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

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, episode 311, part 2. We've been discussing the Dao de jing with our guest, Theo.

0:17 Theodore: Hey, good day.

0:18 Mark: And we left things by talking about what the dao is. The very first line. The dao that can be put into words is not the eternal dao. So, you know, I always thought that that was like some mystical. You know, dao is like God, and that it was just apophatic religion. But you could also take it, you know, if you just take the dao as like a recipe for success and, well, you got to be flexible. So if you can actually write out the recipe for success, well, that's not going to teach you how to respond to all the contingencies. The rules of thumb are inevitably going to be falsified in some circumstances. The dao in that sense is not the real dao. A very mundane versus a very mystical take, all in the same sentence.

0:59 Wes: Yeah, it goes back to this idea about Explicit rules and rule following, you know, a rule that can be grasped mentally and articulated and then just practice. Right. Thinking again of Wittgenstein, I think eventually

1:11 Theodore: we do get beyond that into something a bit more mystical. Because as you say, the Confucians had an idea of effortless action as well. Their dao was a know how you put your mind to learning something and once you learn it, you throw away all these distinctions. That's what you do with any dao. Like in dao at the end of. In a lot of martial arts, like judo, the way of suppleness, if you actually describe the way of suppleness, that's just for beginners and you kind of have to throw that away. I think eventually we do get to a dao that has to be EBI before even these practices, that there is a way that is most natural, perhaps. So the metaphysical reading, I think can be drawn from a more the wider meaning of way, of a practice, of a method, of a technique. Because the Dao De Jing can't just be giving us another way, like the Analects.

2:07 Dylan: Is it the distinction that the way in this context for Taoism is. I'll call it the true nature, the true way. And any others that are learned or cultivated are approaching that way. But insofar as the way is a way is like you can't out nature. Nature in being natural, you'd only be approaching what nature was doing. That would be getting to the notion of the way or nature as a source for all things that you're trying to be aligned with. And so for when you cultivate something, if to say that you are going to cultivate being natural, you're going to be trying to align with in your choices, in your activities as much as possible.

With the pick your analogy, the currents, the grain, the activities that are happening on their own. You can see that a little bit of Buddhist aspect to it, where you're displacing yourself right away from what the activities are, but you are trying to be in tune to them. Right. And even if you're cultivating an activity to extent that it's way, like you're cultivating something that participates in that notion of way.

3:33 Theodore: If we're talking about small ways and the big way, if there is a big way, which is not clear, no

3:38 Mark: capital letters, we should say again, no capital letters. It's not like we can.

3:42 Dylan: Well, Henricks capitalizes way right.

3:45 Mark: A bunch of them. And I think the Ames is kind of being radical. It's like the waymaking that can Be put into words is not really waymaking that. Not only is he saying it's a gerund, but he's. It's not capitalized. It's just like a thing we do rather than God, you know?

4:00 Wes: But he wants to get at the process part of it.

4:03 Theodore: If there is something that's similar between the small ways and the big ways, it is the elimination of self. When you are really engaged in a way, it's an egoless exercise. You are riding the bicycle, you are chopping up the vegetables, you are chopping the wood to use a chan or zen, often thing. And so their egoless activity is, I think, prime. If you have an ego, that means you're thinking with language, you're well out of it.

4:31 Wes: I'm sure this has been compared to the concept of flow, right?

4:35 Theodore: Absolutely. Slingerland does that explicitly. His translation of wu wei is effortless action. So that's very much flow inspired.

4:45 Dylan: Yeah.

4:46 Wes: I'm looking now at the rest of this chapter one in the Ames translation, and I'm not sure how to put it all together, because we go from those first two lines that we've read into this dynamic between what is nameless and what can be named. So the first thing we get is, you know, the nameless in the Ames translation is the fetal beginnings of everything that is happening. Or in a more ordinary translation, the nameless is the boundary of heaven and earth.

5:13 Theodore: It could be I have beginning. Let me just look at the.

5:17 Wes: Yeah, well, that which is named is their mother.

5:20 Mark: I don't understand that distinction, and I don't know that anybody does.

5:24 Wes: In the end, the nameless and what is named emerge from the same source and yet are referred to differently.

5:31 Theodore: The nameless, let's take that as meaning the dao. And so that is the source. I think. I think we do have beginning she, but it's the formless aspect of experience in which all of the natural activities arise. So nameless it is this just generating process or processes.

5:54 Wes: Well, if the nameless is the beginning, how is the named the mother?

5:59 Theodore: Because, yeah, the mother is a difficult one. But if it's named, then we have the 10,000 things, which is how myriad creatures, the world of objects. So once we start naming things, we have carved up the world in a specific way, one way or another. And so in a sense, you might say that, but that's not a separate thing.

6:20 Wes: So in the Ames translation, the nameless is the fetal beginning. So it's almost like it's indeterminate. And then we get Hegel. Would Love this. And then we get determinacy. Maybe this is what you were getting at, Mark.

6:31 Mark: Exactly.

6:32 Wes: And in the. The naming mothers, this indeterminate source, it

6:38 Mark: distinguishes this from that.

6:41 Seth: The naming. Actually births is the naming, the birthing of something. Determinant from the indeterminate.

6:46 Mark: Yeah, it's objects. By naming things, we create objects out of the formless mass that is the dao. That's beyond words.

6:54 Seth: Wow, this is really a horrible translation. Dylan, what does yours say?

6:58 Dylan: Henricks keeps repeating These phrases, the 10,000 things, which I also assume that that was a kind of literal rendition of what usually gets translated as everything.

7:08 Mark: Yeah, we should just say wanwu. I mean that's a term that seems useful. Ames wants to say. Well, it's not things. It has to include events, everything that is happening. I like the 10,000 things. That's a really nice quotable.

7:22 Dylan: So for this section, the nameless is the beginning of the 10,000 things. The named is the mother of the 10,000 things.

7:30 Theodore: 10,000 things. It should be heaven and earth for the first one. That's. That's strange. But that's right.

7:37 Wes: The next passage about thus to be really objectless in one's desires, Wu yu is how one observes the mysteries of all things. So that makes sense now because objects are determinant and the mystery of things is indeterminate. So to desire is always to have a something as the object of desire. And it doesn't really penetrate to this nameless beginning to this mystery at the bottom of things. So having desire as one observes boundaries. Right. Is in relation to the determinant. I suppose that what corresponds to that being in touch with the mystery has to do with waymaking is my guess here.

8:13 Theodore: Maybe this is too convenient translation of mysteries. But you can do mysteries as like subtleties, like really, really granular things. And so if we're thinking of this in terms of practice, like if a dao is like the way of tea or the way of cutting wood, you're engaged with a whole bunch of subtleties in that flow. There has to be non self conscious. It's conscious, but not self conscious to observe the subtleties, the flow, the dynamics.

8:41 Dylan: So in Henricks it says, therefore those constantly without desires by this means will perceive its subtlety.

8:50 Wes: So yeah, there's something reifying or objectifying about desire.

8:54 Seth: Yeah, I was kind of going in the same direction, but this concept of subtlety. So the more you can make your desire objectless, in other words, the more you focus less on the objects of language, things that have been named, the more you are able to notice the subtleties of the things that have not been named. But focus or this having of desire is required for you to even be aware that there is a determinant and an indeterminate or the difference between determinacies. I'm not sure about that part.

9:33 Dylan: You see this kind of talking and process of learning a lot in martial arts is the very common example. But I think you even see this in all kinds of learning, which is a version of when you're beginning, you're focused on the things and even the naming of the relationships between the things. But the better you get at it, and the more you have cultivated being aligned with those, the more those distinctions cease to be the right distinctions anymore. And you're not making those distinctions anymore. And you are then much more in tune to, I want to say, the spaces in between those things.

But that's also more particularizing it than you would be. You've really. You become more embedded in the process and the flow of the things in which distinctions really don't even come up as much. It's like looking at the tail of the elephant rather than looking at a tail. You're still seeing the tail and the elephant at the same time.

10:36 Wes: In the next chapter we find out that. And again, a very Hegelian chapter. But we find out that when you dive into determinacy, you get opposites, right? So if you fix too hard on fix too hard, fixate, maybe fixate, but I don't know if that's the right word. But you know, once you fix something as one determinant property like beautiful. So let's just read him. As soon as everyone in the world knows that the beautiful are beautiful, there is already ugliness. So, right. All these determinations depend on their opposites. So that.

11:08 Dylan: Well, the source of the opposites is the determination in these sections. To me, this is the way I read it. It was not that you have opposites and therefore focusing on one makes you conscious of the other, is that the opposite is brought into existence that by the determination of the first. So when everyone in the world knows the beautiful is beautiful, ugliness comes into being. When everyone knows the good, then the not good comes to be mutual production of being and non being. So it's that by having the particular of the beautiful that generates the ugly, as opposed to I'm focusing on one. And therefore now I see the other side of the dichotomy.

11:50 Wes: So Ames has a determinacy and indeterminacy give rise to each other.

11:54 Mark: Can I read the Lao. The translation that I read undergrad is one of these eight. The whole world recognizes the beautiful as the beautiful, yet this is the only the ugly. The whole world recognizes the good as the good, yet this is only the bad. So there it sounds more like another anti Confucian thing they've made. They've raised something as this is goodness, this is virtue, this is beauty. And it's a bullshit distinction. The very fact of it being ossified and hardened into this ideal means that it's already ruined.

12:26 Wes: It sounds like quite an opinionated translation.

12:29 Theodore: Yeah, actually it could both. It's like the second line is three characters just to get a sense of how condensed these. Yeah, so then it is. Yeah, it is ugly, basically. So the world all under heaven recognizes the beautiful as beautiful. That is ugly. I think it has both. I don't know. It could be beauty, I suppose.

12:53 Mark: Right. I was assuming that the. This refers to beauty or, you know, the things that were called beautiful. But I'm looking at the translation right next to it, the Wu. When all the world recognizes beauty as beauty, this in itself is ugliness. In other words, it's the recognition, the recognition is the ugly thing. When all the world recognized good as good, this in itself is evil. It's the making of the distinctions in both of those are the bad thing.

13:18 Theodore: I think the first thing is the common sense is that you have an idea of beauty. Inherent in that is a value judgment that there are ugly things. And then the more you insist upon beauty, the more you define things as ugly. So the more you search after beauty and then this doesn't actually map on to process.

13:40 Wes: Yeah, and that's clear in the next part of it. Long and short set each other off. High and low complete each other. So that's clearer than the two lines about beauty and ugliness.

13:49 Mark: How do you feel about this in relationship to the way Nietzsche then characterizes the ethical break between the ancients and the moderns? In other words, the ancients said virtue, virtue, virtue. Oh, and there's some stuff that's not virtue, but why would you even worry about that? Whereas the moderns, the Christians, according to him, are evil and then good, you know? Yeah. In other words, just saying that one opposite connotes the other. It seems there's a great room for like, well, which one is emphasized? Do you really create the opposite to the equal extent or can you.

Like Nietzsche says that the ancient Greeks did. No, what the Confucians were really doing, like the ancient Greeks, is they're Just praising virtue. And then if you happen to lack virtue, it's not like we shun you and we make a big deal and we persecute you. It's just you don't get the honors. You don't get to be in the circle of people we respect.

14:42 Wes: So are these moralized or non or. Or amoral opposites?

14:48 Theodore: Well, from some things we've already discussed, I think there is a reading in which to say once you start to insist upon the good, because it doesn't align with the natural way of process. You know, this is like a static cutting up a certain interpretation. The outcomes are bad. So insisting on the good is bad. Could be directed at the Confucians. Another way is just to think, and this, I think, refers more to chapter 12, is that once you start cutting things up, you just become blind to what moral possibilities in front of you. What could be beautiful? Once you start to define the beautiful, you actually separate yourself from the beautiful.

15:32 Mark: Yeah.

15:32 Wes: It gives this as a reason for. It is for this reason that sages keep to the service that does not entail. Wu Wei. Coercion in this translation, so that there's a relationship between this determination, I'll call it pinning things down and then coercive action. But if you understand that trying to fix these things kind of produces the opposites, you lay off that a bit, or maybe entirely. I don't know.

16:00 Theodore: Wu Wei, in this situation, I would think just about not coercion, but like, if you're in a state of flow, these distinctions don't matter. They don't actually map onto anything. It's only once you step out of the flow and apply judgments that they matter. That Lao Tzu is saying, well, the application of judgments, that's wrong. Don't do that.

16:23 Wes: They prevent the flow. Yeah.

16:25 Mark: Should we jump to chapter four, number three? Chapter four? I feel like it gives a good flavor of some of the mystical apparent paradox. Do you want to read your Ivanhoe, Theo?

16:38 Theodore: The way is like an empty vessel. No use could ever fill it up. Vast and deep, it seems to be the ancestor of the myriad creatures. It blunts their sharpness, untangles their tangles. Knots, I would say, softens their glare, merges with the dust. This is repeated. The line, deep and clear. It seems to be there. I do not know whose child it is. It is the image of what was before. The Lord himself. Shangdi, I'm guessing.

17:08 Mark: Yeah. The last line in the Ames, it prefigures the ancestral gods.

17:12 Wes: I like that.

17:13 Mark: So he's just assuming that whenever he's talking about the divine in here, like. Well, that was what the religion that they were talking about. It's just like the accreted souls of your ancestors, Death, the gods just call it, you know.

17:25 Theodore: This is a difficult one. I don't have many notes. Much more notes for chapter five.

17:31 Wes: This idea of emptiness is important, right?

17:34 Seth: Yeah, exactly.

17:35 Wes: Because it's going to show up. So chapter six, we get the root, the valley and the associate, the female and the association with productivity. Ironically, there's a productivity implied in emptiness and a potency implied in it.

17:50 Theodore: Yeah, which is why non being is a terrible translation because I think you could almost translate wu as potent.

17:59 Wes: Like the kind of element like potentiality and Aristotle.

18:05 Theodore: Yeah, I'm sure some will get angry at me for saying that, but it's a very. For something that's nothing, it is the most vibrant thing. And then once you, you start to use it, you use it up, you make objects out of it and it loses its potency. So if you want to keep its potency.

18:23 Wes: And in chapter 11. Yeah, you get, you know, the utility of the clay pot is a function of the nothingness inside it and similar ideas.

18:29 Seth: Well, that was the chapter rather that I was thinking of Wesley, the idea that emptiness is what provides the utility, but fecundity is something else. I don't want to align emptiness with the valley and the fecundity because I think that's a different thing.

18:45 Mark: I mean, I think Ames considers them the same thing. The whole talking about a valley or talking about the mother. Ames actually gets pretty graphic that it's like the open, moist, seemingly empty, productive. The inner vagina.

18:59 Theodore: I think if there was a distinction, perhaps it is that one is useful and the other is almost like a mystical, you know, reveling in the experience of the valley. Whereas another is kind of looking at the way in that and saying, well, how's emptiness useful in the day to day? How does it infiltrate the world of being?

19:21 Seth: The pot does not engender anything. The pot is a vessel that holds things. The valley is a vessel that produces things. Those are two different types of metaphors there.

19:31 Mark: How does that then to go back to four, blunt the sharp edges, untangle the knots, soften the glare brings things on the same track. I mean, it just sounds like this is a talking again about the undifferentiated, that the knots and the glare, these are all distinctions, conceptual. It's again the anti Confucian or something. But maybe there's something more directly metaphysical about that.

19:52 Dylan: It Seems directly metaphysical in pointing to the problem of objectification. And the focus on objectification is distracting you from the way.

20:03 Seth: What?

20:03 Dylan: The source is filing down the sharp edges, untying the tag, softening the glare, settles the dust. Those are all aspects of distinction that are pointing out the objects to us and saying, the way gets rid of that. Or you're more aligned with the way.

20:19 Seth: That's interesting. What's your translation on this one, Dylan?

20:23 Dylan: The way is empty, yet when you use it, you never need fill it again. Like an abyss, it seems to be the ancestor of the 10,000 things. It files down sharp edges, unties the tangles, softens the glare and settles the dust. Submerged, it seems perhaps to exist. We don't know whose child it is. It seems to have even preceded the Lord.

20:46 Theodore: Very Christian.

20:48 Seth: If you take seriously the notion of an abyss, what is an abyss? And it's some kind of endless cavern. If you threw something into it, it would just fall for some indeterminate time, perhaps bouncing off of the sides and doing all this sort of thing. And it sucks the light out, right? It's kind of almost like a black hole. Ultimately, if you think about this endless hole into which things would fall and bounce around, there's no light, there's no shape. There's no form, really, that they can grab hold of and make distinctions. And so ultimately, if you were to think of yourself falling in there. Is that the metaphor we're going for here?

21:30 Wes: The falling into an abyss, the darkly

21:33 Mark: visible, deep and still the abyss.

21:36 Seth: It's so abysmally deep, right? It's so deep and it's so dark that it seems. It could be, you know, the omphalos. It's the source from whence all things come. If you throw something in there or if you try to go in there, the sharp things get blunted, right? The knotted things get untangled.

21:53 Wes: I like Seth, you were talking about chaos, I think, which also connects it to the Christian tradition a bit, the Judeo Christian tradition, you know. And again, we get something of indeterminacy here, so that it prefigures the ancestral gods. So, and I think, I guess with Greek mythology as well and Christian mythology, chaos is the beginning. In that tradition, something is made of the generativity of nothingness and chaos, which is to say it's almost. Milton in his Paradise Lost makes a lot of this, which is to say that nothingness is almost like a paradox. Because it's a paradox. It collapses necessarily. And it. What does it collapse into? Into being. So it necessarily gives rise to things. If you posit an emptiness, if you posit a nothing, what you're positing is something that is inevitably productive, and that's

22:47 Dylan: both aligned with this. But you also see it in that conjunction of terms. Even in the Milton of nothingness and chaos. The only way you can make those two things come together is if that nothingness is a no thingness.

23:01 Mark: Yep. Nothing articulated.

23:03 Wes: Yeah.

23:04 Seth: You know, if you want to make use of the male female distinction and make a correlation to the Western tradition, too, you have the idea of eros being the generative force that actually brings earth and heaven together. So there's a sense in which, from a cosmology perspective, there are these fixed entities, the earth, the heavens, et cetera. But for them to productively, literally and figuratively interact requires some force. And it's chaotic and described as eros here.

23:37 Wes: And eros is associated with nothingness as well. Right. Because it's a lack.

23:41 Seth: It's desire. Right. Desire is the thing. It's the motive force that brings together the determinant. Right. It's the indeterminate thing that brings together the determinant. There's definitely a parallel here, just a different set of metaphors, I would think.

23:57 Theodore: Like, if you are entering the vast and the deep, the first thing you lose is the self. Your self is annihilated just by the vastness and the depth of it. This could be at the core of the mystical element. I think, Mark, you're talking about this. Just when you. I don't know, as a child, and you think about the infinite, or you get to a stage where you think of something or you experience something so vast that the things that matter in your life melt. So this might be core of the Taoist mystical experience and why they want to write this text. Life ain't so important.

24:36 Mark: Can we move to number 12? A while ago, Dylan had said something about the distinctions distracting you. So 12, it says, among other things, the five colors blind the eye, the five flavors destroy the palate, five notes impair the ear. You know, I heard an interpretation of that as like, well, that's just Chinese medicine, you know, don't overstimulate your senses.

24:56 Theodore: I heard that one, too.

24:57 Mark: Interpreting this, they exert their efforts on behalf of the belly rather than the eye. You know, which is more the Stoic or Epicurean. Don't seek far for glamorous things and extravagances. And, you know, just pay attention to the. The root, the simple, the actually nourishing. I take an epistemological thing here, too, that there's the five colors, five flavors, the five notes. That these are sort of symbolic of the spectacle. We have to not be distracted by the spectacle and sort of center yourself. And that's where you will actually get in touch with the way.

25:31 Wes: Yeah, I think there's this contrast again, between basic nourishment and then treating things as if they have a significance above and beyond what they can do for us in a practical sense. So thinking of a number of different things here, including existentialism, but thinking that the lack is going to be filled up. I associate that with the I. Right. Or with the concept of idealization we were talking about earlier in relationship to Stoicism. You can look at things and covet them in a way. And that covetousness isn't just. I want that the covetousness imbues the coveted object with a specialness. And again, we could use our Lacan episodes to hear it as well and think of the objet a but with a specialness and a significance that goes above and beyond what you're seeing. So sight is really special in that sense.

26:26 Theodore: The five colors, five notes, five flavors. These are traditional ways of categorizing. So it's saying once you categorize, something goes wrong.

26:37 Dylan: I liked where you were going, where you said, in categorizing, things are going wrong.

26:42 Theodore: The categorizing is the use of language. And so it's not just you look and then there's a desire, but that you look. And the words and desire for Taoism seem to be codependent. So, you know, if you're learning music and then you start to analyze the music, you are, in a sense, imbuing it with a desire that is unnatural. That is not like the desire of the belly. I think the desire for the belly is very much. You eat when you're hungry, you drink when you're dry. It's done in silence. There is no. And without the words, there isn't gluttony. So I think that is like the most definitive element of. There are things happening. There is the cycles of the stomach. But if you don't talk about it, then you don't generate desire as a kind of codependence. Yeah.

27:32 Wes: It gets us back to that relationship between determinacy and desire. So there's the determinate objects of desire versus whatever it is we're doing with feed ourselves.

27:42 Mark: You know, we've been getting more and more of what the virtues, according to the Daoists on the table 38 is the beginning of supposedly the de sections. The first half, 1 through 37 is supposedly the dao sections. A lot of them were about virtue and we read political stuff in there. But at least this is where it starts. With the word de is because the most excellent do not strive to excel. That they are of the highest efficacy.

28:06 Theodore: Right.

28:06 Mark: They have the most de. The most de don't strive to de.

28:10 Wes: Therefore they have the highest de.

28:12 Mark: Yes.

28:15 Wes: Theo, you were saying we should do five.

28:18 Seth: Especially because it has Wes's favorite turn of phrase. Institutionalized morality.

28:24 Theodore: I hate that translation. It's such a weird translation.

28:27 Dylan: And I have a question about it with respect to mine, but we should read a couple.

28:32 Theodore: Heaven and earth are not benevolent. They treat the myriad creatures as straw dogs. Sages are not benevolent. They treat the people as straw dogs. Is not the space between heaven and earth like a bellow, empty and inexhaustible? Work it and more will come forth. An excess of speech will lead to exhaustion. It is better to hold to the mean. There could be very different translations of this particular chapter. So who wants to do their translation?

29:00 Seth: I like the first four lines of yours. But then it got. Then I don't know what happened.

29:04 Theodore: Seth, do you want to do yours? And then we'll.

29:06 Seth: Sure. The heavens and the earth are not partial to institutionalized morality. Sorry. They take things, wanwu, and treat them all as straw dogs. Sages too are not partial to institutionalized morality. They treat the common people as straw dogs. The space between the heavens and the earth, isn't it just like a bellows? Even though empty, it is not vacuous. Pump it and more and more comes out. It is better to safeguard what you have within than to learn a great deal that so often goes nowhere.

29:41 Mark: So the middle and the last part of that are just redundant of other stuff we've said, right?

29:45 Seth: I don't know.

29:45 Mark: The jar that never empties itself is the same as the bellows that more keeps pumping out. The dao is endlessly generative.

29:53 Seth: Yeah, the middle section. Yes. I don't know about the last part,

29:56 Theodore: the end, about the speech. It actually has zhong, which is like. If you've seen the character, it's a box with a line in the middle. So it's the first kind of reference, I think, to the mean. So we've been talking about balance all this time. But this is like the first character for the middle. Keep to the middle and what that means.

30:15 Seth: How did these guys get. It is better to safeguard what you have within than to learn a great deal that so often goes nowhere from that

30:21 Theodore: I have no idea.

30:23 Wes: So let's start with the first part. We'll just say, you know, so the heavens and the earth are not partial,

30:29 Mark: are not humane, are not ruthless. Or they are ruthless.

30:32 Seth: They're not benevolent, but they're not malicious, they're indifferent. Right.

30:36 Wes: They treat everything as straw dogs, which are I take to be toys.

30:39 Theodore: So the first thing is it is literally not ren. So the Confucian virtue is here. It's the man with the 2 ren. So this might be another dig at Confucianism.

30:52 Wes: So that's the justification for institutionalized morality. Yeah, that's where it's getting that from. Okay.

30:58 Theodore: But I mean, ren is the weird one because ren in Confucianism is closest to the natural feeling. It's the most amorphous of the virtues in Confucian. Like you might say that they're not righteous, they don't follow the li, they're not bound by the li. They use ren, which doesn't work with the institutionalized. But yes, you can see that if it is, if you take it as a dig at the Confucian, you can bring in the whole Confucian system and say that institutionalized ideas, that's not how heaven and earth work. The straw dogs. There is an explanation in the Zhuangzi, and this may be after the fact. There's like an ancient Chinese writer may have been reading this and said, what the hell is this about? I better make something up. But in the Zhuangzi, the idea is that they're effigies, they're carefully put together, they are honored, and then they're thrown on the fire in like a Guy Fawkes, man.

31:52 Wes: So sacrificial objects is what Ames says about it. Yeah.

31:57 Theodore: So if that's true, it has a section where heaven does treat things with reverence. But then when the time has passed, when it's no longer the time to keep things as holy objects, they're thrown on the fire. I think of in Chinese funerals, they often have paper objects for the dead. So like the new iPhone, they will make a paper version of that and send it onto their ancestors by burning it. So there's this kind of weighing of

32:23 Wes: at this time now, what's the battery life like on that?

32:27 Mark: Who knows?

32:29 Wes: Because it's. It is eternity.

32:33 Seth: It has infinity pixels. And no, I think this is actually interesting because I had to go look it up at a sense of what straw dogs might mean. And you know, somebody was like to be disposed of after use Whatever. But then there's another one that says it has its season. So they're associated with seasonal festivals. So it's like in the spring, there's this appropriate spring icon that you do, and then it's to be discarded, but it will recur, right? Which gets into this concept of flow. It's not something like dismissal or destruction, permanent destruction or something like that. So it's the heavens and the earth are not partial. They're neither benevolent nor malevolent. They simply are indifferent. They take all things and treat them as straw dogs.

33:20 Dylan: Right.

33:20 Seth: Sages who want to be like the heaven and the earth also are neither judgmental, because that's really. If you say you're benevolent or malicious, it's a question of judgment, are also indifferent. They treat the people, and they keep saying the common people. But essentially what's intended here is people they rule or people they govern. They treat the people they govern as straw dogs, meaning they treat them with the appropriate amount of reverence when needed, and they dismiss them when not needed. And that. That somehow is part of this seasonal flow of.

And presumably do so in a way from. We saw from whatever it was, Chapter two. Or that the people believe that they are participating in some kind of a ritualized seasonal thing. And if you think about the way in which our lives are structured, at least I don't know what it's like in Australia, Theo. But over here we have things like Christmas and Independence Day and Thanksgiving and Halloween and those kinds of things.

34:22 Theodore: Oh, here we just have the flood season and then everything is on fire season. So that's how we organize.

34:28 Seth: You truly are straw dogs. You get washed away or burned up. No, but the idea is that, you know, like, there's a sense in which there's a rhythm and a seasonality to, oh, it's summertime, so the kids are out of school and this thing happens. And we structure our lives around this concept of season. And without that structure, I don't know what my life. I don't. I can't conceive of life without seasons, without festivals.

34:52 Theodore: That brings in the seasonal aspect, the kind of where you look after the straw dog and you cultivate it and you put together, you care for it, but it doesn't explain the trampling it underfoot or the throwing it on the fire. The kind of. One translation has a ruthless, which I think goes too far because I think indifference is much closer. But from the view of the common people, heaven can be ruthless, can be like. And so can the sage. I think this would Be also like shocking to read at the time, because the traditional idea of heaven, which I think is rejected, is that heaven rewards the good.

And here they say, well, no, heaven doesn't reward the good. Heaven does things seasonally, but it can also crush people. It can, you know. And what's actually more shocking is that there was a naturalist school in China, but they still said, but, you know, the sage, therefore, should not be like heaven. The sage be humane. Whereas the Dao De Jing is saying, oh, no, heaven is not like what we thought of it, but we should still be like it. We should still try to be natural in that way, even though it now seems amoral, indifferent. Which then throws into question all of these things where we're talking about genuine feeling within the family and all that.

Because now we're getting the idea of the sage as quite a solitary person because of his general indifference to something, to people.

36:15 Wes: This, again, kind of is evocative of the same sort of problem we get when we talk about Stoicism, right, with whether the Stoic is really just going to be indifferent to family members. And then you get this fine distinction between what's preferable and not preferable, even though they're not absolutely good and bad. But, you know, it does sound like it's a rejection of morality with a big M, which doesn't necessarily mean small M, or maybe not morality, but valuation. What interests me here is we get the heavens and the earth. I don't know if it means that, you know, there's an earthly value system as well.

Maybe that's the hypothetical reasoning, maybe that's more practical, because in the next section, when we talk about the space between the heavens and the earth, there's some suggestion that there's this middle ground between two extremes, between these two different moralized poles or value systems. And I like this metaphor, right? It seems to be just space. If it's heavens and the earth, it seems to be space, or it seems to be something that an area in which there is no value system, maybe the earthly. Let me go back to Earth. Maybe that's just the natural order of things, right?

So in contemporary terms, we would say the natural order of things doesn't care about you. There's no divine to care about you. But if you look at this space in between, it's not that it cares, but it is productive, it produces something. And then that lines up with the last part in which you don't learn a great deal, that goes nowhere. You don't become the scientist and you don't Become the theologian, but you safeguard what you have within, which sounds like this kind of in between space. Again, I know I'm getting very speculative there, but.

37:55 Mark: Theo, is heaven and earth one character or is it two?

37:58 Theodore: It's two characters. It is a set phrase, though, which I was taking as like nature, but nature is a difficult concept in Chinese. So I was. I'm very happy to go along with.

38:08 Dylan: Well, there's at least one translation in the 8 as nature.

38:11 Wes: Well, then what about the space between the heavens and the earth? That's got to repeat.

38:16 Theodore: Yeah. So it is actually tearing them apart and saying something about them. I think that's right. I don't know what they're saying, though.

38:22 Dylan: So before we wrap up, I really don't get the last two lines here in the Henricks. It says, much learning means frequent exhaustion. That's not so good at holding onto the mean. And other ones are versions of this that by many words is wit exhausted, therefore hold on to the core. Much talk will cause, of course, we'll come to a dead end. It's better to keep to the center. How does the combination of staying to the average and not trying to over complicate things, maybe that's a generous way of saying much learning leads to exhaustion. If I overcomplicate things, how does that go along with the other stuff to

39:02 Wes: extend my very speculative interpretation a little bit? So this idea of learning a great deal, I think we know we can complicate things philosophically, we know we can complicate things theologically. We can come to believe that learning what to do involves doing a lot of reading. And whether it's the Bible or whether it's philosophical texts or theological texts or something else, or it could even be self help books. It could be whatever you like, figuring out what the rules are. And on the other side of that, on the earthly, what I would put the earthly side, you might think there's some value system to be derived, like Sam Harris, for instance, from understanding science.

Right. Understanding what's healthy, for instance. So anyway, you could use all kinds of different learning as a moral guide when the criticism might be, well, you're just thinking too much. And that just gets you away from the way. It gets you away from the more spontaneous relationship to the world, a natural relationship to the world where you would just do what you do.

40:03 Dylan: Yeah.

40:04 Theodore: Another way of putting that is the more speech you use, the more divisions, the more you actually grasp onto objects and try to hold them.

40:11 Mark: Yeah.

40:11 Theodore: And that's very unlike heaven. Once heaven uses an object when it's time to be used, and then there's no grasping onto the object, it moves on. It's a process, man. So that's how it might connect.

40:24 Wes: That's good.

40:25 Seth: Heaven is predisposed to action, not reflection.

40:28 Mark: Yeah, well, much learning does mean frequent exhaustion for us. So we're going to wrap this up, but we're going to have a whole second discussion on this. Any last words from anybody, in case you don't get on the second one? Thank you, Theo, for joining us.

40:42 Theodore: Let me say that much.

40:43 Seth: Thank you, Theo.

40:43 Theodore: I hope I was helpful.

40:45 Dylan: Oh, it's great.

40:45 Wes: No, you're very helpful, actually.

40:48 Theodore: Thank you.

40:49 Seth: I want to learn the appropriate amount of Chinese to understand this. And I didn't realize that I was a Taoist. It's all coming together. My life will be radically different from here on out.

40:59 Theodore: There are some primers that I used when trying to learn English from English to classical Chinese. So there are some primers that kind of jump you right in. Most people learn it after they've done a few years of Mandarin or something, though.

41:11 Dylan: Zach?

41:12 Seth: Nope. I'm going straight to the source.

41:13 Wes: Cool. The Dao of Seth.

41:15 Seth: That's right.

41:16 Mark: All right, folks, hold fast to the void, or keep to the center, or hold to the mean, whichever translation you prefer. Until next time. Good night, everybody.

41:26 Dylan: Good night.