Why wuwei?
What does the ancient Daoist- Sagehood notion of wuwei
have to do with ontological design for back loop realities?
The primary architect of wuwei as a design principle for harmonius living, was Laozi. Writing in the Daodejing (Classic of the Way and Virtue) Laozi critiqued the corruption that was at the heart of a society that he attributed directly to Confucianism itself. In Effortless Action, Edward Singerland writes:
[Laozi singled out] the sort of knowledge acquisition and acculturation advocated by Confucious--- as the main factor contributing to the fallen state of human beings.
In many ways similar to the Socratic virtue ethics that the Greeks introduced in the West, the great Confucian project was to rectify the names and isolate the virtues upon which the great society was to be built. This practice of naming and isolating greatly disturbed the Daoists (Ch’an Buddhists) who understood that to live in harmony with nature by following her principles (returning to the beloved mother), was the highest virtue, and in the natural state, it was effortless. This echos Alexander’s notion of conscious versus unconscious process for, according to Laozi, prior to naming, the people were unconsciously virtuous, afterwards, the people lacked virtue. The situation he addresses is how to reverse the process, such that we become spontaneously virtuous again, following the intelligence of the Dao? According to Laozi, Singerland writes, the truly virtuous “participate in public life and perform virtuous acts, but do so out of spontaneous inclination rather than any forced sense of duty, and do not dwell upon the goodness of their own acts.”
The single most important principle in wuweidao is that the Dao, or Nature, is self-arising, self-resolving, and simply so-of-itself, without effort. It is the dynamic dance of substance (jing, space) and energy (qi, time) that is found in all forms of life.
The heart of wuwei are the three fundamental principles: 1) harmony, 2) coherence, 3) virtue. The foundation of Sagehood is the absolute certainty, that the universe--- that reality itself abides by these three principles. Notice how nicely these map onto the 3 axes of the self --- namely, congruence, coherence, and conviction. The self is a macrocosm of the cosmological. This is the core argument of wuwei --- the self, by allowing the cosmological principles to flow through itself, generates harmony, coherence and virtue effortlessly.
These are forces that we cannot control. The key is to allow them to flow through/as you. To be nature, as nature has designed you as nature itself. Not part of nature --- not even that implication of separation--- but nature yourself.
Wuwei means that the designer becomes the handmaiden of Nature: the Supreme Designer. Which brings us to the question:
What is the Supreme Design that is harmonious, coherent
and virtuous in back-loop realities?
This is at heart, an ethical question. Edward Singerland writes, in his chapter on Effortless Attention called Toward an Empirically Responsible Ethics, that …
… the importance in everyday human cognition of effortless attention and action suggests that virtue ethics, a model of ethics characteristic of many world traditions (including pre-Enlightenment Europe), might be preferable to deontology and utilitarianism both descriptively and normatively. 1
Unlike these approaches, Singerland will propose an ethical system that is based on perception, attention and tacit know-how. He writes:
Even such quotidian achievements as ordinary language know-how and fast and frugal heuristics, guided by embodied and mostly unconscious emotional reactions to our environment. Perception is not concerned primarily with representation but rather with action, and the concepts we aquire from interacting with the world seem to be based primarily upon imagery and sensorimotor schemas. Concepts are therefore not amodal, abstract, and propositional, but perception and body-based. Even when dealing with “abstract” concepts or complicated, novel situations, somatic knowledge appears to play a fundamental role.
Imagination and metaphor also play a key role in moral knowledge --- we grasp the meaning of a particular situation and evaluate it based upon a set of metaphorical relations that we employ to picture the situation in familiar terms. Wuwei itself is based on the metaphor of spontaneous, unimpeded, naturally flowing water (as opposed to a human engineered irrigation) --- these two different metaphors were the basis of the Daoist argument of wuwei as virtue, and the Confucian claim that virtue depended on cultured, disciplined effort.
Quoting Mark Johnson, Singerland writes:
What this means is that moral education will involve training individuals--- explicitly or implicitly--- to develop more and more sophisticated imagistic models, as well as the ability to extend them in a consistent manner. As Johnson explains, in any kind of reasonably complex situation, “moral reasoning cannot consist meremly in the rational unpacking of a determinate concept. Instead it requires imaginative extensions to non-prototypical cases.
Here I would like to make the distinction between metaphor and direct analogy. Metaphor is a form of representational mapping, whereas analogies are functional mappings. Metaphors map images together to highlight qualities or semantic resonance --- time is like a thief. By contrast, analogies emphasize either the structural or dynamic homology between systems, drawing on and establishing relational or operational equivalence--- the heart is like a circulation pump.
The difference is far from trivial when it comes to “moral imagination.” Metaphors seem to be too slippery to handle moral insight--- for this we need to discover the exact or precise analogous situation, wherein the moral choice is easy, to the novel situation where we face a non-prototypical situation and the moral choice is more ambiguous.
Ambiguity, I would say, is the bio-marker that one has not yet found a good-enough analogy, a good-enough functional mapping. This echoes (but also clarifies) Simone Weil’s claim that whenever and wherever a person experiences moral ambiguities, they are not capable of selecting *the *right choice, since, as she argued, moral choice is a matter of directly perceiving the moral act. I am extending this rather controversial statement, which can cater to the true moral character as well as to the narcissistic sociopath--- to the necessity of imagining an adequate, equivalent analogous situation which generates true insight.
Let’s go back to the metaphors of the unimpeded flowing rivers versus the engineered irrigation system. It is easy to see that they will map on different functional analogies, and hence do not solve the riddle.
In moral decision-making, an adequate analogy comes with a somatic marker--- the unconscious, visceral normative weights that we have been calling “bio-marker.” “In any given situation,” Singerland writes, “the number of theoretically possible courses of action is effectively infinite, and the human mind is obviously not capable of running simultaneous analyses of all of them at once.”
What we are talking about here, is the cultivation of a vernacular of functional analogies, through the continuous mindful observation of reality, especially attending to natural systems, aka, The Supreme Designer.
Singerland calls for “a model of ethics generally referred to as virtue ethics---
the dominant model of ethics in many world cultures for thousand of years and one that relies much less on cognitive control than modern Western ethical theories
One might say that the very essence of virtue ethics is a suspicion of the power of cognitive control and a consequent desire to get at and reshape the vast iceberg of human cognition that lies beneath the surface of active consciousness.
One of the best ways to understand the power of insight in service of moral choice, is in making the distinction between ego-centric and allocentric perceptual modes. If one is evaluating an ethical choice from an eog-centric perspective, one will simply choose a good metaphor that reprsents one’s self in the equation. Confucious preferred disciplined society, Laozi eschewed it for the wildness within. Therefore, they chose apt metaphors that mapped onto their own “measuring instruments.” Or is it more than that? Did either Confucious or Laozi, have a profound insight into the functional analogy between reality and the sage?
Translating Laozi from the Daodejing’s first chapter, Liu Ming writes:
When we are in conflict with our situation, we generate basic confusion and discomfort. If we assume from this discomfort that there is a need to “quell” or “overcome” the conflict, we generate desire. In this case, desire enlists the compulsion to concentrate our qi. When we misinterpret our situation, we fell we must speed up of strategize some kind of “release” or transformation. This sort of reaction can become any number of habitual compulsions, but all of them are basically fruitless because the problem or conflict we see is fundamentally a misapprehension of our situation. All of the claustrophobic feelings of discomfort are actually arising in unlimited space.2
Our true situation is not a dilemma in need of correcting at all.
https://www.moralmachine.net/\ http://ethicsdilemma.ethics-e-learning.com/main-menu\ https://quandarygame.org/play
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Further Resources
Footnotes
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Deontology is a rule-based approach where ethical actions are guided by a hierarchy of maxims; right and wrong depend on where the particular maxim lies on the hierarchy. For example, “do not lie” is lower on the rule-hierarchy than “do not kill” therefore it is ethical to lie in order to save a life. By contrast, utilitarianism proposes that every situation can be presented unproblematically through a kind of computation of costs and benefits --- we simply do the math to compute the right course of action. ↩
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For the relationship between effortlessness, claustrophobia and spaciousness as definitions of Sagehood, see Visual Meditation - The Wisdom Stack ↩