Introduction

 
During the Han period Confucianism dominated the intellectual scene, even if it was in a form that we would consider to be significantly corrupted by the inclusion of popular metaphysical notions. It enjoyed official backing as the ideology considered most likely to legitimise the new imperial style of rule. Unfortunately, this official status had a stultifying effect upon the philosophy, as any developments therein had now to be judged by criteria of imperial acceptability. Moreover, it developed an orthodox style largely consisting of scholarly commentaries on the older texts. Given that the possibilities of interpretation were restricted by its official status, there was a tendency for these commentaries to become displays of mere erudition without significant content.

With the decline of the Han imperial power and the rise of the new dynasties of Wei (220–265) and Jin (265–420) there was a reaction against the old ideology and new approaches to the Dao were championed. There was no rejection of Confucius himself who continued to be respected as the greatest sage, but new interpretations of the old Confucian texts were proposed in the light of claims for the Dao inspired by the Yijing and by the classical Daoist texts Laozi and Zhuangzi. Because of the centrality of these Daoist texts in the new thinking it is usual for us now to call the new movement Neotaoism.

At the time however, it was known as xuanxue,(玄学) which probably means something like ‘dark learning.’ though the translation is disputed and may have been intended to indicate ‘obscure’ or ‘abstruse’ learning. It does seem like the term was not always intended as a compliment  At about that time there was a popular pastime amongst the literate classes called qīngtán (倾谈,) or ‘pure conversation’ in which abstract – and practically irrelevant – matters were discussed in a stylized and detached fashion. The practice had arisen under the later Han as a ‘literary’ outlet when discussion of actually important matters proved hazardous. With their new freedom, Neotaoists adopted a style of philosophizing somewhat different from the former official style, possibly influenced by this Pure Conversation. Noting the similarities in style critics accused xuanxue of being similarly vacuous in content.

They may not have been entirely unjustified in this, much of it does seem to be a little ‘deep,’ but we shall see that there is some valuable content in the Dark Learning. In this lecture and the next we shall concern ourselves with two significant parts of this content: first, metaphysical speculations motivated by certain problems in the Daoist conception of the Dao that are quite alien to classical Confucianism but prepare the ground for the acceptance of Buddhism; and second, the integration of the Confucian virtues into a Taoist-flavoured world-view centred on ‘naturalness.’

The Dao is Not

You may recall that some Taoists had quickly realised that their claims about the Dao and what the Dao required were paradoxical. On the one hand, they said, the Dao was supposed to be a guide to behaviour (it is the ‘Way’ of the world after all,) while on the other hand it was supposed to tell us that no guides to behaviour were possible. In short: the one rule to follow is that no rules should be followed. This is both a logical and a metaphysical problem for those who would take the Dao seriously.

i.                     A Semantic Problem

Considered as a semantic problem, we observed at the time that it is similar to the so-called Liar Paradox where one gets into a terrible muddle in trying to interpret the sentence ‘This sentence is false.’ If that sentence is true then it’s true that ‘this sentence is false’ so the sentence is false, which means it isn’t true, which means it’s false which is just what it said so it’s true, and so on. Here, however, a more relevant comparison would be to the problem faced by extreme skeptics. In the classical world there were schools of skeptics who believed that knowledge was not possible, but realised that they couldn’t express this belief by saying that ‘we can know nothing’ because would itself be a claim to knowledge. If we know that we know nothing, then knowledge is not impossible and indeed we do know something and so we don’t know nothing. Instead, such skeptics simply refused to make any positive knowledge claims and in response to anyone else’s claim would simply say that we don’t know that because of such and such reasons. (In fact, the main occupation of the skeptics was skepsis or ‘inquiry,’ specifically into the ways in which claims can be doubted – hence their name, of course.) Similarly, Daoists could refuse to say explicitly that ‘no rules should be followed’ but could argue that any particular rule was one that should not be followed.

ii.                   A Metaphysical Problem

Considered as a metaphysical problem, however, that response is inadequate. The Dao, you’ll recall is supposed to be a real thing – an observed fact about the world and not just a term in a statement – with the two characteristics that (1) it is a rule that we have to follow and that (2) it says we should follow no rules. The Dao that could satisfy those statements would therefore be a real thing, and self-contradictory; and thus, apparently, not a real thing. Now, the original concerns of the Daoist philosophers were purely ethical, so there was even less interest then in pursuing this metaphysical paradox than in pursuing the logical one, but, as we have seen, the question of how the world was actually constituted had become prominent during the Han period, so that this paradox of the nature of Dao’s existence could not now be ignored.

The first lines of the Laozi suggested the response to this. You’ll remember that there it was said that

                The way that can be spoken of

                is not the constant way;

                The name that can be named

                is not the constant name.[1]

Therefore, some claimed that the Dao, though it was undoubtedly real, was such that it could only be discussed in negative terms: that is, you can say that the Dao is not this and the Dao is not that but you can never say that the Dao is this or the Dao is that. You can’t even say that the Dao is either this or not this. Paradoxes can only arise when you are able to make contrasting positive and negative claims, so this is at least some sort of solution to the problem – though whether it is a reasonable or rational solution is open to doubt.

In the West we have seen philosophers resort to this approach, known as the via negativa, when faced with the problem of making sense of the concept of God, who is supposed to be an infinite being beyond the capacity of finite beings like ourselves to understand. Any terms that we might use to characterize God are necessarily understood by us in finite and limited ways and are therefore not true of Him – or at least, not true in the only ways that we can understand. Thus it can only be said of Him that He is not this or is not that. So we find St Augustine speaking of God in a way very similar to the way the DDJ spoke of the Dao:

If you comprehend, it is not God. If you are able to comprehend, it is because you mistook something else for God.[2]

Arguments or observations like this concerning God naturally suggest that one cannot even claim that God exists, since that is a positive claim about God and therefore inappropriate, so that it is better to say that God does not exist. In the 10^th C, for example, Eriugena, a brilliant but over-excitable thinker, said that “Literally, God is not, because He transcends being.”[3] And in modern times Paul Tillich has also argued that we should not say God exists, because existing is something that a ‘thing’ does, and God is not like that.[4] In the Christian world this remains ‘unorthodox,’ but the corresponding claim concerning the Dao was supported by the Neotaoists who expressed this difficult view in the claim that Dao was wu (无.) or ‘Nothing.’

Being Arising From Non-Being
 

A resolution like this, however, makes the effectiveness of the Dao rather problematic, particularly with respect to the claims that the Dao is the origin of everything. In what follows we shall see how several important thinkers addressed the problems which then arose.

i.                     He Yan: The Fullness of Nothingness

The first problem is how creation by the Dao is possible at all. Interestingly, there is again an analogy from Western philosophy. Those who followed the via negativa toward God to the point that His very existence could not be asserted also needed to explain how a non-existent God could be the creator of all the existing things. Eriugena again, addressed this point by observing that God, not being finite, was such that nothing might be outside Himself, because anything outside God would be something that God did not contain – which is to say that it would be beyond the bounds of God – which is impossible. Therefore God contains everything. In effect, creation for God is very different from creation for finite creatures. For God all that is required for creation out of nothing (ex nihilo) is a simple manifestation of His essence – His no-thingness.

…the Creative nature permits nothing outside itself because outside it nothing can be, yet everything which it has created and creates it contains within itself, but in such a way that it itself is other, because it is super-essential, than what it creates within itself.[1]

 It is certainly possible to feel uneasy about this sort of argument, and to wonder in what way nothingness can really be said to contain anything (let alone everything) even in potentia, but its appeal to those sympathetic to the apophatic method is confirmed by the fact that essentially the same solution was adopted by the Neotaoists who were faced with the identical problem that the Dao, which they had established was ‘nothing,’ was at the same time supposedly the origin or first cause of everything.

                The nameless was the beginning of heaven and earth;

                The named was the mother of the myriad creatures,[2]

They found their answer in the doctrine that the Dao was complete and contained all that was.

                There was something undefined and complete, coming into existence before Heaven and Earth.

…

I do not know its name, and I give it the designation of the Dao[3]

Containing all that there was, the Dao could through simple differentiation bring into being all the myriad things. In particular it could bring into being the qi. This is explained by He Yan (何晏, ca. 207–249,) in his essay the Dao Lun (‘Critique of the Way:’)

[It] is clear that the Dao is complete. Thus, it can bring forth sounds and echoes; generate qi energies and things; establish form and spirit; and illuminate light and shadows.

According to the Yinyang cosmology, which continued to be widely accepted, all things are constructed by the differentiation of yin and yang forms of qi. We noted in an earlier lecture, for example, that in the Huainanzi the process of alternation between yin and yang is described as the driver of all creation and destruction. There it was said:

When heaven and earth were formed, they divided into yin and yang. Yang is generated from yin and yin is generated from yang. Yin and yang mutually alternate which makes four fields penetrate. Sometimes there is life, sometimes there is death, that brings the myriad things to completion.[4]

Thus it was ‘established’ that the creation of something from nothingness was possible.

ii.                   Wang Bi: Non-Being as the Necessary Ground of Being

An alternative view of the relationship between nothingness and existence was proposed by Wang Bi (226-249,) a brilliant younger contemporary of He Yan. Wang Bi wrote commentaries on the Daodejing, the I jing, and the Analects, and came up with novel and convincing interpretations which quickly became standard. His edition of the Daodejing was the best available until recent scholarship working with recovered ancient texts superseded his work. These achievements are pretty impressive for someone who died at the age of 23. The version of the relationship of Being, Non-Being, and Dao that is attributed to him in what follows is an interpretation of his commentary on the Laozi; particularly of c. 25.[5]

Wang seems to have had doubts about the coherence of a claim that nothingness contains all of creation. To him it seemed clear that if something contained X then it must be of the same general kind as X. Chinese philosophy did not talk of substances in the Aristotelian fashion, but we can imagine that something like that was in Wang’s mind: something that contains material substance must in itself be at least partially of material substance, and something that contained spiritual substance must in itself be at least partially of spiritual substance, and so on. Similarly something that contained existent things – aspects of Being – as the Dao/nothingness was said to do, must itself partake at least partially of Being. So Non-Being would have to be partially Being.

This makes the origin of Being (i.e. the creation of the world) a problem again, because if you want to discover the ground of Being and you say that it is in the Dao, and then you say that that is possible because the Dao partakes of Being, then you are left claiming that the origin of Being (in the world) is in Being (in nothingness,) which doesn’t help much because you then have to ask the origin of that Being. This is to invite an infinite regress of the sort that convinced Aristotle, for example, that the world had to be eternal. In Aristotle’s argument he noted that whenever we see a thing created it is created on the basis of something that already exists – we never see creation ex nihilo – therefore the world, if it were to have been created, would have had to have been created on the basis of something prior, which would mean that there was a world (perhaps of a different sort, but a world nonetheless) prior to the creation of the world. Then the explanation of the creation of that world would require yet a prior world and so on. Since the assumption that the world was created leads to an infinite regress, it follows that the world was not created; yet the world exists, so it follows that the world is eternal.[6]

If Wang Bi had similarly concluded that the world was eternal there would still remain the problem of explaining what was meant by the claim that Being arose from Dao/Non-Being. Wang’s solution was to take the precedence of Being as a logical or metaphysical precedence rather than a physical or cosmological one. If Being were to be grounded on anything at all – and it must have some grounding since it is there and there needs to be a reason for its being there – then it would have to be something other than Being in order not to invite the infinite regress. That which is other than Being can only be Non-Being. Thus Non-Being is the necessary ground for Being.

iii.                 Guo Xiang: Self-Transformation

However, even amongst those who accepted that the ten thousand things (萬物, wanwu ) arose from Dao, not everyone was happy with the ideas that Dao was nothing, and that the ten thousand things emerged from nothingness, and that Being arose from Non-Being. In particular, Guo Xiang (252 –312) was such a scholar. Guo is the editor responsible for the shape of the Zhuangzi as it has come down to us, and for an influential commentary attached to that text. There is an argument about how his work is related to the work of the earlier commentator Xiang Xiu (向秀,) with some even in ancient times accusing him of plagiarism. That’s a controversy which needn’t concern us just now.

Guo accepted that any talk of a Creator of things or of a thing prior to Creation  being responsible for Creation simply pushed the real question of the possibility of existence onto that Creator or that thing preceding creation. One might conclude from that that ‘nothing’ preceded Creation, but he could not accept either that ‘nothing’ could be the generating principle of Creation. Guo was understandably convinced that all talk of Being being produced by Non-Being was nonsensical in so far as we had the normal understanding of those terms. This, he thought left only one possibility.

In existence what is prior to things? We say that the yin and yang are prior to things. But the yin and yang are themselves things; what then are prior to the yin and yang? We may say that ziran (自然, Nature) is prior to things. But ziran is simply the naturalness of things. Or we may say that the Dao is prior to things. But the Dao is nothing. Since it is nothing, how can it be prior to things? We do not know what is prior to things, yet things are continuously produced. This shows that things are spontaneously what they are. There is no Creator of things[7]

Elsewhere he says a little more about this business of things being just what they are:

Because wu [Non-Being] is not Being, it cannot produce Being. Prior to the coming to be of Being, it cannot produce other beings. In that case, then, who or what brought about the birth of Being? [Answer:] Beings are spontaneously self-generated[8]

So, something other than the things of the world cannot be the origin of the things of the world, and ‘nothing’ cannot be the origin of those things, so the origin of the things of the world can only be attributed to those very same things. This he calls self-transformation (獨化, du hua) and he thinks that by recognising it we have solved the problem of Being. Quite how it is supposed to solve it is a little unclear, however, because it’s equally hard to see how a thing can bring itself into being from nothingness as to see how nothing can bring it into being.

We are given a clue to a possible interpretation in the further statement that

Not only is it the case that Non-Being cannot become Being, but Being cannot become Non-Being. Though Being may change in thousands of ways, it cannot change itself into Non-Being. Therefore there is no time when there is no Being. Being eternally exists.[9]

So the world – the collection of all the things in the world – is eternal. You’ll recall, no doubt, that this is exactly the conclusion that Aristotle reached and by just the same reasoning. In this case it indicates that talk of coming into Being or the grounds of Being are not to be confused with talk of a real ‘creation’ ex nihilo. At best it can only be said that it offers a logical solution to the problem of finding an origin for all the things of the world – inductively, everything has an origin and the world is a thing, so it must have an origin. Moreover

Generally, we may know the causes of certain things and affairs near to us. But tracing their origin to the ultimate end, we find that without any cause, they of themselves come to be what they are. Being so of themselves, we can no longer question the reason or cause of their being, but should accept them as they are[10]