The Dao of Marx
Western philosophy from Parmenides has concerned itself significantly with the question (or questions) of ‘Being’ (ontology). What is pointed to when we say of something that it ‘is’? It is a ‘what’ question. Subsequent to, and related to the ‘what’ question are the ‘hows’; how can we know about what is? what are the characteristics of knowing? how does what ‘is’ present itself for us to know it and how do our faculties of knowing interpret? ‘How’ is generally related to ‘epistemology’. There is also of course a basic ‘why’ question which relates to both ontology and epistemology, but is concerned with what we often regard as a moral question. Why should what is be as it is and how is it best to regard what is?
From the very first, we can see that the western concept of ‘being’ is an abstraction. The fact that we can be questioning what is, means that we already exist, and further, that we already have a familiarity with the existence of things. That we would formulate a question about what ‘is’ indicates an uncertainty, or as Aristotle would have it, a wonder. An uncertainty indicates the experience of doubting, of being aware that what appears may be deceptive at first glance. Deceptive that is, in that our faculties of knowing may be insufficient, may be misled. Being misled by first appearances has great, possibly fatal implications for a life form. We can certainly relate to experiences where being misled by appearances led to painful consequences. Consequences relate in turn to the ‘why’ question. The experience of pain is an intense and important element in life. To avoid pain we have developed systems which put the responsibility for causing pain, as well as it’s opposite into matters of ‘should’ and ‘should not:’, that is, into a moral framework. We could say therefore that these western philosophical questions are all abstractions from basic experience.
Not just ‘western’ philosophy of course. The designation ‘western’ is simply for convenience. It’s limited, and even a cursory recognition of the characteristics of the phenomenon of human life on Earth reveals it to be nothing more than an arbitrary designation. The Earth is a globe, humanity is one species, all philosophy is human philosophy. For any human being, nothing of humanity is alien.
If however we are content to use these arbitrary designations, we could talk meaningfully about the different emphasis of say, certain streams of Chinese philosophy to the western concern with ‘being’. This is not to say that what is considered western philosophy is entirely focused on something static. Heraclitus’ philosophy is one of the first prominent (that we are aware of) philosophies of change and of what later becomes known as ‘dialectical’ change. However, even with Heraclitus, the basic question of ‘what is’ is in focus. It’s still an objectification of ‘what is’. Heraclitus calls the dialectical flow of being ‘the One’, or God. However, it’s still an abstract from experience. Heraclitus still treats his One in an objective manner; his is still an objective ‘metaphysics’ of being. Classical Chinese Daoist philosophy by contrast has been called by Mou Zongsan, (one of the 20th century’s foremost Chinese philosophers, disciple of Xiong Shili and teacher of Tu Weiming) a ‘metaphysics of vision’. How is this so?
Daoist philosophy takes as focus ‘the Way’, the Great Dao. The Way is quite literally the way of everything. It is the all-embracing principle which is never in itself apart from anything. It is nothing other than what is, including the experiencer, the experienced, and the experience. Therefore it cannot itself be thoroughly objectified. It is both everything and nothing. It cannot have the same status as the ‘being’ of the ancient western ontologists since it is inextricable from experience. It therefore also includes both the experiences of deceptive phenomena and non-deceptive phenomena. Understanding the Way therefore is a question of developing skill, or training our minds to see clearly and helpfully ‘in medio res’. Hence, Daoist metaphysics does not attempt to separate and study some concept abstract from concrete experience, but rather to skilfully experience what is!
The implied ontology, if we were to try to get a handle on Daoist metaphysics in a western sense, would be one which is only clearly apparent in an objective field to a subjective mind that is trained to see clearly. Furthermore, Dao is dynamic. The Way reveals itself in it's functioning, not as substance. The functioning of the Way is in fact the phenomenal world as it appears. Such concepts as the western versions of ‘substance’ and ‘activity’ objectified which straitjacketed European philosophy into scholasticism for the Middle Ages are dispensed with here, in this understanding of the non-dual dynamic nature of reality, where reality is revealed through phenomena to a mind not separate from that reality. This is very profound philosophy. This is out of the exclusive remit of logic as it is understood in the western tradition.
The Way in Daoism can understood only by first recognising its all-encompassing (and dynamic) nature and that there can be no real ontological duality or separation between the subjective mind and the objective world.
To train one’s mind in the Daoist sense is not so much a question of information, of systematic knowledge, but of clearing the way for innate facilities of our minds (themselves phenomena of the Great Dao) to get a handle on our experience.
There is a concept in the western tradition quite close to this kind of perspective. It is what Henri Bergson calls ‘intuition’; not some occult psychic ability as it is often presented, but a very fundamental way of knowing that precedes systematic analysis and logical thought. It indicates an activity, a way of knowing, that grasps things as they are in immediacy and which also grasps things in and as a whole experience. From this ‘intuition’, this experience of the ’whole’, concepts, designations, patterns, etc are then abstracted for analysis.
Of course, there’s also the Kantian notion of intuition, whereby intuition is a source of knowledge which is not derived from observations. Dao ‘vision metaphysics’ encompasses both. For Kant, there is a distinction between intellectual intuition and sensible intuition. Intellectual intuition is the intuition of God, where it is understood that for God knowing and creating are the same activity. Sensible intuition means our innate structures of knowledge which can come to an understanding what God has created (as in, the world encountered through the senses). For the Daoist vision, what is subjective and objective is the Dao which ‘creates’. To get a clear vision, or a good handle on, or to skilfully engage with what appears as the Way, training and cultivating our minds is necessary.
Might this be useful in enriching some western philosophical approaches? I certainly think so!
For instance, Marxist historical-dialectical philosophy is also a philosophy of change and understanding that change in meaningful ways. Like the Dao, the dialectic of history is all-encompassing of changing phenomena, if perhaps acutely focused in the developments of the phenomena of human society. For Marx, changes in the way humanity produces what it needs from the non-human environment (which is nevertheless a co-immanent of humanity- both being aspects of Nature) are reflected in the social structures of humanity. The relations of workers to each other and to the means of production embody the general consciousness of the way of production at a given time. What appears to a member of the society as their consciousness is heavily shaped by their relationships in this social dynamic. The dynamic change, the development of the means of production, has consequences on the consciousness of the members of the society in a pattern of reciprocal, or dialectical social change in intricate ways, characterised by struggle.
We could say that a Marxist understanding of this process of change and development, that is, the dialectical understanding, is a skill that should be developed so as to get a good handle on what is appearing in society. Developing a skill in understanding is a richer way of understanding than simply acquiring information. A good understanding of what is being pointed at through the words and forms of any such systematic approach is not obtained through merely the knowledge of the words and forms themselves. And just as in the experience of being misled by appearances, so too with words and forms. A Marxist or a communist for example is not so simply because they use the words and forms. It takes both knowledge of information and skill to get a good handle on the reality as presented through any systematic view. In this way, Marxism could be also helpfully taken as a metaphysics of vision!