SOURCE: Wu Kuang, Ming. “Trying without Trying: Toward a Taoist Phenomenology of Truth.” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 8, no. 2 (June 1981): 143-66.

[In the following essay, Wu Kuang explores the philosophical tension Chuang Tzu creates when he formulates the conflict between trying-not-to-try and not-trying-to-try.]

Nothing defies classification as does the thought of Chuang Tzu. Elements of joy and suffering, magic and politics, buffoonery and austerity, poetry and science, and above all, jokes, philosophy and ignorance, all consort together in symbiotic bliss. His words are obviously inspired, yet they engage the reader as no aphorisms of irresponsible genius do. Chuang Tzu does not merely entertain; he haunts and provokes an intimate profundity of everyday living.

Unfortunately, as often is with inspired thought, Chuang Tzu usually enthrals and baffles. The imperfect infancy and simple slumber are lauded as the zenith of enlightenment. The criminal is the saint, and Confucius, the crippler of original humanness. Such transvaluation of cultural values is not something one can afford to neglect. Worse yet, one strains at attaining cultural values, and one strains oneself to deformity; one strives at fulfilling values, and is plagued with internal strifes. One's devotion costs no less than oneself; all endeavors of civilization destroy human nature. Authentic human life must not be a series of trying, but life in which “the ultimate trying is not to try.”¹

This paper proposes a scheme with which to understand “trying which is no trying” (wu-wei), a key to understanding the rest, itself so puzzling yet hauntingly crucial. The scheme is this: self-emancipation from a “trying” conflict of two selves through the process of reduction. By the two selves are meant the empirical self and the reflexive, two aspects of the self describing its characteristic function, not its essence, which eludes description because the self is that whereby one engages in descriptive understanding. By “reduction” is meant both a re-turning to the original situation of the self, and a removal of encumbrances in the way.

The paper begins (I) by describing those two selves in their “trying” mutual tyrannies, out of which life must grow in the pre-reductive, reductive and post-reductive stages. (II) A phenomenology of truth of things takes place in such process of self-maturation, characterized by double negatives and the self-forgetful fit-and-comfort in the world. (III) The fit is an active one, a happy playful meandering, (IV) in a friendship that resonates among the co-thrivings of individuals.

The notions of the two selves are suggested by Dworkin, and “reduction” borrowed freely from early Husserl and Merlearu-Ponty. Thus some Occidental notions are used to understand Oriental inspiration, i.e., used metaphorically. It is important to remember that one should not be shy of using philosophical jargons, categories, precision, etc., as metaphors. One should freely use them as literary allusions.

In addition, the borrowing from Merelau-Ponty is made possible by Merleau-Ponty's similarities to and differences from Chuang Tzu.

First, both share three similarities of vision. Both see the lived world as a horizon of life, the importance of metaphor in our construing of life, and a natural emergence of the reasonableness of life.

Then, they are different in three ways:

1. They differ in their targets of attack. Merleau-Ponty's target was an empiricistic approach, an external mechanistic perspective. His weapon was perception interpreted phenomenologically as global and reasonable. Chuang Tzu, in contrast, attacked moral-political decadence of his time, by attacking the very root of the problem—the unnatural endeavor (wei) that cripples humanness, especially the endeavors of those well-meaning moralists and politicians.

2. This does not, of course, mean that neither has anything to say on other matters. It means, rather, that Merleau-Ponty is most famous for his novel approach to perception, and Chuang Tzu, for his revolutionary vision of humanness.

3. In his meticulous scientific investigation of concrete perception of things, Merleau-Ponty intimated the lived world as a total integrated horizon. Chuang Tzu's description, in contrast, is always in the context of total picture of human nature and Nature as a whole. Merleau-Ponty works his way up to a totality of the world; Chuang Tzu always plays in the world with a total (though indefinite) map of the Non-Being that be-ings every being unobtrusively.²
4. In consequence, Merleau-Ponty was always clear and reasonable. He took logic seriously. He sometimes (in fact, often) played on words and even on logic when soaring up high in a metaphysical generalization. Yet he rarely abandoned his scientific and meticulous rationality, even when castigating our obsession with it.

Chuang Tzu, in contrast, dared from the start to play not only on but often with words, notions and arguments. He even used logic metaphorcally. Few commentators realized that the profound Second Chapter of Chuang Tzu on “Equalizing Things and Theories” was meant as a joke; those extraordinarily subtle and inexpressible musings, as philosophical as they are mysterious, are meant as an irony and a metaphor, mutely appealing to our imagination. On the whole, he was hilariously mystical, purposely bordering on a tantalizing mystification. Chuang is frivolous when he is profound, and profound when frivolous (Lin Yutang). His Style is that of mystical abandonment, in sharp contrast to Merleau-Ponty's rational approach tinged with romanticism. In sum, Merleau-Ponty and Chuang Tzu were both metaphorical thinkers. The former's metaphor is dipped in logic; the latter's in humor and irony.

All this amounts to saying that Merleau-Ponty helps one understand Chuang Tzu's fascinating obscurity. That is why Merleau-Ponty is used as an aid, a metaphor, to Chuang Tzu. Chuang Tzu, in turn, helps one understand how to live in trying-without-trying. That is why he is used as metaphor for wu wei, a spontaneous trying without trying.

I. Gerald Dworkin in his essay, “Autonomy and Behavior Control,”³ states that a person may “desire that his motivations may be different.” A person may decide to stop liking to smoke, and take steps toward fulfilling his decision, e.g., by introducing a causal structure that brings nausea at the taste of tobacco, etc. The self is thus seen to have two levels, the empirico-causal level of motivations, and the second-order level of reflexive judgment bearing on the first. Dworkin unequivocably regards the reflexive level, that decides to stop smoking, as one's true self, whose wishes the self wants to see carried out.

The two levels of the self can be named the empirical and the reflexive self, respectively. The problem is, however, more complex than Dworkin suspected. For there is tyranny of the self over itself in both directions. Evil obtains not only when too much of the empirical self interferes with the decision of the reflexive self, but also when too much of the reflexive self overrides the empirical. Destruction of autonomy is effected not only, as Dworkin pointed out, when the empirical self controls the reflexive by, e. g., brain washing technique or mental disorder. The self is destroyed also, especially in today's civilized world, when the reflexive self controls the empirical, neglecting a careful listening to its own “body language,” to borrow the apt current jargon. Chuang Tzu is concerned with the latter sort of disturbance, the reflexive self overpowering the empirical, that characterizes the malaise of civilization.

A. The pre-reductive: The tyranny of the reflexive self over the empirical constitutes the pre-reductive social situation into which one is born. It begins when standards of excellence are set up and adhered to, be they moral, intellectual, technical or even economical (profit), all of which prove to be “tangles”⁴ to humanness, which is destroyed thereby.

Seeing the webbed toes and the sixth finger to be contrary to “what ought to be,” the reflexive self embarks on their corrections, only to result in an unwitting deformation of the empirical self.⁴ Such tragedy to the physical nature holds also in the sphere of the moral nature. The benevolent men worry about moral depravity of the age, only to do violence to the natural way of life.

The fault lies in setting up a standard of what one ought to be. The standard induces antagonism between the clever and the stupid, the righteous and the wicked, and the rich and the poor, in a word, those successful people and scum of the people. Such discrimination prostitutes people into “trying and laboring” (wu, lao)⁵ at the dangled prize of excellence, which now “enslaves”^b them.

Enslavement to covetous scurries, in turn, discriminates belaboring on “excellence” from simple stodgy laxity. People are caught in the dilemma of trying versus not trying. Some people soon see that neither horn of the dilemma is desirable, and are driven further to discriminate not-trying from trying not-to-try. Yet since neither of these sets of alternatives are natural, people merely go from one undesirable situation to another. They fall prey to the fidgety scheming and fussying scurrying, an entanglement from which there is no exit.⁶

At the center of the collapse of human autonomy is “trying.” As the reflexive self becomes tyrannical over the empirical, at the lure of various “excellences,” the total self enmeshes itself in the quagmire of “trying:”

a. One can try to try: If Hui Tzu is an example of philosophical jostling only to injure himself,⁷ then robber Chih and righteous Tseng-shan or Shih-yu are those of moral tragedy, and tyrant Chieh that of the political.⁷ They are breakdowns of the self in over exertion, being overrun by things on life's way.

2. One can try not-to-try: Seeing that the endeavor described above only injures oneself, one can try to stop trying. And one is caught in the austere morality of “don'ts,” another form of “trying.” This is merely a special form of trying to “help” what cannot be helped (chu t'ien), much as the ugly woman who horrified and repelled people by her frowning, in imitation of beautiful Hsi-shih's, naturally and charmingly.⁸ Similarly, unselfishness is a form of selfishness, as hazardous to health as correction of the sixth toe.⁸

3. One can simply give up and not-try at all: It is muddy ineptitude, a sure invitation to disaster, as the story has it of the goose that was killed for a feast because it does not cackle,⁹ or of the mediocre cook-butcher who breaks his knife by merely hacking into the ox.⁹

Thus no matter which way one turns, one is trapped in the terrible irrelevance of “trying” to push the boat across land;⁹ both the boat (the self) and the land (nature) are hurt. Such is the actual situation into which one is born, which is analogous to the epistemological plight described by Edmund Husserl as “the natural naive attitude,” loaded with empiricistic prejudice that prevents one from seeing things as they are. The cognitive clogging of vision is only a special case of the pervasive problem of life-obsessed conation that drives life out of touch with itself and with reality.

It is unfortunate, however, that Husserl chose the word “natural” to characterize such cognitive prejudice. For “natural” can mean either actual unreflective prejudice or original pristine authenticity. Husserl meant the former by “natural” which yet covers both. His mistake parallels that of empiricism (pointed out by Husserl himself), which illegitimately “confuses [and] identifies the basic requirement of a return to the ‘facts them selves’ … with the requirement that all knowledge shall be grounded in [sense] experience.”¹⁰ In a similar vein, Husserl's use of “naturalism” tends to confuse its root-meaning of “as we were originally born with,” which he espouses, with his intended meaning of “as we actually find ourselves in,” which he attacks.

And yet, Husserl's mistake is an instructive one. For though the two meanings are entirely opposed in value, they do dwell together in the same pre-reductive realm, so that when the actual prejudiced attitude is reduced, one comes back home to that prereductive natural level in the original sense. To go forward to the post-reductive stage is to return to the pre-reductive original.

Prior to the re-turned aspect of reduction, its preliminary calls for an explication. This is the process of re-turning away from (i.e., the bracketing) the actual prejudiced attitude, the process of turning off our un-natural trying. This is the second, reductive stage.¹¹

B. The Reductive: The purpose of Taoist reduction is to get out of the conative trap: to try or not to try. Husserl's epoche is still in a pre-reductive realm; it is a conative project to rid oneself of the view of things as related to one another externally and mechanically. In contrast, Chuang Tzu wants to turn away from precisely such conative cognitive entanglement, and return to the pre-“view”-ing flexibility in the world neither as mutually, mechanistically external nor amenable to the ideal, transcendental vision of essences. Hence Chuang Tzu's oft-repeated conversation: “Do you know … ? How should I know?”¹²

Chuang Tzu's aim is a “noetic” (i.e., total-personal, not cognitive-conative) return to the original pre-viewing, by getting out of an unending noematic criticism of world views. Though Husserl saw not only that theoretical presupposition steers the entire philosophizing activity in a specific direction, but also that a specific theoretical presupposition is in turn produced by a specific life-attitude, he did not complete the project of restructuring our attitude in the Lebenswelt. Chuang Tzu perhaps completes Husserl. Life revolution precedes the philosophical; and once the former is effected, the latter is nonessential, if not dispensable.

Hence the importance of freeing oneself from entanglements in trying-versus-not-to-try. The entire conative area must be “bracketed,” in the exercise of “mind-fasting.”¹²

Be it noted, however, that the “activity” of leaving the realm of activity is neither a cessation of activity nor another activity alongside of other activities. It is instead a reflexive self-activity, a meta-effort that culminates in effortlessness. It is (1) not doing nothing, a pu-wei, but a non-doing, a wu-wei, (2) neither speech nor silence, (3) nor yet a simple idiotic lack of knowledge or a small petty knowledge, but great Understanding supported by i-gnorance. Let me elaborate.

1. The self can be characterized as a being in the realm of effort, which is a wei. To go out of it is an “act” of wu-wei, a radical re-positioning of wei on a new plateau. It is a wei-ing of wei, a meta-effort to posit the self out of the wei-realm, where there is conflict between doing and not-doing.

The wu-ing of wei does not mean a cessation of wei, a pu-wei, which is after all a sort of wei. For not-doing is meaningful only in contrast to doing, perhaps a refraining thereof, a performance by way of not performing (e.g., an insult by way of not shaking hands, or a murder by way of not giving medication). This is a pu-wei, itself also to be wu-ed.¹²

It is no accident that Chuang Tzu recommends wu-wei as a wu-ing of pu-wei (wu pu-wei), for then wu-wei shall amount to having “nothing that is left undone” (wu-pu wei^d).¹³ Being neither filial nor unfilial is the ultimate of jen,¹⁴ for unselfishness is also selfishness.¹⁴ The convicts are saints in that they act according to what they cannot help acting.¹⁴ The theme of wu-wei is understandably so important that no less than three chapters¹⁴ are explicitly devoted by Chuang Tzu to it, which pervades the entire book of Chuang Tzu.

2. The same holds for speech and silence, both of which belong to the same locutionary realm, co-existing in mutual contention and support. Speech exists only in contrast to silence and vice versa; the one stands out as such only when accompanied by the other. Chuang Tzu advises that one refuse to take sides, stand out of such locutionary maelstrom, before one can discern its tapestry. When one grows “sensitive to the thread of silence from which the tissue of speech is woven,”¹⁵ one can remain silent and for ever speaks, and conversely, whenever one speaks, one speaks silence.¹⁶

With words that are non-words, you may speak all your life long and you will never have said anything. Or you may go through your whole life without speaking them, in which case you will never have stopped speaking.¹⁶

3. Reduction is a returning not only from doing-versus-not-doing and speech-versus-silence, but also from craving for and meddling in little petty knowledge, for whose acquisition the self is ensnared, being pulverized amidst the clanging noise of incessant debates. All this originates in one's pervasive propensity to knowledge and aversion to ignorance. One must return from meddling in such “petty cognitive [enterprise] which injures virtue (te),”¹⁷ to a quiet discernment of the living chiasma between knowledge and ignorance. For understanding relies as much on ignorance to be understanding, as does the foot on the support of the untrod ground, all around (Watson) and the distance between the steps (Lin), to go forward.¹⁷ The tragedy is that “no one understands enough to rely upon what understanding does not understand and thereby come to understand.”¹⁷

In short, one must go out of the above three realms of contrast (between doing and not doing, speech and silence, knowledge and ignorance). This is because such contrasts indicate contentions within the self,¹⁸ a discord between the reflexive self and the empirical. It is caused by the reflexive self's stubborn effort (wei) at a unilateral control (chih) over the total self, with its “good” intention to “benefit life” (yi-sheng) and “help [improve] nature”¹⁸ (of the empirical self). Yet the harder the reflexive self tries (wei), the fiercer does the internal contention grow between knowledge and stupidity, speech and silence, trying and not trying. The grinding shrills of “the pipings of men” “wear out” the empirical self and “drive” the reflexive to a total collapse in exhaustion.¹⁹

One must therefore “fast” oneself and “empty” all the internal disturbances.¹⁹ This is the process of reduction, whereby one returns to a perceptive listening of “the pipings of earth,” the empirical self that has been for too long repressed and tyrannized. In this connection, it is important to note the twin functions of reduction, in accordance with the twin implications of the pre-reductive stage. As long as the first pre-reductive realm is the original world out of which one strays, reduction is a return, a restitution. It is, however, to be accomplished by a cutting off of the second aspect of the pre-reductive realm, the contrived contrastive elements of the self and their contentions. This is a restrictive aspect of reduction. Thus restitution is accomplished by way of restriction; re-turning from unnatural conflicts is a return to nature. Reduction is a via negative home, a return by a reducing. Not without reason, Chuang Tzu praises abnegative notions, such as emptiness, stupidity, daily reduction, a renouncing of learning, [becoming like] a withered tree and dead ashes, etc. They caution that whatever the worldly people aspire to (which includes saintliness) should be reduced to an emptiness. Such is the process of a radical homecoming (re-ductio). Revolution of “values” is an index to a radical reverting to the pristine origin.

A reflection on early Husserl's program²⁰ of reduction shows how revolutionary Chuang Tzu's reversion is. Husserl proposed a bracketing of one theoretical framework (external mechanistic naturalism or empiricism) in favor of another (an idealism of the transcendental ego). Yet as long as any theoretical framework is an imposition of the reflexive self on the total ego, a tragedy remains in the rift and conflict between the reflexive self and the empirical, because the transcendental ego (as the reflexive self) is allowed a more stringent hegemony than in the empiricism that Husserl attacked.

Chuang Tzu's reduction is a radical cessation of all such theoretical wranglings, an “equalizing of all theories on things.” The second chapter in Chuang Tzu, “Ch'i Wu Lun,” is not another lun (theory) that ch'is (equalizes) wu (things,)²¹ but rather a ch'i-ing of all wu-luns (theories on things). For inherently wrong is the very theorizing activity that is the reflexive self's dominance over the empirical. Such internal conflict makes for an ontological rigidity of the self, which results in an obstinate blindness to things as they are.

Our joy has not ended when grief comes trailing it. We have no way to bar the arrival of grief and joy, no way to prevent them from departing. Alas, the men of this world are no more than travelers, stopping now at this inn, now at that, all of them run by “things.”. … [From] these mankind can never escape. And yet there are people who struggle to escape from the inescapable—can you help but pity them?²²

Thus it is not things that are to be equalized, for they are as they are, now a Chuang Tzu, now a butterfly, neither equal nor unequal. It is theories concerning them that are to be equalized, i.e., equally bracketed away so as for the self to quietly listen, without “presuppositions,” to the pipings of earth. The destination of reduction is not in the transcendental ego eternally irrelevant to worldly vicissitudes. It is a return to the original lack of rift and conflict between the reflexive self and the empirical, the thinking and the things.

C. The post-reductive: The aim of reduction is to attian a life-engagement that is disengaged. On the one hand, such life is disengaged from siding either with the reflexive self (as with Confucious and saint Tseng) or with the empirical self (as with robber Chin and the inept goose that was killed). It is engaged, on the other hand, because through a disengagement from both trying (Confucius) and not trying (the goose), one can stay in the midst of turmoil, “not halfway between opaque facts and limpid ideas, but at the point of intersection and overlapping where families of facts inscribe their generality, their kinship, group themselves about the dimensions and the site of our own existence.”²³ Life can now go on with every changing circumstance, “now a snake, now a dragon,”²⁴ sometimes changing with them, sometimes changing them, always taking them as they are, never violating them nor being violated by them.²⁵ Such ontological freedom can best be seen in contrast to the pre-reductive situation.

Previously, being internally at odds with itself, the self has been at odds with the world. The self was divided against itself and could not help but be inflexible and irrelevant to reality, The self was caught (and injured), now in one horn of the self-concocted dilemma, now in another, for ever tossed from one extreme to the other without respite. All this was originated in a takeover of the natural self by a contrived arbitrariness of zealous reflexive consciousness.

Acts of takeover and dominance are only some aspects of “trying,” around which are several contrasts: to try (b.) versus not to try (a.), to try not to try (c.) versus both above, and to try without trying (d.) versus all above. To complicate the matter, each of these activities carries two implications:

1. The pre-reductive:
   • a. Not to try (pu-wei):
     • a.i.: A natural situation, such as: childhood, slumber, newborn calf, withered tree and dead ashes, not able to answer query as to why one is, etc.
     • a.ii.: The empirical self over the reflexive, such as uncackling goose, self-abandoned robber Chih, etc.
   • b. To try (wei):
     • b.i.: Echoes d.i.
     • b.ii.: The reflexive self over the empirical, such as obsequious Confucius, calculative robber Chih, etc.
2. The reductive:
   • c. To try not to (wu-wei):
     • c.i.: A way out of the reflexive self over the empirical, a reductive process (to try-not to try)
     • c.ii.: Another mode of the reflexive self over the empirical (to try not-to-try) (a version of b.ii.)
3. The post-reductive:
   • d. To try without trying (wu wei erh wu pu-wei):
     • d.i.: “Trying without trying” in an effortless roaming in the self-transmutation of things, doing what cannot be helped, the inner nature matching up with the natural (cf. b.i.), etc.
     • d.ii.: “Trying without trying” that culminates in a playfulness of a.i.

The above list indicates that the post-reductive situation of d. entails free revisits to a.i. and b.i., after having undergone the reductive process of c.i., Chuang Tzu “the cool man”²⁵ comes in²⁶⁽¹⁾ from the cold²⁶⁽²⁾ without leaving the cool behind.²⁷⁽³⁾ Having gone through stages 1 and 2, one realizes at stage 3 that one has not left the previous stages after all. Rather, one has merely turned away and emancipated oneself from aspect-ii. of each stage, the tyranny of oneself over oneself, and has returned to aspect-i. of each stage, an integrated self. There is the same world of life activities, and yet, for all their sameness, the spirit and the significance are transformed.

On seeing a car that has the same look as his, a child shouted, “Look! A same different car!” The self that is in d. is literally the same different self. Because of the radical shift in perspective, the return to the same world is permeated with new freedom: “How could I know that? But suppose I try saying something. … Words exist because of meaning; once you've gotten the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can have a word with him?”²⁸ Now that one is out of the trap²⁹⁽¹⁾ of trying,²⁸⁽²⁾ to get in²⁹⁽³⁾ and out of the trap²⁸⁽⁴⁾ is an enjoyment.²⁸⁽⁵⁾ One now plays with words, as one does with fire, without burns.²⁸⁽⁶⁾

Before going any further, someone might still object, saying, “But why not trying-to-try, or rather, all trying, without a residue of not-trying? What is wrong with wanting to try ever harder?” The answer to this question can conveniently serve as a summary of what has gone so far. The answer can be twofold:

1. Such pure trying is simply impossible, as long as consciousness is always enclosed in the frame of the fringes of consciousness, i.e., spontaneity, which in turn is intelligible only in the light of consciousness. There cannot be a complete transparency of consciousness in the form that Sartre envisioned. There is a background of spontaneity, a not-trying, that is both unerasable and supportive of a contriving effort. Effort is made possible by spontaneity, and culminates in a spontaneous effortlessness.
2. In general, we have been insisting that it is neither simple trying nor simple not-trying that is bad. It is not either one alone that is evil, because such a situation is impossible to obtain. For really these two modes of being cannot be separated; human life is both. “Trying” is evil because it is a short for “trying controlling not-trying;” “not trying” is evil because it is a short for “not-trying asphyxiating trying.” Evil is the situation of tyranny of one over the other, an ontological disharmony.

“Why not trying-to-try, all trying?” bespeaks a suspicion that “trying without trying” may connote too much of a not-trying. That such is not the case can be seen when one notices that the word, “trying,” occurs first in the phrase, which means that “trying” obtains properly only in the environment of not-trying, which, in turn, exists and is expressed properly only in the act of trying. Thus, not-trying and trying form a mutuality that is a non-trying, a wu-wei, an act that is trying-without-trying, a respondent indwelling (not domination) of one in the other. Trying echoes and expresses not-trying; not-trying pervades and supports trying.

In short, it is neither pure trying nor pure not-trying that is evil but the tension (i.e., conflict, mutual tyrannies) between effort and spontaneous effortlessness. Trying without trying is the situation where effort is fitted into the socket of effortless spontaneity, and moves freely therein. And such movement, in turn, delineates and lets appear the socket of not-trying. That is the natural original situation to which we return. That is trying without trying.

II.

Such a realm of freedom can be characterized by double negatives, on the one hand, and self-forgetful fit-comfort, on the other. Together they describe the self's natural playful transmutation (yu and hua), in which the self is an active phenomenon of the truth of things.

The reason is not far to seek. To step out of actual obsession of one's daily scurries is to go back home to the pristine naivete of things themselves. There, effortlessness converges to being without effort, and being-natural, to the naivete and genius of the genesis of things, as symbolized by the little infant and the newborn calf.²⁹

a. Natural transmutation of the self: “Emptying, one is still and composed. Composed, one [now] moves, moving with the fulness of oneself.”³⁰ Self-emptying operation is that reductive process that keeps the self clear of (thoughts about) praise and blame, life and death, exactly as do the convicts in chains.³¹ Such men are fear-less, for their inner emptiness swallows their desires and energies. Being out of touch with worldly lures as those convicts are, the self acts at will, and whatever it does hits the mark. Subjective serenity leads to an objective fit.

The knife of a mediocre butcher was broken by the ox it was meant to cut; it was “thing-ed” by things (wu-yu-wu).³¹ The cleaver of Master Cook Ting goes at the ox not by perception that distracts, but by spirit that goes along with the natural makeup; the thickless (the cleaver) dances about in the space (between the joints). The blade remains, after nineteen years of use, as good as fresh from the grindstone. The cleaver “things” things (wu-wu) because it goes with the change of things (yü-wu-hua).³¹ The inner “heaven” is matched up with the outer (t'ien-ho-t'ien), the innate nature of the self with that of all things.

2. Subject-ive phenomenology of truth: it is in the above situation that the truth of things appears to human selves, and that in and through human selves. Here conation and cognition merge. For if the truth of things is to be known primarily in cognition, then it is i-gnorance, a cognitive emptiness, that opens the self to the self-manifestation of truth. “When knowledge rests at its unknown, it reaches the ultimate.”³¹

“Whenever I convince anyone of his ignorance,” the Apology says with melancholy, “my listeners imagine that I know everything that he does not know.” Socrates does not know any more than they know. He knows only that there is no / absolute knowledge, and that it is by this absence that we are open to the truth.³²

Socrates' statement, “You do not know what you think you do” implies two possible situations of Socrates himself: (a) Socrates knows more than the other person does; or (b) Socrates knows no more, and is aware of his ignorance. Socrates rejected (a) not without reason; (a) entails Socrates' being different from being human, which he is. Therefore, Socrates can only be in situation (b), of which he is aware. One's awareness of ignorance opens oneself to the objectively real, which by definition is something other than a subjective fancying.

This one's being-open is, for Chuang Tzu, a profoundly active open-ing of every being, as an artist is an invitation to life. If, as someone said, the arts are a drawing from life to contribute to life, then one such eruption in life changes the life-perspective, and thereby life itself. When the eruption is a drawing from life, i.e., a reflection of life in life, then, as a mirror in a mirror,³³ the manifestations of life are infinitely rich, alive and free.

To borrow Heidegger to our purpose, an artist lets manifest the Is of what-Is in its sheer presence, which is the very life of reality standing-out (ex-ist, in answer to subject-ive re-duction) of the humdrum ordinary routine. The presence pre-sents itself, in which the True Man (the thinker-artist) pre-serves the presenting activities of the presence. For the presence is not only the encompassing region of Be-ing, less a question than an answer, an environing all-inclusive “yes” that enables all the quests to start and end. The presence is also that creative enriching power of reality, a con-forming thrust of Reality (the Presence) with reality (self's presence),³³ more a cor-responsiveness with reality than a passive correspondence to it. In this sense, the self is through its openness (cognitive and conative) an active co-creator and co-revealer of reality. The self is a phenomenon of life, an active phenomenology of truth.

Chuang Tzu would have agreed with Cusanus who said that God is an encircling Circle whose circumference is nowhere and whose center everywhere. It is important to note that what Cusanus proposed is the circle that is no circle. On the one hand, it is a circle because it is explicitly announced as such, with all its attributes complete—its center, its circumference. On the other hand, it is no circle, since a circle is made up of a definite center plus a delimited circumference. The center that is everywhere is hardly a center any more than the circumference that is nowhere is a circumference properly so called.

Cusanus' “circle that is no circle” can, then, only mean an environing horizon with neither confines that, as a regular delimited-delimiting circle would, encircle something in, nor with discrimination that excludes some people. It is instead a circle for everyone (“center everywhere”) to dwell therein, and thereby to be enabled to envision and live freely (“circumference nowhere”). And of course such a “circle” is no circle, for it is shapeless and limitless. This is the shapeless shaping power; only as shapeless can a shaping power freely shape according to the nature of things, or rather, let beings shape themselves. In this self-shaping activity of beings the shaping power of beings adumbrates itself as circle that is no circle, with its center everywhere and its circumference it is a circle (a Totality), and with everywhere center it is many a circle (the self). Here one can neither say that the one and the many are mutually supportive nor can one say that they are polar. One can only say that the circle is also those many circles, for it is the same reality that enables Leibniz to see multiple monads and Spinoza to see a single God or—Nature. Nature is many monads, and all monads are one Nature.

But need one say all this? This question brings forth a unity of conation and locution, especially in its paradoxical answers—yes and no. First, as to the negative answer. No, one needs not say because any saying (as any nay-saying) is a fixing, a conscious trying that ossifies our knowledge and falsifies reality. With his tongue in cheek, Chuang Tzu counselled the king who was ill that everything has its own ghost, and prescribed becoming his own ghost himself, thereupon the king's illness went away.³⁴ One might as well become not (only) oneself but one's own ghost, as a penumbra to the shadow.³⁴ One need not speak; one's living presence speaks loud enough.

Speech is a trying, and in the realm of trying, not-trying is still a trying; once one strays into this realm, there is no exit. One must neither try nor not-try, that is, both try without trying and not-try without even trying. One can then cease being obsessed by trying, and freely go in and out of it.

Analogously, it is a philosophical muddle to cognitively scrutinize the cognitive mechanism itself. Critical philosophy is an enterprise that bankrupts by tripping over itself. One can never wiggle oneself out of the dilemma of either proposing one more dubious theory-concerning-things, or else do no philosophy at all. Plato's paradox of the Third Man, the post-Kantian idealistic revolts after reason's self-critique was effected, the later Wittgenstein's mystical ambiguity, etc.,³⁴ are but a few pieces of flotsam thrown up by the frantic efforts at jettisoning a few theories out of a philosophical ship, which has been reeling over the reefs of itself. Philosophy beyond philosophy is an impossibility, for it will be another philosophy, caught in its ghostly shadow. No, one needs not say.

And yet, the question persists: Does one really not need to say. There have been words on no-words, which is a contradiction. To stop at the above nay-saying is to be stuck in the realm of saying and in such self-contradiction. This is still to be in the reductive stage; one must go further. After having said concerning the unsayability of things, one must realize that what cannot be de-scribed (i.e., reduced to saying) can be pre-sented, becoming one with the appearance of truth. After the nay-saying about sayings comes an existential nay-saying of all such nay-sayings, not indeed by way of another saying, but in the mode of ceasing to be obsessed by it. What cannot be described is then naturally ex-pressed in the freedom of life in all its inexpressiveness.

After understanding the unity of conation both with cognition and with locution, one comes to a realization that there is a unity between locution and cognition. Such are the beautiful double negatives of Chuang Tzu. With “neither words nor silence (negation of words),” that is, “with words that are no-words, one can speak always and remain silent, or one can undergo one's whole life without speaking a word and will have never stopped speaking in understanding.”³⁵ “Neither doing nor doing nothing, and no-thing is left undone.” The entire book of Chuang Tzu is an instance of playing on words with words in a self-forgetfulness of cognitive openness.³⁵ There is forgetfulness and playfulness in the freedom of life that undergoes double negatives, in an existential knowledge that all is well that goes on as it does. It remains for us to explore the implications in life of such double negatives.

III.

The three stages on life's way (pre-reductive, reductive and post-reductive) are no mere neat chronological chart of life's way to its maturation. The above double negatives bespeak of those stages as ontological moments or even movements in the constitution of the be-ing of True Man, who constantly goes in and out of those stages. “Words exist because of meaning; once you've gotten the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten the words so I can have a word with him”?³⁶ It was joy for Chuang Tzu to have playfully jostled with Hui Tzu the philosophical jostler, whom Chuang Tzu sorely missed at his grave.³⁷ Such playfulness³⁷ lives in self-forgetfulness. The ferocious tigers and wolves, as well as the criminals in chains, are reck-less (i.e., worry-less, care-less)³⁸ enough to be simply oblivious to themselves, acting on their own ir-resistible spontaneity without further thoughts.

The subjective forgetfulness is an index to the comfort of the objective fit in the world. “To forget the feet and the waist is the comfortable fit of the shoes and the belt. To forget the knowledge of the right and wrong is the fitting ease of the heart-mind. Being without inner turnoil or outward conformity is the fit of events. Such fit, once started, never ceases to fit; [this]is to forget the fittingness of the fit itself.”³⁸

In contrast to the craft-y mind (chi-hsin)³⁹ that manipulates, the True Man breathes deeply at his base, “his heels,”³⁹ for the springs of life-mechanism (chi) are at the “heels” of things,³⁹ and to manipulate them with a pre-set frame of mind is to invite disaster. One of the signs of the disaster on its rise is the uneasy awareness of the existence of feet pinched by shoes. Conversely, in the forgetting of the feet appears the snug fit of the “shoes” of one's environment, and as the “waist” (one's body?) is forgotten, as if it were a “withered tree,” the “belt” of every day world comes to fit one as one's comfortable home. All of this, in turn, is an outward sign of the inner mind that forgets the distinction of the must and the must-not, striving after neither morality nor profit,⁴⁰ growing psychically fit, as the “dead ashes” are, to everything. Such is the first aspect of the reductive change, a listening to the “pipings of men.”

Moreover, the above is a subjective aspect of an objective fit with meeting of events. There one does not listen; one hears, of oneself (tzu-wen)⁴⁰. One acts only at an ir-resistible urge (pu-te-yi)⁴⁰. Therefore one experiences no “inner turmoil.” naturally ceases to meddle with things or with men (pu-ying),⁴⁰ going after nothing, welcoming nothing.⁴⁰ One experiences no “external conformity,” but merely “things” things and is not “thinged” by things, letting them be as they are, without harm either to oneself or to things.⁴⁰ Such are the listening to “the pipings of earth,” the second, objective aspect of the reductive change. Such fit, once started, shall not expire. One now realizes that one has been all this while listening to “the piping of heaven,” where every effort and every comfort is forgotten, including the very fit to things. And this is where the truth of things appears, in and through True Man, who “plays” (yu) in life (with) the truth of things.⁴⁰

“Playing music” perhaps is a closest analogy to such play fulness. The structure of music differs somewhat from that of architecture or painting. One neither sees the musical structure as a whole nor touches it ready made. Instead one undergoes it as it goes through the process of constituting itself historically, minute by minute, phase by phase. Someone might wonder where “it” is, that musical structure, that goes through the process of self-constitution. To ask this question is to bring forth five peculiarities of such processive structure that is music.

1. The structure is the process, and as the process comes to a completion, it (the structure) comes to an end. It expires itself in attaining its own “end,” that is, its purpose, and its termination. To finish its purposed project is to finish itself. That is the throbbing self-creative history that is music.
2. Furthermore, to experience music is to structure it. There is no musical structure apart from its being experienced by the composer, by the performers and by the participating audience. The three parties are no mere instruments to music; they are music. There can be no music without them making it, that is, e-lating (ex-panding) their be-ings in music. This is a dynamic, self-creating social world that is music.
3. The above first point needs an amendment in the light of the second. To say that a completion of music is its termination is only half a truth. For if this were completely true, no music can survive; all musical compositions will disappear as soon as they have been performed, if not composed. But they do survive long, the so-called classical music, though its survival differs from that of painting and architecture. Music survives not objectively, readymade, but by being re-enacted. For such re-enactment that is music, the musical scores are a faint suggestive guide.
4. It can be further objected that, in the final analysis, to say that music differs from painting and architecture is, again, only half a truth. For there is a sense in which painting and architecture are musical. The survival of both depends, as does that of music, on a re-enactment of their vision and excitement. Such re-constitution is evoked by the various media, pictorial, architectural or musical, that are created by the artists in respective areas. Without constituting, that is, undergoing the structure of painting and architecture, without creatively living through their vision, a piece of painting or architecture is mere piles of matter, very much “useless.” in the sense in which Hui Tzu variously attacked Chuang Tzu.⁴¹

5. It is, therefore, safe to aver that all beauties are sociohistorically constituted. Those piles of matter, such as musical scores and sounds, the book of Chuang Tzu and this paper itself, are a suggestive pointer, “a snare and trap” to catch the “rabbits” of the experiential “meanings” of things.⁴¹ For all this is “labor of experience on experience.”⁴² Those who have ears to hear, hear and see; to miss it is to get oneself caught in the “trap.”

6. In the final analysis, if beauty is structural participation, then the universe is itself a grand piece of beauty, and True Man, a phenomenology of its beautiful truth, wherein the piping of heaven naturally manifests itself.

Initially, the heavenly piping is seen to hug silence; listeners “see” the intricate interplay of the two that form a tapestry of the world. Then the piping appears as that which enhances silence. Listeners only listen to silence when they listen to the piping; after all, the sound comes forth from the hollow of the pipe. And the piping expresses its own tacit dimension of the hollow of silence. Finally, the piping silences. It is a silent power of tranquility. Listeners themselves are quieted. That ontological depth of mysterious inner integrity (te) is strengthened and nourished in the dusk of the world, so clean, so vast, so quiet.

To put it differently, this silence is music without music, that is, the locus of the birth of music (piping of men), which joyously serves this “nurse of becoming,” this goddess of Muse. Yet this Muse is no music; for after all, a mere sound of nature (piping of earth), however inspiring, is no music, much less Silence (piping of heaven) that begets both. The parent is no offspring. The piping of heaven is no music but its evocative incipience, its heavenly chi. What [Pablo] Casals said in the context of music applies to life that is musical: “He goes the wrong way who does not … listen to the [silent] ‘voice’ of his artistic nature.”

IV.

It is instructive to note that there is no “Taoism” or “taoist” in the world. For the Tao of life cannot be tao-ed, that is, de-fined by cognition or expressed by conation or locution. Here any cognition must be i-gnored; the self must lose itself in self-forgetful play-full-ness. Any conation must be foregone. The Son of man has no beauty to be desired. The best one can say is “a friend of a taoist.” But even this locution is to be abandoned, seeing that there is no taoist; one can only have “friends,” one to another, and in the name of Hun T'un (in the circle that is both no circle and many a circle), “treat each other very well.”⁴²

“… [They] said to each other, ‘Who can join with others without joining with others? Who can do with others without doing with others? Who can climb up to heaven and wander in the mists, roam the infinite, and forget life forever and forever?’ [They] looked at each other and smiled … and … they became friends.”⁴² They smilingly understood, without a cognitive identification of what it is that they understood.

David Hall suggested that the Spaceship in the popular TV show, “Star Trek,” is a contemporary platonic fable; Captain Kirk represents the will, Dr. McCoy the emotion, and Mr Spock the intellect. These three main characters with 430 crews aboard a spaceship of objective technical rationality go straight out into the Space to explore. Chuang Tzu has no scheme of the self. Therefore Chuang Tzu has no compunction allowing for Plato's trichotomy scheme, and would be willing to accommodate any number of people in the spaceship.

Or perhaps, if one presses Chuang Tzu to reveal names, he might smile and say that the three main characters are Mr Humor, Mr Irony, and Miss Evocation, with other friends on board the spaceship named Metaphoric Mutuality, or better, Meandering Friend-Ship, for it does not explore, much less colonize, but merely meanders playfully. Furthermore, the spaceship itself is a Light-and-Lissome Bird,⁴³ changing itself from a big K'un fish to a big P'eng bird, which in turn become small cicadas and little doves, and then changes from Chuang Tzu to a butterfly, from a dragon to a snake, etc., all of which exhibit characteristics of mutual transmutation (wu-huz) and mutual distinction (yu-fen).⁴⁴

Such an ontophanic odyssey that preserves both an inter-change of beings and their distinctive individualities has no parallel in the Occidental imagination, not even in the contemporary scientific vision of the future. Gerald Feinberg, professor of physics at Columbia, in a manner reminiscent of the recent movie, “Black Hole,” surmized that the future of mankind may well be a merger of distinct consciousnesses into one another, even with machine—and animal—consciousnesses, as well as with the stone-being, to form the unlimited and heightened “universal consciousness.”⁴⁵ Such cosmic submerging of individual consciousnesses in cosmic rhythm of energy, completely destroys the original individual integrity of things.

In contrast, Chuang Tzu's meandering mutuality fulfills each individual being, in that they are enabled to freely “play” out various modes of being and become friends one with another. The notion of friendship is important. Friends mutually influence, support and enjoy one another. In such mutualities each one grows into oneself. Each leaves nothing to be desired, and has nothing to desire. They only “look at each other and smile.” This is a social world built on individual integrities.

Notes

1. This is a rather free rendering of chih-wei-ch'ü-wei, ch'u-wei-wu-wei, 22/84, 23/78 in A Concordance to Chuang Tzu, Harvard-Yenching Institute, Sinological Index Series, Chinese Material and Research Aids Service Center, Inc., Taipei, Taiwan, 1966. For convenience, all references henceforth to the original Chinese version of Chuang Tzu shall be to this edition.

2. Merleau-Ponty is related to Chuang Tzu as the early Heidegger is to the later. The early Heidegger investigated the structure of Dasein whereby to catch glimpses of the structure of our being-in-the-world. The later Heidegger emphasized the essence of truth as the revealment of Being in concealedness, from which Dasein's ontological forgetting is derived. Similarly, Merleau-Ponty worked his way up from analysis of perception, and was planning for a reversal of ontological perspective, when he met his untimely death. Chuang Tzu was (at least in the book) at home in the non-being in/behind the world, where he meandered at will in nonchalant joy.

3. See Hastings Center Report, VI. 1, February 1976, pp. 23-28.

4. The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu, translated by Burton Watson, Columbia University Press, 1968, p. 141; Chapter 8. All references to this work shall henceforth be abbreviated as “W[page number]”, e.g., in this case, W141.

5. Cf. W [Watson, Complete Works] 106 [“cf.” indicates my disagreements with Watson's rendering].

6. See W251, 140f., Ch.8.

7. Ch.11, especially W118; 19/61 (cf. W206), ww/82 (cf. W247).

8. 13/50, W98f; chu t'ien, 6/9; W160f.

9. W209; 51; 159f.

10. Edmund Husserl: Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, Collier-Macmillan (1931) 1962, pp. 94f., 2:19

11. In Husserl, the natural attitude (or standpoint, or simply naturalism) has two components: (1) It is characterized as that standpoint which we adopt unreflectively since our birth, that attitude with which we engage ourselves in the daily activities. It is our accustomed tendency to look upon things in a certain way without examining its validity. (2) The contents of this naturalism are: nature (or world or things therein) considered as (a) simply given, independent of us, (b) interrelated by universal causal laws, (c) external, in and for itself, out there. The present paper is interested in (1), the characterization of naturalism as a naive attitude accepted by society.

    Similarly, epoche in Husserl has two components: (1) a philosophical activity in which we (a) rid ourselves of the natural standpoint and are disengaged from commitment to unreflective attitude, (b) suspend our judgment, abstain from accepting usual assumptions concerning the world, and thus become neutral (neither assenting to nor denying) about the truths of those assumptions, (c) become reflective of what has been and is still going on in life. (2) Or it is to cut off from our consideration of all our knowledge of the world (or nature) and concentrate on our being conscious of it. The second meaning (2) leads Husserl to an idealistic turn. This paper is, again, interested in (1), the characterization of epoche as an act of disengaging oneself, suspending judgments and reflections on life's ongoings. (See Ideas, op. cit., 3:31-3, 2:19-21; “Phenomenology” essay in Encyclopedia Britannica, 14th edition; Cartesian Meditations, Martinus Nijhoff, 1960, Section 15.)

12. 2/64ff., 78ff., 6/68, 17/19f., 19/61, 28/71f.; W57f.; “wu” as verb here could perhaps be translated as “to nihilate” a la Sartre—see his Being and Nothingness.

13. 18/14, 22/9f., 23/70, 25/64. Watson consistently translated the phrase in the second sense (W191, 235, 259, 290.

14. W155; 13/50, cf. W149; W260; Chapters 8, 9, and 10.

15. Maurice Merleau-Ponty: The Prose of the World, Northewestern University Press, 1973, pp. 45f.

16. W272, 293, (299), 302; 304.

17. 16/16f. (W174); W278, Lin Yutang: The Wisdom of Laotse, Modern Library, 1948, p. 88; W288.

18. 26/40, see W301 “quarrelling;”-yi sheng 5/58, cf. W76; chu t'ien 6/9, cf. W78.

19. W36f.; (76), 132; 212, 57, 205.

20. Be it noted that this is about the so-called “early Husserl” (typically of Ideas, and possibly Cartesian Meditations), against whom the later Husserl revolted in his The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Northwestern University Press, 1970, in the name of the Lebenswelt (on which John Wild dwelt in his later years). Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Sartre, Marcel and Ricoeur (and others) continue, in their varied directions, this revolt.

21. As Watson has it.

22. W247.

23. Maurice Merleau-Ponty: The Visible and the Invisible, Northwestern University Press, 1968, p. 116. See W209 on “halfway between.”

24. W209; 83, 97, 142, 246f.

25. This is William McNaughton's translation of “Chuang Tzu” in his The Taoist Vision, University of Michigan Press, 1971, p. 27. However, the original meaning of “chuang” is “lush tall grass.” See Shuo Wen Chieh Tzu and Dai Kanwa Jiten.

26. (1) b.i., c.i.; (2) a.ii., b.ii., c.ii.; (3) a.i.

27. 2/65f. (=W45); W302.

28. (1) c.i., W302; (2) a.ii., b.ii., c.ii.; (3) b.i., d.i.; (4) a.i., d.ii.; (5) d.ii., yu.; (6) W77, 182, 198.

29. W253; 237.

30. 13/6, cf. W142; 260.

31. 3/7f., 20/7; 11/62; wu yu wu 20/7, wu wu 11/62, 20/7, yü wu hua 22/78, yi t'ien ho t'ien 19/59 (=W206); 2/60); 2/60, cf. W44.

32. Maurice Merleau - Ponty: In Praise of Philosophy, Northwestern University Press, 1963, p. 39.

33. W97, 142, 372; see the story of the Bell-Stand Maker (W205f.)

34. W203f.; W49, elaborated in W307; see Richard Rorty's interesting essay, “Keeping Philosophy Pure,” Yale Review, 1976, pp. 336-356.

35. Cf. W304; wu-wei-erh-wu-pu-wei; See an intricate dialectic among Knowledge, Do-Nothing-Say-Nothing, Wild-and-Witless and the Yellow Emperor. There is a real question as to who is the wisest. One of the obvious answers is that Knowledge, who asked in ignorance in the first place, is, for it is Knowledge who was able to judge that the Yellow Emperor Knew (W234-6).

36. W302; 269.

37. Chuang Tzu would have enjoyed jostling with Jean Piaget who saw the self growing out of game playing into moral judgment. See his The Moral Judgment of the Child, The Free Press, 1932, For precisely the reverse was true for Chuang Tzu; morality is something to be grown out of in order to play as the child.

38. 14/6, cf. W155; 19/62-64, cf. W206f.

39. Chi-hsin 12/56, for which Watson commendably translates “machine hearts” (W134); W78; 7/24, cf. W96.

40. W102; tzu wen 8/30, cf. W103. See also 4/27 (=W57f.); pu te yi 4&30, 23/71, 79, cf. W58, 260; pu ying 11/17, 24 (W116f.), 24/24, 80 (cf. W264, 274); W97; 97, 246; This is the main theme of Chuang Tzu, developed especially in the first chapter, “Hsiao Yao Yu (happy meandering)”.

41. W35, 278, 299; 302.

42. The Visible, etc., op. cit., p. 117, note 3; cf. W97; 86.

43. W93.

44. These are the two important phrases toward the end of that famous story of Chuang Tzu dreaming himself as being a butterfly, which ends that profound and metaphorical chapter on equalization of things and theories. Cf. W49.

45. Gerald Feinberg: The Prometheus Project, Doubleday Anchor, 1969, pp. 181-190.

This is a revised version of my paper presented at the Second Biennial International Conference in Chinese Philosophy, June, 1980, at College of Charleston, Charleston, South Carolina. Revisions were made in the light of criticisms offered by Professors David Hall, Roland Strader and Lik Kuen Tong, to whom I owe much gratitude.

The word “truth” in the title has no other meaning than an ordinary one of “truth of things as they really are,” as in the phrase, “the moment of truth,” although the emphasis is more neutral or even positive than those gloomy breakdowns, impasses or contradictions which jolt us into seeing the world as it is. Cf. W. M. Macomber: The Anatomy of Disillusion, Northwestern University Press, 1967, pp. 44-51.