Two characteristics stand out when considering the early Chinese understanding of Sagehood: wu-wei and the Sages of Old.
In response to the debates between the Daoists who followed Laozi and quoted the Daodejing and the neo-Confucians, who followed Mencius and quoted the Analects, Zhuangzi 1 proposed a radical (re)turn toward the wisdom of the ancients. Zhuangzi’s rhetoric is based on a poignant contrast between the foolishness of contemporary people with the wisdom of the sages of old. Singerland 2 translates Zhuangzi’s description of both the highest form of knowledge, and the various stages in the gradual decline (fallenness) of men:
The knowledge of the ancients really got somewhere. How far did it get? These were those who believed that there had never even been things in the worlds---they reached the highest, most exhaustive form of knowledge. Nothing can be added to it. Below them were those who believed that there were boundaries but that there had never been ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ The glorification of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ is what caused the Way to be harmed, and that which caused the Way to be harmed also caused love to become complete.
As Singerland explains, when Zhuangzi says “love becomes complete” he is claiming that “the natural, spontaneous caring of people for one another (a manifestation of the Dao) became disrupted, “love” became a conscious issue and people began making a show of “benevolence” [and hence created the virtues, a philosophy of virtue-ethics]”
There are numerous references to the ancient sages as having almost unfathomable level of wisdom, a superiority so vast, it eventually led to the question of whether Sagehood was attainable by a human, and the more neo-Confucian understanding of Sagehood as a spiritual ideal. Therefore the neo-Confucians replaced sagehood with various litanies of virtues that human could pursue and should perform. I am proposing a new interpretation of Zhuangzi’s ancient sages. Zhuangzi writes that the True Person (the sage of old)
has the physical form of a human being but lacks the human essence. Because he has the form of a human, he flocks together with other people. Lacking the human essence, though, right and wrong cannot get to his true self.
In other words, it is exactly that which distinguishes the human being from other living beings (humans characteristic ‘essence’) the sage learns to do without.
What are we to make of Zhuangzi’s commentaries? He is pointing us to a time when humans did not have their chracteristic human essence, of “righting” and “wronging” things. He is warning us that there is already judgement in the very naming of things, and this is why the Dao that is named is not the true Dao. And yet, he is also reminding us that this “evaluative naming” is not only the central, defining characteristic of human, but also the key characteristic that needs to be overcome, in order to achieve wu-wei (non-doing action). For Zhuangzi, therefore, this, wu-wei, is the central characteristic of the Sages of Old.
I want to propose that, centuries before Darwin, Zhuangzi was pointing to the deeper, natural processes that created humans. Instead of thinking of these processes as natural laws, as Darwin did, he positied an earlier society of ancient sages who developed their capacities simply by doing nothing. The Sages of Old, had the intelligence of the Dao, because they were nothing but, did nothing more than, express the Dao’s own process.
For me, referring to The Sages of Old, is a pre-modern way to point to the evolutionary history of our species. Those that learned how to walk on two feet, those that learned to use tools and to shape materials into new tools, those that learned how to speak – they are the Sages of Old . What we notice is that these ancestral sages actually did nothing by themselves to learn how to do these things. And today, we still don’t really know humans came to do these things. We inherit these abilities as pre-egoic potentials of the core self. In childhood, each of us capitulates the entire evolutionary journey in compressed time – we learn to walk upright, we learn to manipulate object, to use tools and play instruments, we learn to speak – we don’t know how to do it before hand, or how we came to do it, even afterwards, – and yet they are things we learned to do. This is the wu-wei (active, not-doing) that Zhuangzi is pointing to. It is not charactersitic of the human ‘essence’ because it is a pre-egoic potential, a recapitulation of the Dao in a fractal compression of time. It is the individuation of evolutionary species into the individual organism.
Zhuangzi is saying that everything that is true and wise unfolds behind the scenes, as it were, in this not-doing way. While everything that is false or foolish is that which we characteristically pursue with ever-increasing effort. We characteristically name things judgmentally, ammending each moment and each event with a positive or negative valence, naming each action right or wrong…and go on to create societal rules to protect the rights and right the wrongs. This gives humans their “charactersitically human essence” and gives rise to civilization which directs human activities away from the Dao.
To stay coherent with Zhuangzi’s message, we must resist “wrong-ing” civilization and its activities and pursuits, while “right-ing” the alternative path of wu-wei.This then is why Zhuangzi describes the Sage as “not-human.” When Zhuangzi’s rhetorical friend Huizi asked him ” Can a person really be without the human essence?” Zhuangzi replied, “Yes.” 3
Huizi: “But a human without the essence of a human – how can you still call him a human?
Zhuangzi: “What I am refering to as ‘essence’ is making distinctions of ‘right’ and ‘wrong.’ So when I talk about ‘lacking the essence’ what I am referring to is a person not allowing likes and dislikes to get inside and harm his true self. He is constant in following the natural and doesn’t try to help life along.”
The upshot therefore is that the Sage does not turn back the tide of civilization, but they escape its discontents, and as a result function as a kind of exemplaryness for the people. We might say the Sage is a living archetype, or, to use Bhaskar’s term, a concrete universal – the transcendent ideal as living, immanent wonder. At bottom, wu-wei is identified as genuine happiness:
Now, as for what ordinary people do and what they find happiness in, I don’t know whether such happiness is in the end really happiness or not. I look at what ordinary peple find happiness in – what the masses all flock together to pursue, racing after it as thought the couldn’t stop – and I don’t really know whether those who say they are happy are really happy or not. In the end, is there really happiness or isn’t there?
I take wu-wei to be genuine happiness, even thoough it is something ordinary people think very bitter. Hence the saying “Ultimate happiness is without happiness; ultimate acclaim is not acclaimed.” What the world takes to be right and wrong can never be settled. 4 Nonetheless, wu-wei can be used to settle right-and-wrong.5 When it comes to attaining ultimate happiness and invigorating the self, only wu-wei can get you close.
Genuine happiness, therefore too, is part of our inheritance. This point, when deeply held, is a clear marker of Sagehood. And yet, here we are, distanced from that inheritance, and the path back is overgrown with thickets, weeds, and trash. Perhaps we can clear that path backwards. Where does it lead? For me it means tracing that path back to nature – our original nature, where the word ‘nature’ means the same as when we look out over a resplendent valley, or seascape, or humble urban garden with a single busy bee and say “Nature!” without naming it. 6
Further Resources
Footnotes
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It is probably more correct to think of The Zhuangzi as a collection of authors, bot poets and philosophers, who shared a common sense of urgency to re-imagine the central notions of Daoist thought. ↩
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Again, relying on Edward Singerland book Effortless Action for much of the content in this article. ↩
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This and the following dialogue is excerpted from Singerland’s book Effortless Action p. 181 ↩
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This is consistent with Hartshorne’s notion of incommensurable goods in the animal realm, and my extension of that to the notion of incommensurable values in the human realm. Furthermore, incommensurability is a feature not a bug, of all complex living systems. If you settled all the disputes, you would have a dead blob. Even the fundmental particles of physics can be understood as having incommensurable properties such as electron spin and the Pauli exclusion principle, to name just two of many. ↩
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IOW, settle the entire process of trying to settle. ↩