in awe. And the worst are the rulers they disparage. Where there is lack of credibility, there is lack of trust, vigilant. They are careful in what they say. With all things accomplished and the work complete, the common people say we are spontaneously like this.

14:23 Wes: That word, spontaneity. That's why I was talking about emergence. The whole idea of Wu Wei, which is. What's it commonly translated as non action,

14:32 Mark: non coercive action, something like that.

14:34 Wes: In this one it's about not forcing it or coercive action. But anyway, yeah, obviously it's not advocating complete inaction or is it? But it's a matter of how action is done, whether it's forced, whether it's top down or. Or spontaneous.

14:49 Theodore: Wu Wei is a real problem because it does literally mean not action. But no one wants to really read it like that unless you have acquired de as a kind of spiritual force and therefore you don't need to act because it just resonates. But I think it is doing very small things that aren't noticed. So minute things I think is kind of the essence of this passage. And you also have here on the third last line, slow to speak idea. So you even have the sage speaking, but very carefully. So we also have a problem of the daoist is not attached to language, but uses it in some very strategic sense.

I was also kind of on this, I wrote down yes Minister, if anyone had seen that. And you have the civil servants who always have to get the minister to think that every idea was his own idea. So it's that kind of political strategy or just getting others to think that acting a certain way was their own idea. So that's a bit more of a cynical perhaps.

15:51 Seth: It's not cynical. That's called people management. That's how you operate in any sufficiently large organization, church, government, business. You will encounter people with whom you can only have a productive relationship if they're convinced that they're the ones making the decisions or having the ideas regardless of who else has them. And one strategy is to fight that and to point out they're wrong and to create strife. And the other is to get them to be convinced that they have the idea that you want them to have.

16:22 Wes: I think for passage 17, are you supposed to get the idea that the people are being manipulated? No, I don't think that they're being flattered. I don't think so. So the common people say we are spontaneously like this.

16:34 Seth: It's a question of agency.

16:36 Wes: It's not a top down order where someone says okay, here I set the laws and you. This reminds me of Hart a little bit. You have to do it or you're in trouble. Hart called this internalization where people actually accept the norms. Right, they're internal. We accept the norms as having a certain kind of authority. But in this case it even seems to go deeper than that. It's almost like, well, this is just the way we naturally Behave. We don't steal. Because who does that now? Which is not to say there aren't laws. They just don't feel grafted on and discordant with people's natural impulses. The impulses and the habits line up with the legal apparatus.

17:12 Dylan: Let's say the first part of it in my translation, full disclosure, I mainly read the Henricks translation, which is the one that I had on my desk, because I didn't get the Ames translation in the mail in time. And I can't stand reading things on electronically.

17:29 Wes: It comes free with the gin. So

17:33 Dylan: it's.

17:33 Mark: So Henricks was pretty good as far. It's one of those eight in the thing.

17:37 Dylan: Yeah. The first three things you have the highest, the next highest, the next one, and then the ones at the bottom. It's a kind of ontology of rulers, or at least a taxonomy of rulers in the middle, where the first one is the highest kind of rulers. Those below them simply don't know that they exist. There's leading happening, but you don't know that you're being led. And then all the way down to the bottom, where the bottom kind of rulers, everybody just ridicules them. They just know they're just full of crap. They don't pay any attention to them.

And the key here in the middle is when trust is insufficient, there will be no trust in return. So there's a kind of exchange going on between the leadership that is the foundation of this natural activity. And in my last line is. Yet the common people say these things all happen by nature, which is aligned with this notion of spontaneity and living naturally. But that's the condition of the well balanced state, is that things are happening. And the activity of the social life is kind of a natural activity. It's interpreted naturally. You can get your intuitive sense of what to do in a natural way.

You can get those cues. You're not fighting against the leadership and saying, what the frick, why did they do that?

18:58 Wes: This idea of credibility, it reminded me of ethos, right in the poetics, where there's a certain kind of moral authority involved in what you say that can be persuasive. So it's not just about reasoning with someone and saying, here's my deduction, this is why you got to do X, Y and Z. It's something about your character which is evident and which is persuasive. So when you say the most excellent rulers or subjects only know that they are there and then you connect that to the line about credibility, you can think someone might be just ruling with their character. Right. The spectacle of their character. And again, the idea of leading by example I think is relevant there.

19:38 Mark: I'm very excited about the concept of ziran. We are spontaneously like this or many of the translations said like we did it. You know, the people say we did it. But this is, you know, everybody knows my favorite word is teleology because it's a way of talking about having a standard. It's a way of crossing the descriptive normative divide. Right. The telos of a plant is to grow into the strong version of itself. So it's like ziran is the Chinese version doesn't seem to have the blueprint aspect. And I guess there's going to be a way that something grows naturally but it de emphasizes that there is a plan that maybe is God's plan.

Right. Once you start talking about telos or natural law as if nature is dictating this as a top down thing, whereas it is spontaneously. So ziran is a way of saying the same thing. But it's not necessarily. Ames talks about it as self spontaneity. Right. So I know Dylan is always very excited about something having, whether it's an atomic particle or whatever, having its own built in causality. Ames really emphasizes a more ecological picture. So whereas teleology focuses on, well, it's mainly the DNA of that plant. Like yes, it requires the water and the air and everything to grow.

Right. And it also requires maybe a ruler. It's not just doing nothing and letting the plant do its thing. Unless it's a weed. But you know, with a lot with

21:02 Dylan: cultivated plants, it's providing the right environment.

21:05 Mark: Yeah, I just like this new way of carving up the world so that you're talking about a spontaneity. Maybe its focal point is the individual thing. But you can talk about it in terms of a society and the characters.

21:17 Theodore: Ziran, the two characters, literally a self. So. So it's wondering how much we should call that nature because it does actually as you say, kind of apply to anything you want it to. It can apply to the family unit if you're thinking Confucian lines along with aims or the society or anything like that. The tension I have in this in 17 is whether people are being led by example, by being just allowed to harmonize their own self beings with each other being led back to a natural state or if they're actually being led somewhere. They say this is how we are, but it's a second nature almost that the sage has led them to.

21:58 Dylan: I Think you can get some more of that? I'll call it Darker Interpretation. If you look at 18 and 19. So the Henricks helpfully not helpful, I don't know, says chapters 17, 18 and 19 should be read together as a unit. And you get more of this for my Western sensibilities. Less cultivated excellence on the part of the community, particularly in 19.

22:23 Wes: So 18 is going to crap directly on Confucianism.

22:27 Dylan: So why don't we read it and then you explain why it's crapping on Confucianism.

22:31 Seth: Read your translation, Dylan.

22:33 Dylan: Okay. Therefore, when the great way is rejected, it is then that we have the virtues of humanity and righteousness. When knowledge and wisdom appear, it is then that there is great hypocrisy. When the six relations are not in harmony, it is then that we have filial piety and compassion. And when the country is in chaos and confusion, it is then that there are virtuous officials.

22:55 Seth: Love it.

22:56 Wes: Yeah. Just as far as it being about Confucianism. It is when grand way making is abandoned that authoritative conduct, which is ren and appropriateness, yi appear and are Confucianism. Episode was all about ren and yi. Right. And those things have positive connotations for Confucianism, but here they seem to have negative associations.

23:18 Mark: Ames, take us, like many passages in here, it's about the yin yang, it's about the book of change, it's the interpenetration of opposites. In other words, whenever you have one thing like a Confucian, you want to make distinctions and you want to say this is the good, this is the. That's the bad. Do the good neglect the bad? Of course, that seems to just like follow from like what ethics is. And it seems like the critique is that, well, whenever you do that, you sort of freeze things and you're not being flexible enough.

23:47 Theodore: Right.

23:47 Mark: You reify what maybe is good in this situation. I mean, it's really sort of optimum. Is something that Ames uses a lot. Like, you don't say there's a hard and fast division in the world between the optimum and the unoptimum. And Ames goes so far as to say that whenever you distinguish an opposite, maybe this was one of the other secondary sources. Anyway, you're really just picking out a single distinction. Whenever there's day, there must be night. So you can't just try to clutch to the one and neglect the other. They come as a package. I mean, I like your anti Confucian one. Well, when there's ren, in other words, virtue in quotes, Then like there's no real virtue because there's just this nominalist nodding respectfully to virtue but you know, not actually feeling it with your heart. I like that interpretation.

24:32 Wes: I mean this is the way Ames of course takes it as well. Like this is an anti Confucian polemic in his commentary. But the idea is that you know all these things that Confucians value, authoritative conduct, appropriateness, even things like upright ministers. They seem good on the surface, but they're indicative of a rot underneath. You wouldn't need them if things were happening, for instance, spontaneously. If things were happening according to nature, according to the way, or in this first line grand way making. So you don't need upright ministers unless there are troubled times. So you shouldn't be celebrating oh what a great minister they are. You should be thinking why would we need that? What's going on? What's not functioning correctly? Mark, to get at your idea of teleology that we need this top down management.

25:16 Seth: There was a hook in Dylan's translation that I think made this ring more true. I think you used the word righteous Dylan.

25:23 Dylan: Yeah, that was in the first line.

25:25 Wes: We suck Seth into the translation.

25:28 Seth: Motherfucker. See, what I'm going to do is I'm going to elevate that translation point into something philosophical, conceptual, spiritual, emotional and

25:38 Wes: give it all to us in one unified package that will make you truly succethful.

25:43 Mark: Go ahead.

25:44 Seth: That Jesus. I mean 14 years Mark with the puns.

25:50 Mark: I don't think I've ever used that one.

25:52 Wes: No.

25:53 Seth: So anyway, this is one of those opposites things. Righteousness only emerges when the opposite of righteousness is present. Yes, it might be a slam on Confucianism, but it's part of that. You can only be soft when there's hard. You can only be weak when they're strong. In order to have somebody act righteous, then there must be some sense of inequity or fallen from the path, whatever. In reading these passages where that takes place, I think a lot of what our discussion of hermeneutics in the Bible and Spinoza things, it's like when do prophets appear?

Prophets appear when people have fallen off the way of the path of God. So it's like you got a golden calf and then suddenly you get Moses or you got this and then somebody else comes in. What's interesting is that in the western tradition we take that as prophets are actually explicitly called out as their whole job is just to say hey, you told us to do this, but you're doing that you're doing the opposite. And you recognize that prophets only arise when times are bad. And I feel like there's a really tight synergy here with the Dao de Jing where it's saying if you're in a place where prophets arise, things must be bad, they're out of order, the equilibrium is whacked.

But if you take the prophet as something other than what it is, which is just a sign of disorder, a sign of disequilibrium, you're missing the point.

27:17 Wes: I think the prophet is a good analogy, except I think there are some connections between Taoism and shamanism in some forms. So it's really more about spontaneous natural feeling versus external rules of conduct. This is the way Ames puts it in this commentary. So all of these things, upright ministers and authoritative contact and appropriateness, these represent kinds of externalities of behavior, top down forces of control that only need to arise when people's natural propensities have become corrupt.

27:48 Seth: Interesting.

27:49 Theodore: Okay, so we can take them as like pure symptoms. And also whether we're talking about Ren and Li as actual Ren and Li or it's just the discourse, once people start talking about righteousness and benevolence, that's the problem. But if we didn't talk about ren and li, then maybe in some sense we are naturally humane. Or it could be that the very ideas don't actually match onto the pure natural way, which is a bit more amoral or a bit more out there. Even more than just being signifiers when you have good ministers. I think with Tao Te Ching, it's basically saying it doesn't just signify that something's gone wrong, they're actively making it worse.

So there's a kind of accelerant to the Confucians. They see the problem and they try to fix it. And the Daoists are saying, well, every time you try to fix something, you make more distinctions, you befuddle people more, you make more crooks, you make more war because you insist upon the good. So there's, I think, an acceleration.

28:49 Wes: We need less government, not more.

28:52 Theodore: Exactly.

28:53 Dylan: But the criticism doesn't sound like it's one of doing nothing. Exactly. It's more of a criticism of the kind of intervention that they're talking about. So when you say that when knowledge and wisdom appear, it's then that there's great hypocrisy. So you see this in 19 and several other sections, that the veneration of certain kinds of distinctions socially then leads to the very problems that they're trying to solve. And that the criticism, I guess it's a criticism of Confucianism, is that the mode of solving those problems is to further venerate the things that are the source of the problem itself.

It's not an indictment of problem solving per se. It's an indictment of the particular kind of problem solving. Because in this it would say that, well, when the great way is rejected, is then that we have the virtues of humanity and righteousness, or going with the aims or sort of combining it and say when the great way making is abandoned, that authoritative conduct and righteousness appear. The indictment is we need to be more aligned with the way the world is. That's the great way. And it's when we're fighting against it and we're trying to prescribe to it, which is these cultivation of knowledge and wisdom, then we, in veneration of them, we.

We run into problems, especially socially.

30:16 Wes: Let's just say one more thing about 19. So he says, cut off authoritative conduct and get rid of appropriateness, and the common people will return to filiality and parental affection. I thought that was worth mentioning because it substitutes something more formal and impersonal for something familial and something that's more personal, which I'm not sure I like that idea because the whole point of our justice system, it's based on the idea of impersonal relationships between people. And it's not like the Mafia, where it's like you're in the family or you're out of the family and we do things because we love you or because you've betrayed us and things like that. That contrast between the Confucian conception and this Daoist conception, whatever it is, is important. There's something about these more natural affections.

31:09 Dylan: But I think that you just highlighted something, Wes, that there may be a sanguineness about the Taoist criticism, which is like, well, we just need to be more in tune with the way things are and not try to be messing things up so much. It may be that there are conflicts that the interpretation that by going along with the way there will be no conflicts is just not the right way to think about it.

31:38 Wes: CEO, did you want to lead us back to the way? Get us back on

31:47 Theodore: chapter one?

31:51 Mark: I was going to take us just back to chapter three, which is the first one that's overtly political. So we're edging close because I think chapter one is so hard. You could talk about chapter one the whole hour and we should be more prepared. We've already said, thrown in terms like The Great Way. And you know, I think we're by context leading people toward pointing at the dao the way.

32:11 Wes: We're going to let the way emerge spontaneously, not try and fix its reference.

32:16 Mark: All right, Theo, you want to read number three.

32:19 Theodore: I'm actually reading from Ivanhoe 2005. So not paying honor to the worthy leads the people to avoid contention. Not showing reverence for precious goods leads them to not steal. Not making a display of what is desirable leads their hearts away from chaos. This is why sages bring things in order. By this translation has opening people's hearts. You can also say emptying people's hearts and filling their bellies.

32:47 Wes: That's what it is in the aims.

32:49 Theodore: Yeah. They weaken people's commitments and strengthen their bones. They make sure that the people are without zhi, knowledge or desires. And those with knowledge do not dare to act. Sages enact non action and everything becomes well out ordered. So this is explicitly. We have wu, Wei.

33:10 Mark: Yeah, we have a few different wu forms here.

33:13 Theodore: Wu yu, no desire.

33:14 Mark: And what I found the most useful about the way that Ames laid out wu is just nothing, right? Or rather than it be being in nothingness, it's like it's not nearby, so it functions grammatically.

33:27 Theodore: Usually is just a negation. So not this. But I think the most useful translations I've got, I think what you kind of absence and presence. But in a sense, I think the Lao Tzu wants you to think of the absence as absence of form and that it is actually inexperienced that you can access the wu through the dao, which is a form of experience. So it's not far away. It is actually here.

33:56 Wes: Well, we get all these associations between emptiness and potency in this too, which we'll get to.

34:02 Mark: I don't know if it's Hegel, but we've definitely run across the idea of there's like a formless chaos and then distinct things come out of it through the process of conceptualization or the process of just recognition perception. Maybe it's like Kant's that we impose. There's just the stuff out there, whatever it may be, the noumena. And that we create objects by cutting using our little cookie cutters that are our senses, our language, make little pieces of it. But then we have to realize sort of what a contingent activity that is. And metaphysically, things arise into individuality and they fade back, they recede.

In fact, the way that some of these put out is not that. It's just like an ever changing. Sometimes you're catching it on the Way in, sometimes you're catching on the way out. But when it initially manifests itself as its maximum potency and from then on it's just downhill, you know. In other words, something is born and it's. When it's a baby, it's the most supple, it's the most flexible, it's the most awesome in a certain way. And then it rigidifies into its adult form and goes toward death.

35:07 Theodore: Yeah. Just to problematize that is that the Way is always described as generating things. I can't think of a chapter where it says the way disintegrates things. It draws people back to death. Maybe that's just the nature of being away from the Dao. People kind of fall into death by not being in tune with the Dao. But the Dao always kind of generating. That's what it does. So there is a cycle, but the Dao is always generated. That's its primary thing. I'm getting away from the politics.

35:37 Wes: Yeah. So if we go back to the politics in the Ames translation, it's for this reason that in the proper governing by the sages, they empty the hearts and minds of the people and fill their stomachs. I think in one of the commentaries I read, I don't know if it's Ames, but there's mention of at some point in the history, a bunch of books being burned unless they had to do with farming and other practical things.

35:57 Theodore: This is well after the Daodejing had formed.

36:00 Mark: It's one of the ways it's been interpreted.

36:02 Wes: Yeah. So that would not be such a great way to interpret it. But it has been interpreted that way. But regardless, we get this focus on sustaining the body. There's another passage which talks about embodiedness at a certain point, but sustaining the body and meeting basic needs and not getting too into our heads and too into status, which is the way I take this. Or it's into concepts of merit and aspiration and drive. So objectless in their desires. That's how Ames translates wuyu to be desireless and do things non coercively or through inaction. So sounds very Buddhist and Right. I guess one of the myths surrounding this is that Buddha met Lao Tzu or is Lao Tzu or was influenced by Lao Tzu or whatever you want to say, but a great story.

36:54 Theodore: So by theory this was written by Lao Tzu as he left China, stopped at the Western Gate, left China because it was too much bother. He wasn't going to be let out of China until he wrote down his wisdom. But because he went west. When Buddhism finally came to China, all the daoists said, oh, he must have just gone all the way to India and been the Buddha. So Buddhism is just derivative to what we've been saying all along, which is great. I think filling the bellies definitely speaks to. Because if one's hungry, one generates desires. And usually for the daojing, I think language generates desires.

So language divides the world in a certain way. Once you divide the world in a certain way, you have good and bad value laden world here. I think there's a suggestion that if you get hungry, that itself is enough to start the process. Therefore, if you don't want to start the process, you want people not to go down the road of knowledge, you got to keep them well fed.

37:51 Wes: Yeah, yeah.

37:52 Mark: I mean we're getting into the day the ethics here, but you know, that's sort of tied in with the politics because it's supposed to be like the leader acts according to Taoist ethics and then tries to inspire in the people these virtues. So that's what he's talking about at the end of here is that it's doing things non coercively making people objectless in their desires.

38:12 Wes: Wuyu.

38:13 Mark: So that's sounds like stoic, not grasping. But what else do you guys make out of wuyu?

38:21 Wes: Yeah, I thought of stoicism as well. None of these externalities are absolutely good or bad. It's only. The only thing that could be good or bad is one's state of mind, one's own virtue actually. You lose that, then you've really lost something. If you lose your wife or your job or your house, you haven't really lost anything. Those things might be preferable or not preferable, but they're not absolutely good or bad. So you take on this state of mind that recognizes that those things aren't to be desired in the way that one has typically desired them. All one's life.

38:55 Mark: So maybe fixated would be the opposite of objectless. It's not that you literally want nothing in particular. Having desire is a way of engaging the world.

39:04 Wes: I think of it as idealized. Right. And even in our existentialist readings, this is talked about a bit with Simone de Beauvoir. You see these externalities as things that will fill the lack of or they seem to promise to do something that they're not actually really going to do. So you idealize them and you give them a value that they don't actually really have.

39:25 Dylan: It makes me want to read some of these categorizations of the different failures of certain social beings. The way Beauvoir does. Like the Serious Man.

39:35 Wes: Exactly.

39:36 Theodore: There's also a way in which you're desiring because things are objectified, they're made objects. But, well, one is in the dao, everything is processed. The Dao Te Ching doesn't really talk about death. Zhuangzi does a lot more. But if you see things as processes, it's not so sad when they change into something else, rather than when an object breaks, that object has been destroyed. That's not how you should see things, as a Taoist sage. So it could be seeing things as objects, and that is to desire them, because that's all tied together.

40:07 Mark: And so is this Wuzhi, unprincipled in their knowing is the way it's translated here. I mean, I was interpreting that as kind of knowledge that versus knowledge.

40:18 Dylan: How?

40:18 Mark: It's again, the anti Confucian thing, that if your knowledge is all I learned taxonomies, then like, well, that's sort of a human invention. And it's probably you are losing sight of the forest for the names of the specific trees that the arborist has picked out.

40:35 Theodore: Yeah.

40:35 Wes: I thought here of Wittgenstein, sorry to make so many associations, but practice right versus explicit rules is one example of that. Know how versus know that.

40:45 Seth: So that's an interesting and fully understandable

40:50 Wes: but wrong association.

40:52 Seth: No, no. What I thought of here was Moore. And Wittgenstein's reflection on Moore. There's a kind of knowledge that falls under conceptual apparatus. I know that. That's the discourse of philosophy. That is a tree. I know that. That is a tree. And there's a kind of knowing. Here is a hand. Here's another hand. Which befuddled Wittgenstein because he's like, I can't dispute that these things are true. I can't dispute that you know them. But there's a certain kind of common sense knowledge about them that is of no use for philosophy. And I felt like what this text was pointing out there is that unprincipled knowing is a common sense kind of knowing. I do think that a knowing that can fall under, although that's a cultured and perhaps cultivated version of common sense knowing, but that's how I saw it.

41:38 Wes: And we should remember that with Wittgenstein, the line between know that and know how is not clear because meaning is use. Right. And I. And I think he's right about that. The application of a concept is rooted in something that's very much like habit in a way.

41:52 Mark: So I was all ready to go with this know how versus know that. But then I read this. Theo pointed us at this little paper, part of a book by Chad Hansen, Language and Logic.

42:05 Theodore: Language and Logic in Ancient China.

42:07 Mark: Yeah. That actually talks about the Confucian version as knowing the distinctions is actually a know how. Right. That's the ideal of Confucian virtue, is to be completely in sync. So you don't even have to spell out, you know, the relationship between you and your superiors and your parents and the ruler of the state and the whole universe. And so you've internalized that you're really good at playing the game. And that what the Dallas is actually doing is pointing out like we did with Wittgenstein, hey, but that's just a language game. That's not actually you relating to the world.

That is like a thing one could do in the world. But it's not the only thing. And in fact, it's a very exclusionary thing, if you like, put all your. If you're fixated on that. So it's not even the fact that it's articulated that makes Confucianism bad. Confucianism itself has a goal of unarticulated naturalness. It's just that daoism is trying to get you beyond any game that's merely a game. Well, if you like that game so much, I'm going to state the opposite of that. But that's really just a way to get you out of the first game. And ultimately the point is to be more flexible and not be stuck in any particular game.

At least that was Hanson's theory.

43:19 Theodore: Yeah, so you have the daoists who do distinguish, but you're meant to get beyond the distinguish as you internalize it. But that's to get you stuck in a single dao, a single way of dividing up the world. And so one way of understanding Lao Tzu's preference for the dark is just to say, well, this is how civilization always does the positive. More balance.

43:39 Mark: Actually, I think this gets us to the point that we can articulate just in the. Just another two minutes here and then end part one, that we've kind of said what the dao is and what it isn't. I mean, the very first line, somebody read it in their translation.

43:53 Wes: I'll read it of one. Waymaking that can be put into words is not really waymaking. And naming that can assign fixed reference to things is not really naming. Do you want me to go farther even?

44:05 Mark: Just give some alternative translations of that. Give your Henricks.

44:09 Dylan: As for the way, the way that can be spoken of is not the constant way. As for names, the name that can be named is not the constant name. So it's much more poetic, right? It's repeating that. I am assuming that repetition is in

44:24 Theodore: the Chinese, it's mirrored basically. The only difference is the word for dao and ming.

44:28 Mark: It's more repetitive than we're even hearing here. Because the word dao not only literally means like road or way, it also means speak. So the dao that daos, the dao that can be daoed is not the eternal dao, like it literally has it. The dao that daos is, is not the dao.

44:47 Theodore: It is so condensed, just to give you kind of a feel for it is six. In the received Wang Bi edition, it's six characters. Dao ke dao fei chang dao. So half of those characters are just dao. And there is some controversy in that. The KE dao makes dao into a verb. So dao daoing. There is a way in which that is to speak. So the dao that can be spoken of as very often, but a lot of people just go, that's a bit of a stretch. It's the dao that can be daoed, so that can be trodden is also a very common translation. So this would come perhaps to like, more to that Confucian. Oh, you can take the Confucian path. That is a dao that can be daoed, but it's not constant. It's not going to last. It doesn't map onto reality, perhaps. So fei, dao and chang can mean frequent than eternal. So eternal is very grand or absolute is one of absolute.

45:50 Dylan: And this one has constant.

45:51 Theodore: Constant's pretty good, but like a frequency, like a natural rhythm, you might say, I've never seen it translated, but you could almost translate it as a normal way. Like the ways you talk about don't actually track onto the normal ways, the ways that we actually navigate the world. So it is because it's such a condensed bit of writing. And again, as you say, is it the dao? Is it a dao? Are the daos in general? We don't know plural. We have no definite or indefinite article. So really, how you translate the first line is going to tell you a lot about how the translator is thinking

46:29 Wes: about the whole book.

46:30 Seth: If you perceive that this particular dao in this particular set of circumstances from your perspective is the dao, then you are mistaken. The dao that you perceive from this particular vantage point in this particular situation in this field of focus, with these things happening all at this one time, it's not the dao.

46:50 Wes: The different translations suggest very different things. So it's quite confusing.

46:57 Seth: I think that's actually quite liberating. And it was actually one of the things. I know you're all shitting on Ames right now, but he explicitly says, or they explicitly say. This is a philosophical translation, by the way. I'm about to go someplace. This is their version, their attempt to make the dao de jing comprehensible to a Western philosophical audience and let it manifest in a language that theoretically people like we jack holes would understand. But to even dispute that there's some kind of fixed meaning of the original language, is that not being disharmonious and out of equilibrium? Is it not trying to find a constant name for something that does not have a constant name? Isn't it disingenuous to try to read the daodejing and find the meaning of the.

47:46 Wes: We don't have to judge it by its own lights. We can judge it by our lights if we want.

47:51 Mark: I think we should leave part one with that bit of profundity and let people think about this. And we'll continue on this one line with part two. If you're a supporter, a Partially Examined Life supporter, you'll hear it as the next thing in your feed. You don't have to wait. If you're not, go to partiallyexaminedlife.com support Become One. Get with the program. Get with the dao.

48:11 Dylan: Get with the way.

48:12 Mark: Thanks.