The Useless Tree

Another Taoist July 4th...

My annual reflection on the day:

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!

Effective Leadership

I am, finally, returning to my book, which is pretty much and extension of the theme of this blog: ancient Chinese thought in modern American life.  I am on chapter six, which deals with Daoist and Confucian views of public life and politics.  Thus, I am reading through the basic texts yet again, a task I thoroughly enjoy.  When I came upon Analects 1.8, which Hinton translates as:

The Master said: "If you're grave and thoughtful, people look to you with the veneration due a noble.  And if you're learned, too, you're never inflexible.

"Above all else, be loyal and stand by your words.  Never befriend those who are not kindred spirits.  And when you're wrong, don't be afraid to change."

What struck me was the advice to balance loyalty and sincerity with flexibility and openness to change.  That is not an easy thing.  On the face of it, loyalty, suggests a kind of inflexibility, a defense of certain interests and personal relationships.  But, Confucius seems to be saying, these cannot be absolute.  If your choices turn out to be wrong, then you have to change, which suggests a release of loyalty and a reinterpretation of sincerity. 

This brought to mind a post by Andrew Sullivan the other day, about another conservative pundit, in which he quoted Machiavelli to the effect of: "This is the tragedy of man. Circumstances change, and he does not." I'm not sure where this direct quote comes from in Machiavelli.  The closest I could find was this, from The Prince:

Consequently, as I have said, two men, acting differently, may achieve the same results; and if two men act in the same way, one may succeed and the other fail.  From this, again, arise changes in prosperity; because if a man acts cautiously and patiently, and the times and circumstances change in ways for which is methods are appropriate, he will be successful.  But if the times and circumstances change again, he will come to grief because he does not change his methods....

Of course, there is a key difference between Machiavelli and Confucius: the latter was interested in flexibility in the pursuit of Humanity, ultimately a moral goal and standard.  Machiavelli was, infamously, less constrained by morality.  He urged flexibility as a means of maintaining power as a good in and of itself. 

In any event, it would seem, for either good moral practice or power political concerns, effectively leadership requires a certain flexibility....