The Daoist’s Futile Rejection of Humanism
Human progress is possible in nature despite the Daoist’s implicit nihilism
Daoism is about the foolishness of contending against nature.
That is, Daoism is the anti-artifice philosophy par excellence, as it was directed against the Confucian’s obsession with devising clever techniques for maintaining social harmony. Daoist philosophy or religion could thus be applied more recently against secular humanism and the First World’s dreams of human advancement.
Developed societies strive for economic growth, using science and technology to our species’ exclusive benefit. The Daoist predicts that this enterprise will end in disaster because nature can’t be vanquished. Our hubris, then, must be as deranged as our underestimation of nature’s resources for flowing along in its underlying equilibriums, regardless of the “advances” we think we’re making.
With innovative technologies we dam up nature’s processes, as though the universal flood that encompasses myriad galaxies could be dammed.
Daoism’s main text, the Dao De Jing, is full of irony as it illustrates repeatedly — in cryptic prose that established the stereotype of the inscrutable Chinese sage — how you achieve your goals not by striving after them as though you were an autonomous agent, but by doing nothing and accepting you’re only along for nature’s ride.
Nature’s way, the Dao, is best, but only by default because it’s the only enduring way. Those who think mainly of themselves will flounder as they clash with nature’s unstoppable forces and inhuman patterns. Like the Stoic, the Daoist sage realizes she can’t beat nature, so she joins the universe. She prefers effortless action or spontaneity as a sign that she’s subdued her arrogant impositions and acts only as nature’s vessel or puppet.
Daoist ironies
As that main text says, “Exhibit the plainness of undyed cloth; embrace the uncarved block. Be little self-regarding and make your desires few.”
And here’s the irony:
Heaven endures and earth long abides because they do not give birth to themselves. Hence they are long lived. Hence the sage places his person last, and it comes first; he treats it as something external to him and it endures. Does he not employ selflessness? Hence he attains his self-regarding ends.
This ironic triumph of the humble sage is echoed in Jesus’s promise that the last will be first and the first last.
Why is the sage nature’s puppet? “Heaven and earth are not kind — thus the ten thousand creatures become as straw dogs to them.” The sage recognizes the bitter reality that people are small, despite our grandiose goals. The sage should rather prize “his body as if it were the world,” since only then could he be “given charge of the world. He who loves his body as if it were the world can be entrusted with the world.”
By aligning with nature, the sage departs from society’s egoistic norms: “Few, thus gaining; many, thus confused — therefore the sage embraces One and is a standard for the world. Not revealing himself, thus bright; not asserting himself, thus shining; not praising himself, thus meritorious; not boasting of himself, thus enduring.”
The irony is that, like Plato’s philosopher-king, the Daoist sage leads from behind. (This was the centrist Barack Obama’s political philosophy, too, which enabled America’s Trumpian depths to wash over and through him, as Obama missed his chance to use the 2008 financial market calamity as a pretext to strengthen his country’s economic regulations.)
Again, “One who shows himself cannot be bright; one who asserts himself cannot shine; one who praises himself can be meritorious; one who boasts of himself cannot endure.”
The essence of Daoist ethics seems summarized by this passage:
Reaching the ultimate of emptiness, deeply guarding stillness, the things of the world arise together; thereby do I watch their return. The things of the world burst out everywhere, and each returns to its own root. Returning to the root is called stillness; this is called returning to destiny; returning to destiny is called constant; knowing the constant is called enlightenment. Not knowing the constant, one acts blindly and ill-omened. Knowing the constant, one can accommodate; accommodation leads to impartiality; impartiality leads to kingliness; kingliness leads to Tian [Heaven]; Tian leads to the Dao. With the Dao one may endure, and to the end of life one will not be in danger.
Moralistic and nihilistic promotions of Daoism
But there are two ways of promoting Daoism.
First, the Daoist can say that it’s prudent to serve nature or to renounce egoistic, humanistic, progressive conceits. The sage, for instance, will face no danger in doing what’s natural. And the sage ironically attains her ends by not resisting nature’s norms.
For instance, “One who knows glory but preserves shame becomes a valley to the world. Such a one is always supplied with constant virtue and returns again to be an uncarved block,” that is, to be the mysterious whole or heart of nature, the Dao or the flow of energy in physical forms. Here, again, the goal of balance is deemed wise, not just necessary, as though Daoism included a moral system, a set of recommendations of how we should live.
And again, “In governing people and serving Tian, there is nothing like parsimony. Parsimony may be called ‘submitting in advance.’ Submitting in advance may be called piling up virtue. If you pile up virtue there is nothing you cannot overcome…”
This sounds like an ancient equivalent of self-help coaching, as when an influencer passes along the secret of success. It’s just that Daoist virtue is supremely ironic: “To live but not possess, to act but depend on nothing, to lead without directing, this is called mysterious virtue.”
Second, though, and perhaps more esoterically, the Daoist can embrace nature’s indifference to values, in which case Daoism entails nihilism. Again, “Knowing the constant, one can accommodate; accommodation leads to impartiality; impartiality leads to kingliness.” Nature would have to be impartial because nature strives only to realize every possibility, as it were.
Only self-interested animals with limited perspective would seek to discriminate in their favour, and unenlightened people do the same. Our values spring not just from our ignorance, but from our preference to live as ourselves, to identify with our body and mind rather than to see through those ephemeral forms to the “nothingness” that’s the whole of nature.
“Thirty spokes share a single hub; grasp the nothingness at its center to get the use of the wheel.” And how is the Dao nothingness? “The Dao is empty yet you may keep drawing from it as though it could never fill your need.” Again, “All between heaven and earth is like a great bellows — Empty, yet it does not collapse, the more it is moved the more it issues forth.”
Or note the fatalism and moral neutrality of this remark: “When things in their prime grow old, they are called ‘contrary to the Dao.’ What is contrary to the Dao comes to an early end.” The point there is just that resistance to nature won’t last, not that resistance is foolish. An early end would be foolish only from the egoistic perspective, which the Daoist means to transcend by way of adopting nature’s neutrality towards all its internal eventualities.
The Daoist’s double truth doctrine
Here, then, we have an implicit double truth doctrine, one found in Buddhism, too. As the political philosopher Leo Strauss emphasized, this double standard serves the social purpose of disguising the sage’s elitism to avoid offending the unenlightened populations.
The Dao De Jing is explicit on this point: “Hence if you wish to rule above the people you must employ words to take the lower position; if you wish to lead people you must place yourself behind them. Therefore, the sage dwells above and the people don’t consider him heavy, he stands ahead of them and they do not consider it an injury to them. Hence the world delights in supporting him untiringly.”
As I said, Daoist irony is like the otherworldly reversal of values in Christianity. Despite the mystical enormity of cosmic truth, we get what we want, but only if we honour the ultimate truth by adjusting our wants to suit Nature or God.
That irony operates, however, at an exoteric, conventional level. Superficially, human values still matter. But esoterically, as I said, Daoist mysticism entails nihilism. The sage wouldn’t think in terms of good and bad, right and wrong, since they mean nothing to nature. The Dao and thus the reality of nature are nameless. As the Dao De Jing’s first line warns: “A dao that may be spoken is not the enduring Dao.”
This is to say that mysticism confounds humanist epistemology. We trust our concepts only if we’re thinking egoistically or humanistically. Nature in its entirety would transcend that self-absorption, and the Daoist sage is one with nature. Our conceptual classifications would be ambitious tactics for trapping and exploiting nature, for binding the Dao with categories that make sense to us but that count for nothing in the cosmic scheme since nature will of course evolve beyond our understanding, long after our species has been extinguished.
The Dao De Jing is anti-progressive in so far as our conception of progress is human-centered: “The wish to grasp the world and control it — I see its futility. The world is a spiritlike vessel; it cannot be controlled. One who would control it would ruin it; one who would grasp it would lose it.”
On the contrary, says that text, “the sage desires not to desire and does not value goods hard to come by; he learns not to learn and redeems the errors of the masses. Assisting the things of the world to be as they are in themselves, he dares not act.”
Humanist progress presupposes contention or a struggle, as in the civilized taming of the wilderness. Yet “The dao of Tian [Heaven, and thus nature in its cosmic fullness] excels at prevailing though it does not contend; it excels at responding, though it does not speak; things come of themselves though it does not summon; it excels at planning though it is flexible. The net of Tian is vast; though the mesh is broadly spaced, nothing gets through.”
That latter analogy means that human progress must be illusory since nothing can permanently resist nature’s flow. Yet Daoism concedes at least the appearance of an ephemeral struggle since “The dao of Tian takes from what has abundance and supplies what is wanting, but the dao of man is not thus. It takes from what is wanting in order to supply what has abundance.”
This to say that human nature is antithetical to nature at large, or that people are anomalous in the impersonal whole of space and time. Daoism’s exoteric prescription is to render us equally impersonal:
He who studies is daily enlarged; he who follows the Dao is daily diminished. Diminished and then diminished yet more, at last attaining non-action. Never acting, nothing is undone. To control the world, undertake nothing. Once you undertake to do anything you are unfit to control the world.
The sage’s non-action or spontaneity is supposed to be as impersonal as starlight, rainfall, or the blowing of wind. Enlightenment is a renunciation of personal individuality, as the sage takes on the cosmic mantle.
The incoherence of Daoism
Yet both Daoism’s exoteric and esoteric formulations seem self-negating.
Again, Daoist prescriptions should make no sense to the sage since nature wants nothing, and those who prefer so-called good outcomes to bad ones are all-too personal, meaning they haven’t yet “diminished” themselves or learned to adopt nature’s neutrality. The sage must be as impartial as the void in which the earth spins so that we may be treated to equal intervals of day and night.
At best, the point of Daoist prescriptions must be like the proverbial ladder you may need to reach an elevated level of understanding, whereupon you can kick out the ladder from under you since you no longer need it. Prescriptions of moral worthiness make sense to the blundering masses, but not to the sage who follow’s nature’s Way.
Yet Daoist nihilism is likewise problematic since it means there’s no reason to be a nihilist. This nihilism looks like trivial, tautological fatalism, as though the point were just that whatever will unfold will do so — including our species’ attempt at progressing by contending with the wilderness.
Here we see a subtextual purpose of the Dao De Jing’s cryptic style. The nihilistic sage realizes there’s no point in saying anything, not just because the mysteries of nature defy our cognitive boasts, but because language-use is an expression of wrongheaded egoism. Even if the sage were to want to enlighten folks, so he or she would speak in the Daoist manner about the foolishness of resisting nature with our small-minded desires, that would only betray the sage’s imperfection since the sage, too, would thereby harbor a wayward preference rather than surrendering to the cosmic stance of indifference.
The Dao De Jing tries to have it both ways with coyness. The text speaks but not plainly so you can’t tell whether the author cares about the text’s contents. Daoist poetry can’t come across as a narrow-minded plea since that would engage the author in a performative self-contradiction. Instead, the sage’s words must seem as mysterious as any natural event.
But that means the sage can’t care whether the masses enlighten themselves or not. Cosmically, there can be no contest with nature, so that egoistic vanity or the lack of enlightenment, too, is a natural development, something that will take its course.
In this case, Daoism compares with simplistic theism in being cheaply unfalsifiable on account of its vacuity or triviality. If God or Tian is sovereign, there can be no evidence that falsifies either Absolute since the Absolute would work in mysterious ways. These religions would amount to untestable, self-reinforcing delusions.
Additionally, the clash between Daoism’s exoteric and esoteric formulations betrays an underlying humanistic ambition, namely the politics of preserving the enlightened elites despite what they regard as the vulgar recklessness of the unenlightened majority. Daoists would resort to the double truth doctrine as a defense mechanism because, contrary to their purported aim of being impartial, they care whether they live or die, or whether they’re socially secure or liable to be run out of town for mocking the rabble.
Superficially, the Daoist sage would be a proto-transhuman, a ruthless, personalized force of nature, but as an institution Daoism is politicized, in which case this religious philosophy presupposes humanism.
That is, the Daoist is supposed to reject the conflict between nature and civilization, but by catering to vulgar preferences for so-called good, virtuous outcomes, or by burying the esoteric, nihilistic message, the Daoist sage shows he or she is beholden to a social outcome after all, namely the preservation of Daoist elites despite the risks posed by the masses with their more forthright selfishness.
A fully impartial Daoist sage wouldn’t act like a person at all, and wouldn’t care whether he or she eats, sleeps, finds shelter, or dies, in which case this sage would come across more like an ancient Greek Cynic. Of course, the sage’s body would incline him or her to pursue certain ends, but the enlightened mind wouldn’t be attached to any outcome. The sage’s mind would be like a disinterested observer within the body, noticing the outcomes as nature plays itself out in that vicinity but not directing any of them from any self-centered standpoint.
No such sage, however, would resort to the double truth doctrine since doing so would be a political act of negotiation between social classes, as though it mattered to nature at large whether Daoist sages persist, or whether Daoism endures as a religion.
Daoism versus humanism
But let’s confront more directly Daoism’s repudiation of the humanist’s progressive aims. Where Daoism goes wrong here is in simplifying “Heaven” and Earth as though they were united by a single, all-mighty Dao or Way. Daoism is monistic in that sense, yet what scientific study of nature shows is that nature is rather fragmented. Forms emerge wildly in nature, so that there are countless stars and worlds as well as levels and periods of growth and decay, multitudes that are autonomous and incommensurable.
True, there are underlying physical regularities, but these are defined by quantum chaos and insubstantiality, hardly a single concrete Way. If anything, Nature’s “Way” is the wild (mindless, monstrous) realization of all quantum possibilities, including their higher-order, perhaps holographic constructs that occupy most of our attention and that include the countless stars and planets. But if nature is defined by its mind-numbing pluralities (which some translations of the Dao De Jing speak of figuratively as the “ten thousand creatures”), this means there’s free to be contention within nature, after all. Hence, the conflict between the wilderness and our civilizations, or more broadly between nature’s indifference and life’s self-interest.
In one sense, these conflicts are natural, but in another they’re not. Far from being a mystical enigma, this is a mere matter of semantics. Metaphysically, we’re free to consider everything to be natural in so far as it arises from physical underpinnings. But psychologically, socially, and historically — that is, with respect to these emergent patterns that call for irreducible levels of explanation — we honour nature’s variety by dividing our vocabularies and models.
Thus, we have the wilderness, on the one hand, and progressive civilization on the other, the latter being implicitly anti-natural in a non-metaphysical sense. Evidently, one part of nature here means to devour another part, as it were, just as there’s plenty of conflict throughout the universe, even if many of these transitions are too slow to register in our ephemeral frames of reference.
Black holes devour light and spacetime. The natural selection of species depends on competition between animals, and on the environment’s elimination of unfit varieties. Even the human mother’s womb goes to biochemical war against the fetus, treating it as an invader, so that nature is self-divided on account of its root mindlessness or wildness.
The philosophical upshot of scientific theories is that the essence of nature is wildness and thus an unfathomable multitude of ways or autonomous orders, not a single, all-encompassing Way or form of change. And it’s in that scientifically established context that secular humanism stands as a bid for tragic heroism in the cosmic scheme.