The Logos and the Tao

When the civilizations of China and Western Europe first made contact with one another (c. 1600), each culture perplexed the other with their respective political and cultural ideologies. Most noticeable, perhaps, was the Chinese reluctance to embrace nascent colonialism and expansive trade, an aversion reflective of differences in modes of thought and conceptions of the human condition. Prominent French Sinologist Jacques Gernet attributes this intellectual clash to the stark difference between the Western conception of metaphysical order and the historicist “aesthetic” order of the Eastern worldview. Gernet posits that the philosophical edifice underlying each culture is fundamentally different, and he attributes to this the clashes between their respective cultural, religious, and political institutions.

In this essay, I want to argue that Heraclitus, arguably the most influential Pre-Socratic philosopher, and Lao Tzu, the architect of Taoism and much of Chinese philosophy, make analogous metaphysical arguments. After showing the manifold similarities between the two, I want to contend that Eastern and Western (Greek) philosophy developed in tandem with, but independent of, one another. Finally, I will refute Gernet’s assertion that clashes between the East and the West are due to a fundamental difference in their philosophical traditions.

The Tao te Ching extensively describes the unifying principle of the world, the Tao, how it is commonly misunderstood, and how it belies man’s understanding of the world around him. Lao Tzu states that the Tao is, at any one time, what the world is and how it is. “Every being in the universe is an expression of Tao,” Lao Tzu writes. “It springs into existence, unconscious, perfect, free, takes on a physical body, lets circumstances complete it.” It “never does anything, yet through it all things are done.” Lao Tzu contends that the Tao “is ungraspable…dark and unfathomable. It is beyond is and is not.” “Free from desire,” we can “realize the mystery,” but “caught in desire,” we see only “the manifestations.” The Tao also is “formless and perfect…serene. Empty. Solitary. Unchanging. Infinite. Eternally present.” It is such an ambiguous concept that a regular man “half believes it, half doubts it” and the foolish man “laughs out loud. If he didn’t laugh, it wouldn’t be the Tao.” The concept of the Tao, however, is not merely abstract; it bears on our daily interactions with society and our environs. The Tao shows us the necessary interaction of the positive and the negative, the futility of classifying certain things as good or evil, war or peace, concrete or abstract; “The soft overcomes the hard; the gentle overcomes the rigid” To bolster this assertion, the Tao te Ching speaks of the illusion of goals. “We shape clay into a pot,” Lao Tzu writes, “but is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want.” Indeed, it is ironic how the quest to make life as secure and happy as possible does exactly the opposite; we ignore the present and neglect to savor life itself and the beauty of the Tao. The Yin/Yang model shows that opposites are useless without their counterparts; separately, they are incoherent. Kant speaks to this in the Critique of Pure Reason when he writes, “A light dove parting the air in free flight, feeling its resistance, could get the idea it would succeed even better in a space with no air.”

The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, born in the same decade BCE as Lao Tzu, formulated a universal principle similar to that of the Tao: the logos. This “account” or “word” is something to which everyone should listen; it is the objective account of reality, the fundamental principle of the world, the reason for things being the way they are. The logos guides and adjudicates the cosmos. “The logos,” Heraclitus states, “holds always but humans always prove unable to understand it, both before hearing it and when they have heard it” The logos is the unifying formula of all things, or the proportionate method of arrangement of all things: their individual and collective structural plan. Like the Tao, the logos is available to all and “in continuous contact” with humans. “It is wise to agree that all things are one,” Heraclitus states, for “the Logos, like the stars, is endless, infinite” Foolish men are “like the deaf. Though present they are absent,” for they are like those “who seek gold, dig up much earth, and find little.” “Right thinking,” however, “is the greatest excellence, and wisdom is to speak the truth and act in accordance with nature, while paying attention to it.” The fact that all things are arranged according to a common plan makes all things united in a coherent complex, of which mankind is a part and nature is a paradigm. The unity of this life complex is often hidden and arbitrary. As Heraclitus says, “The most beautiful arrangement is a pile of things poured out at random.” As in the Tao te Ching, there is no absolute division of opposite from opposite; the logos is the constituent that makes all things appear opposed. “The road up and the road down are one and the same,” for different aspects of the same thing justify opposing descriptions. Good things are possible only because of bad ones and thus, “Disease makes health pleasant and good, hunger satiety, weariness rest.” This unity of opposites debunks the classifications of good and evil, war and peace, concrete and abstract: “It is necessary to know that war is common and justice is strife and that all things happen in accordance with strife and necessity.” Most importantly, the unity of all the opposites is hidden. “Nature loves to hide,” because the unseen is stronger than more obvious types of connection.

The similarities between both philosophies are striking, as are their respective impacts upon Eastern and Western philosophy. It is not an overstatement to call Lao Tzu’s work the cornerstone of Taoism and the Chinese zeitgeist throughout the ages. Contemporaries of Lao Tzu (i.e., Confucius) could not avoid the questions he raised in the Tao te Ching, nor could they dismiss or supplant his sophisticated Tao. It is similarly difficult to ascribe too much importance to Heraclitus. He enraged some philosophers that came after him, like Parmenides and Zeno of Elea, while inspiring others, including the pluralists and Democritus. Indeed, some scholars have dubbed him “the impetus of Socrates,” “a bastion of rational thought,” and an “ancient Spinoza.” Regardless of his connection to these thinkers, his influence on Greek philosophy is undeniable. It rings false to suggest, as Gernet does, that Eastern and Western philosophy, both of which followed largely in the footsteps of either Lao Tzu or Heraclitus, do not have common philosophic origins and developments with a compatible view of the human condition.

To deny the parallel development of Eastern and Western philosophy along with their shared belief in a single cohesive force that guides and adjudicates daily life is tantamount to denying the common origin of mankind. While clashes and disagreements between the East and the West have been, are, and will continue to be commonplace, they are not, as Gernet suggests, the result of polarizing metaphysical philosophies, but of cultural and political differences arising from stark differences in geographical location, political ideology, agriculture, industry, and history.


Notes:

i. Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, (New York: Harper Perennial), verse 51: lines 1-6.
ii. Lao Tzu, 37:1-2.
iii. Lao Tzu, 21:4,7,12.
iv. Lao Tzu, 1:8-9.
v. Lao Tzu, 25:1-5.
vi. Lao Tzu, 41:2-7.
vii. Lao Tzu, 78.5-6.
viii. Lao Tzu, 11:4-6.
ix. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
x. See Cohen, Marc, Readings in Ancient Greek Philosophy, (New York: Hackett, 2005). Within, see Sextus Empiricus, Against the Mathematicians, 7.132.
xi. See Cohen, Readings. Within, see Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 4.46.
xi. Ibid. Within, see Hippolytus, Refutation, 9.9.1.
xii. Ibid. Within, see Clement, Miscellanies, 4.4.2.
xiii. Ibid. Within, see Stobaues, Selections, 3.1.178.
xiv. Ibid. Within, see Theophrastus, Metaphysics, 15.
xv. Ibid. Within, see Stobaeus, Selections 3.1.178.
xvi Ibid. Within, see Origen, Against Celsus, 6.42.
xvii. Ibid. Within, see Themistius, Orations, 5.69b.
xviii. See T.M. Robinson, Heraclitus, Fragments: A Text and Translation with a Commentary, (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, Vol. 2: 1987).