The Ethical Foundations of Early Daoism

Zhuangzi's Unique Moral Vision

Jung H. Lee

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137384867
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The Ethical Foundations of Early Daoism: Zhuangzi's Unique Moral Vision argues that we can read early Daoist texts as works of moral philosophy that speak to perennial concerns about the well-lived life in the context of the Way. Lee argues that we can interpret early Daoism as an ethics of attunement.

CHAPTER 1

DAOISM AND “MORALITY”

In Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad, Michael Walzer suggests that there are “two different but interrelated forms of moral argument—a way of talking among ourselves, here at home, about the thickness of our own history and culture … and a way of talking to people abroad, across different cultures, about the thinner life we can have in common.”¹ “Thin” arguments aspire toward the universal, the abstract, the nominal, while “thick” arguments are “richly referential, culturally resonant, locked into a locally established symbolic system or network of meanings.”² In a comparative context, this distinction would presumably enable participants across different cultures to engage in discussions about “thin” concepts like “freedom” or “justice” without dismissing thicker descriptions of particular, local moralities. But what if there are no analogous terms or concept clusters in the native language to correspond to the organizing category?

In a worst case scenario, the native tradition will either be reduced to the corresponding category or be judged as lacking in some way to the extent that it does not approximate the category in question. We can readily discern this dynamic in much of the nineteenth-century apologetic scholarship of Protestant missionaries to China who would appraise a tradition like Confucianism based on its proximity to Christianity and to concepts like God, faith, and salvation. Thus, in Confucianism in Relation to Christianity, James Legge writes that Confucianism falls short of Christianity because it does not begin from the foundational notion of agape and that whatever value Confucianism may have stems from its anticipation of the Gospels.³ The interpretive failure here is twofold: not only does this kind of reductionism distort the ideas under examination but it also marginalizes or completely elides other concepts that seemingly do not reflect the ideological assumptions of the interpreter. Although Legge was considered “progressive” in regard to his reading of ancient Chinese texts, uttering at one point that a world ordered by Confucian principles would be a “beautiful world,” it is not difficult to imagine just how easily comparative inquiry can devolve into cultural reductionism if we uncritically apply concepts that do not reflect the fundamental conceptual orientations of a tradition and fail to appreciate the genuine differences between traditions. Beyond obvious cases of cultural imperialism and Orientalism, what if our “thin” concepts actually betray thicker notions that can be traced to culturally specific contexts and histories?⁴ In other words, what about those cases where our “thin” concepts appear to be thinner than they are precisely because of their familiarity as “universal” categories of thought? Does “morality” qualify as a thin concept, applicable to diverse cultural contexts, or does it betray something thicker?

This chapter ventures an answer to this set of questions against the backdrop of early Daoism, a tradition that “remains a fascinating and ironically meaningful imaginary construct precisely because it resists all easy Western definitions and essentializing classifications,”⁵ including “morality.” The fascination that Daoism exerts on the Occident stems not only from our own Orientalizing logic of representation (i.e., seeing Daoism as “quietistic,” “mysterious,” “other-worldly”), but also, in large part, from forces within Chinese intellectual history, most notably the influence of the Confucian literati, which have conspired to confirm our exotic presuppositions by painting Daoism in the following terms: “Daoism is a religion of hermits in a picturesque mountain setting, living in harmony with the universe, endowed with mysterious powers and a legendary longevity acquired by means of a diet taught and tested over millennia.”⁶

Although “eclectic misrepresentations” such as this do not seem to have much purchase in contemporary Daoist studies, the anxiety of its influence can still be felt in the perplexity that scholars seem to exhibit when addressing the moral dimensions of early Daoist thought.⁷ To take a case in point, Herlee G. Creel suggests that “there is not, in this philosophy [Daoism], a basis for any very positive action … Morally, Daoist philosophy is completely indifferent … it is quite lacking in any practical program.”⁸ While Creel’s blindness to the moral dimensions of early Daoism can be traced, in part, to the lingering legacy of the Victorian invention of Daoism,⁹ his oversight becomes much more intelligible, even reasonable, if we understand Creel as speaking a particular moral language—the language of modern Anglo-American moral philosophy.

This chapter begins by providing an outline of the conceptual features of “morality” as it is currently understood in the discourse of Anglo-American moral philosophy and illustrating the reach of its influence in contemporary interpretations of Daoist ethics. I argue that the specter of “morality” leads scholars to unwittingly finesse early Daoism into a form of “morality” (e.g., altruism, Kantian ethics) or, less obviously, to suggest that in fact early Daoism does not possess a moral sensibility or is engaged in another project altogether (e.g., philosophy of language). The chapter concludes by suggesting that the normative dimensions of early Daoism can only be appreciated when we appeal to a kind of methodological charity where we not only (1) maximize the sense of the text or subject’s sayings but also (2) privilege the categories of thought that are native to the text’s or speaker’s lexicon. This methodological principle should help us to avoid instances of cultural imperialism or Orientalism where we appraise a non-Western tradition on the basis of concept clusters that are endemic to the West. I argue that we can appreciate the normative dimensions of a tradition like early Daoism only when we become aware of the culturally specific ways that we define the realm of ethics and how seemingly universal categories like “morality” betray particular ideological and philosophical prejudices.

HOW SHOULD ONE LIVE?

According to Bernard Williams, our conception of “morality” represents a particular development of the ethical within Western culture that forms the “outlook, or, incoherently, part of the outlook of almost all of us”:

Morality is distinguished by the special notion of obligation it uses, and by the significance it gives to it … In the morality system, moral obligation is expressed in one especially important kind of deliberative conclusion—a conclusion that is directed toward what to do, governed by moral reasons, and concerned with a particular situation … there is a pressure within the morality system to represent every consideration that goes into a deliberation and yields a particular obligation as being itself a general obligation.¹⁰

We need not go any further than ancient Greek to see that what our term “morality” denotes does not closely correspond to any one term or concept. As Elizabeth Anscombe once famously noted,

Anyone who has read Aristotle’s Ethics and has also read modern moral philosophy must have been struck by the great contrasts between them. The concepts which are prominent among the moderns seem to be lacking, or at any rate buried or far in the background, in Aristotle. Most noticeably, the term ‘moral’ itself … just doesn’t seem to fit, in its modern sense, into an account of Aristotelian ethics.¹¹

Although given the most penetrating expression by Kant, “morality”¹² does not designate one determinate set of ethical thoughts but encompasses a wide range of ethical outlooks that, beyond the distinctive significance bestowed upon the notion of obligation, seem to adhere to the following general characteristics:

(1) Moral reasons form a distinct kind that can be clearly distinguished from nonmoral reasons in other spheres of life.

(2) “Morality” demands that we identify, systematize, and formalize out of our moral thinking certain “methods” or procedures for coming to conclusions, especially about dilemmatic situations.

(3) Moral reasons either override or silence other reasons.

(4) Moral obligation is inescapable, regardless of the circumstances, one’s psychological health, or other nonmoral demands that may weigh on you.¹³

As Charles Taylor points out, this understanding of “morality,” at least within the recent memory of Western moral philosophy, has tended “to occlude or exclude questions about what it is good to be or what it is good to love. The focus is on obligatory action, which means it turns away from issues in which obligation is not really the issue, as well as those where not just actions but ways of life or ways of being are what we have to weigh.”¹⁴ According to Taylor, two developments within the history of Western thought have contributed to the narrowing of morality: first, the post-Renaissance affirmation of the “ordinary life,” especially during the Reformation, tended to reinforce Christian conceptions of charity and benevolence by locating the center of social gravity in ordinary living, the family, and production, rather than in “higher” activities such as contemplation or the arts. Accordingly, the moral sensibility that accompanied this outlook tended to be informed by issues of practical benevolence and equality, emphasizing either more justice (Kantians) or benevolence (Utilitarians). The second development within Western intellectual culture that contributed to the narrowing of morality can be traced to the evolution of what Taylor calls “disengaged reason,” or reasoning that can turn on its own proceedings and examine them for accuracy and reliability. This Cartesian attitude puts the trust of the cognizer in a method or a procedure of operation, and it is this dependence on method that Taylor discerns in contemporary “single-term moralities” that reduce moral reasoning to a calculus of instrumental reason.

The pervasiveness of this understanding of “morality” as a special system of obligations can be discerned in the manner in which ethicists seem to conflate “morality” with the entire domain of the ethical. Consider the following “general idea of a morality” sketched by Alan Gewirth:

A morality may be defined as a set of rules or directives for actions and institutions, especially as these are held to support or uphold what are taken to be the most impor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Conventions and Romanization
• Introduction
• 1. Daoism and “Morality”
• 2. Hearing the Silent Harmony: Revisioning Ethics in the Zhuangzi
• 3. Travelers on the Way: Friendship in the Zhuangzi
• 4. The Preservation of the Way: Rights, Community, and Social Ethics in the Zhuangzi
• 5. The Great Returning: Death and Transformation in the Zhuangzi
• 6. Inwardly a Sage, Outwardly a King: The Way as Ruler
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index