A Taoist (and thus non-nationalist?) July 4th

I've run this post for several years now but I rather like it, so here we go again:

It may seem improbable but I think we can find a Taoist angle on the US Independence Day, July 4th, holiday.

   Patriotism and nationalism, which are basically what July 4th is all about, are rather alien to the Taoist world view.  Indeed, far from celebrating the accomplishments of the nation, the Tao Te Ching (passage 80) urges: "Let nations grow smaller and smaller/ and people fewer and fewer."  The ideal is a primitive, we might even say pre-nationalist, small-scale political community centered on common production and close family life.  Not much of an "imagined community" there.

     But there is one element of the holiday that a Taoist might connect with: the line in the Declaration of Independence that states our unalienable right to "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." 

      As for Life, the "Te" (or "De" in the Pinyin transliteration) of the Tao Te Ching, denotes the integrity of each thing in the larger context of Way (Tao).  As such, I take it to imply a recognition of the value of each thing in itself, each life in itself, as in this passage from Chuang Tzu:

Hence, the blade of grass and the pillar, the leper and the ravishing [beauty], the noble, the sniveling, the disingenuous, the strange - in Tao they all move as one and the same. (23)

    As for Liberty, we have this statement from Burton Watson's introduction to Chuang Tzu:

The central theme of the Chuang Tzu may be summed up in a single word: freedom. (3)

  "Freedom" here means, for Watson, "free yourself from the world," but it is not incompatible with other notions of political liberty that might be celebrated in the US today.  For Chuang Tzu, governments should not interfere in our pursuits of freeing ourselves from the world.

     And as for the pursuit of Happiness, Taoism, in its philosophic form, is very much about happiness.  It tells us that we should not reify Happiness (maybe Chaung Tzu would have counseled Jefferson not to capitalize it in the Declaration) nor pursue it in a purposive and directed manner; but we might find happiness precisely in that process of detaching ourselves from worldly worries and desires and embracing "nothing's own doing" (wu wei).  Watson also has this to say:

Finally, Chuang Tzu uses throughout his writings that deadliest of weapons against all that is pompous, staid, and hold:  humor.  Most Chinese philosophers employ humor sparingly - a wise decision, no doubt, in view of the serious tone they seek to maintain - and some of them seem never to have heard of it at all.  Chuang Tzu, on the contrary, makes it the very core of his style, for he appears to have known that one good laugh would do more than ten pages of harangue to shake the reader's confidence in the validity of his pat assumptions. (5)

    Sounds pretty happy to me.

    So, have fun today, and remember those Taoist principles of Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness!

Comments

[The Western Confucian]

Great post! Mr. Jefferson was a Taoist, Mr. Adams a Confucian, and Mr. Hamilton, who won out, a Legalist.