The Categorical and the Ineffable

In earlier posts in this Does Nature Need Correcting? series I owned up to no longer believing in one of the most deep-seated premises of Christian thought: that nature, including human nature, is amiss and needs correcting. Now I'd like to explore one of the contrasting views I touched on in the original installment: the Taoist insight that things in our world are not fundamentally "broken" and do not need to be "fixed."

I discussed Taoism a some length in three posts (this, this, and this) I made some two years ago to another blog. Briefly: the tao is an ancient Chinese notion whose name means "the way." If we cultivate harmony with the tao, we will find the peace and tranquility of the nameless "uncarved block," a Taoist metaphor for the entity from which all named "vessels" are carved. Before "the myriad creatures" — the vessels — there conceptually came, in reverse succession, the "three," preceded by the "two," preceded by the metaphysical "one." The latter too has a predecessor, the tao.

As I review the first of my previous discussions, several things stand out:

• If the monotheistic God of Western religion personifies the metaphysical One, the impersonal tao principle conceptually precedes him.
  
• The tao transcends the person-nonperson distinction ... as it transcends all pairs of opposites. In actuality, calling the tao "impersonal" is as mistaken as calling it "personal."
  
• In the history of Western thought, Plato was the consummate anti-Taoist.
  

Plato was heavily invested in the notion that only Ideas (a.k.a. Forms) are truly real. Platonic Ideas or Forms, such as the Form of the Round, are necessarily immaterial; all material objects such as the circles we draw on paper or the spherical shapes of planets represent imperfect copies of Forms. No man-made or nature-made shape is perfectly round, or square, or oval, or whatever. Hence, it is not fully real.

If material things are not fully real, then they're not fully knowable. Plato's hope was to, as I say, invest heavily in that which is truly and fully knowable. Whatever is truly and fully knowable is necessarily a Form or Idea, without material substance. But knowledge of Forms/Ideas lets us control the material world in ways otherwise unavailable to us. For example, even if a wheel is less than perfectly round, our knowledge of its Form lets us predict what a wheel will do. Do that sort of thing consistently enough, and human "progress" ensues.

To the Taoist, it takes only "cleverness" to coerce material outcomes in the world this way. "Wisdom" is something else entirely. The distinction between cleverness and wisdom parallels that between the categorical and the ineffable.


Plato sought knowledge of categories, which are in effect pigeonholes into which we stuff objects, by which we give them their names. But the Taoist's "uncarved block" is expressly said to be nameless, ineffable. It is "rough," where the vessels are "smooth." (But the tao is also "smooth," since it logically precedes the rough-smooth dichotomy.)

Plato said the categories, as Ideas or Forms, lay at the basis of reality. But the Taoist says the ineffable is the true origin of all.

Plato, in his Myth of the Cave, said true knowledge of the categories of reality would destroy the illusions that beset most of us. The highest knowledge of all was that of the Form of the Good.

The Tao te ching by Lao-tzu

The Taoist, for his part, says such "cleverness" amounts to an illusion, and that real wisdom abandons attempts at exerting coercive power over the affairs of man and the world. According to the Tao te ching, also know as the Lao-tzu after its author:

The way never acts yet nothing is left undone.

Should lords and princes be able to hold fast to it,
The myriad creatures will be transformed of their own accord.

After they are transformed, should desire raise its head,
I shall press it down with the weight of the nameless uncarved block.

The nameless uncarved block
Is but freedom from desire,
And if I cease to desire and remain still,
The empire will be at peace of its own accord.

Western thought historically combines Platonism (as neo-Platonism) with Christian ideas concerning the "fallen" imperfection of the natural world, our sinfulness, and so on. When you shift mental focus all the way back to the tao, pairs of opposites like good and evil vanish. This is why the Taoist would say, in contradiction to the neo-Platonist Christian, that things in our world are not fundamentally "broken" and do not need to be "fixed."