Daoism is not a Strategy

A rather odd blog post over at Huffington Post College, by Keith Weigelt, a Professor at the Wharton School, gets off to an incongruous start:

I am a strategist in the Daoist tradition. One tenet of Daoism is that individuals are responsible for their reality.

I am not sure what it means to be a "strategist in the Daoist tradition," since Daoism, generally - or, at least the Daoist principles I find in the Daodejing and Zhuangzi - are not really "strategic" in the common sense of that term.  And for that common sense meaning, I would turn to the OED: "....a plan for successful action based on the rationality and interdependence of the moves of the opposing participants."

On the face of it, Daoism urges us to eschew planning precisely because we cannot really control the complex reality that surrounds us (which we might take as dao - way).  Let's go to passage 24 of the DDJ:

Stretch on tiptoes and you never stand firm.  Hurry long strides and you never travel far.

Keep up self-reflection and you'll never be enlightened.

Keep up self-definition and you'll never be apparent.

Keep up self-promotion and you'll never be proverbial.

Keep up self-esteem and you'll never be perennial.

Travelers of the Way call such striving 'too much food and useless baggage.'  Things may not all despise such striving, but a master of the Way stays clear of it.

I take this as a rejection of self-conscious definition of interests and preferences and, thus, an undermining of the first stage of any sort of planning.  

And I am completely aware that this could also be seen as a king of meta-strategy; that is, by avoiding "strategy" in the first instance, you actually come out in a better place.  A sort of anti-strategic strategy.  Very Daoist that.

But that sort of anti-strategy strategy is not what Weigelt seems to have in mind.  He is a game theorist:

We all have the power to change our reality because of what game theorists call interactive payoffs. When you interact with others, the consequence of your decision depends on the behavior of others. One's world is not filled with solitude. Because consequences depend on one's actions and those of others, you must consider their actions in choosing yours.

This is a good starting point for understanding game theory but, again, it has virtually nothing to do with Daoism.  Of course a Daoist would agree that the consequences of our actions depend on the behavior of others.  But a Daoist would also assert that we cannot know what the actions of others might be and that there are myriad other unforeseen factors that can disrupt any expectation of the behavior of others.   Zhuangzi is the antithesis of a game theoretic strategist:

Birth and death, living and dead, failure and success, poverty and wealth, honor and dishonor, slander and praise, hunger and thirst, hot and cold - such are the transformations of this world, the movements of its inevitable nature.  They keep vanishing into one another before our very eyes, day in and day out, but we'll never calibrate what drives them. (5.4)

死生存亡，窮達貧富，賢與不肖，毀譽、饑渴、寒暑，是事之變，命之行也；日夜相代乎前，而知不能規乎其始者也.

Instead of Hinton's "we'll never calibrate what drives them," Graham gives us: "knowledge cannot measure back to where they began."  We cannot know the origin or development of the most basic human forces: life, death, failure success, poverty wealth....  That last pair - poverty and wealth - is especially telling for Weigelt, who is ultimately interested in understanding and reversing economic inequality in the US.  That is a noble cause, one that I certainly support.  But it is not at all clear how his game theoretic approach to that problem has anything to do with Daoism.

Weigelt also states:

Daoists believe since interactions define the future, they must be actively managed.

To which we have to reply: No. Daoists do not believe that our interactions with others must be actively managed.  Quite the contrary, we have to let go of conscious management and let relationships emerge and unfold in context as they will, without our purposive effort to steer them in certain directions.  

We'll let Zhuangzi (5.5) have the last word:

聖人不謀，惡用知?

The Sage never makes plans, so what good is understanding?

Comments

[Christopher]

Personally, I think both Graham and Hinton are slightly off on 而知不能規乎其始者也 (actually, Hinton is much further off). I'm pretty sure 規 here is a scribal error or stand in for the cognate 窺 meaning "to perceive," "to spy out." This makes more sense with the preposition 乎 as well, which I think would seem odd with 規 taken verbally. 知 is not only a noun here (as Graham's translation reflects but Hinton's does not), but it is important that it's a noun; Zhuangzi is talking specifically in many parts of this section about a certain type of knowledge that's inherently limited. I can't think of any possible justification for "what drives them" as a translation for "其始者."

[gregorylent]

if someone said they were a strategist in the advaita vedantic tradition i would take it to imply that they understood non-duality, unity of opposites, the connection and interaction of all things .... and i would put him or her on my board of directors

i think the daoist statement can be seen in the same light, though i am not an academic

[Sam]

Christopher,
Perhaps Hinton is thinking: "what drives them [from their starting points]." I see the problem: he really should make more explicit use of 始...

[Christopher]

Sam-

My guess is that you're right: he IS thinking that. But to do so is assuming an outside force that does the driving. That's an assumption that I don't think the text supports and would also entail a very particular take on Zhuangzi's view of how the world works (and an incorrect one). Zhuangzi is arguably the most linguistically and philosophically challenging major received text from early China and that's one reason I feel Hinton is a particularly inappropriate translator for it.

[Karlo]

Hinton's comment doesn't surprise me. I've seen so many silly quotes misattributed to Confucious. Somebody could collect them all and make a compendium--a sort of alternative Analects existing in 21st century virtual space. And no matter how we construe Hinton's allusion to Daoism, it's hard to imagine how this is in the spirit of anything in classical Daoist works. As for the translated passage (知不能規乎其始者也), wouldn't it be better translated as something like "knowledge cannot provide normative criteria for their primal beginnings". The words "criteria" and "primal" aren't in the original, but it seems like we'd need them to bring out the implied intended meaning. "Calibrate" seems odd as it's a mechanical metaphor that would seem inappropriate to the more legal and social 規,

[Christopher]

Karlo-- Just to clarify, Hinton is a "translator" of 論語, 莊子, 孟子, etc. (and a very well marketed one at that), not the author of the piece Sam is discussing. As for the translation itself, I still think it makes much more sense in grammatical context to read 規 as an error for 窺.

[melektaus]

Again, I guess my interpretation of major Chinese philosophical ideas are fundamentally different from yours.

First of all, many Taoists consider the Art of War to be in the Taoist canon (and I would tend to agree). And it most certainly is strategic.

“On the face of it, Daoism urges us to eschew planning precisely because we cannot really control the complex reality that surrounds us (which we might take as dao - way). “

This is false. Taoism does not say that we cannot really control the “complex reality that surrounds us”. Likewise, Taoism as far as I know, does not say anything like “we have to let go of conscious management and let relationships emerge and unfold in context as they will, without our purposive effort to steer them in certain directions.”

That is actually a common misconception of basic Taoist principles. Taoism does not say that we have to let go of our “conscious management” and “purposive effort”. If it did it would make it basically an ascetic and stoic philosophy which it is not. It simply says that conscious management and purposive effort is more effectively realized when 1. rigid preconceptions are allowed less sway and we adopt a more flexible and nuanced mindset so as to identify the basic grain of nature (The Tao). 2. we do not go contrary to this grain of nature but go with its grain and allow it to carry us to ends of our purpose.

Also, this is wrong: “But a Daoist would also assert that we cannot know what the actions of others might be ...”

Taoists do not say that we cannot know what drives the actions of others. In fact, Zhuangzi explicitly and famously argues that arguments for unknowability or radical skepticism regarding internal motivation and mental states presupposes the very knowledge the skeptics argue against. How does Huizi know that Zhuangzi does not know that the fish are happy? Huizi seems to be committed to a truth about Zhuangzi's internal states by asserting this skeptical claim which thus undermines itself.

Finally, Taoism is somewhat related to certain developments in game theory. For example, the Taoist idea that spontaneity and certain forms of ignorance (not complete ignorance) about either oneself or another may be beneficial does have game theoretic justifications in many contexts. Although it may also be correct that the author of that article was stretching it a bit with his idea of Taoism.

[Scott Phillips]

When Zhuangzi opens his mouth and the words, "the fish are happy" come out, the words are intrinsically calibrated within the context of the relationships he is in, with the fish, the bridge, his friend and you and I (the readers). To think or act strategically is to move outside of social constraints and see things as they actually are. In that sense, "being responsible for our own reality" is simply acknowledging that we are (in) an infinite procession of event/things.

[melektaus]

Ummm...Yeah...