Chaos/Primitivity and Philosophical speculation

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
1

Here are two translations of a passage from the Chuang Tzu which seem to suggest that the wholeness of the thing considered is what contains the truth, and that the breaking of it in order to have interchange with it is a loss. Any thoughts on the consequence such thinking has for the role of philosophy in Life, and the relationship “Truth” has to truth? (Within this is the question, does philosohy produce happiness?) The Greeks had a name for this “Chaos/Primativity”, the “aporos”, from which we get the word aporia. It is means “without passage, impassablity, pathless, trackless” and of situations, “hard to see one’s way through, impractical, very difficult”. “Poros” in Greek is a path, a ford in a river, but also a contrivance, a device, a means. In many of Plato’s dialogues, the Sophist comes to mind, there is a particular focus on the “aporos” and the metaphorical finding your way through a difficulty. Is “pathmaking” inherently a good thing? Is it inherently a bad thing? And do paths, roads and highways actually lead to knowledge, or do they only lead to desired end-points, with the loss of knowing what lies in between?

“The emperor of the South Sea was called Shu Brief, the emperor of the North Sea was called Hu [Sudden]（忽）, and the emperor of the central region was called Hun-tun [Chaos]（浑沌）. Shu and Hu from time to time came together for a meeting in the territory of Hun-tun, and Hun-tun treated them very generously. Shu and Hu discussed how they could repay his kindness. “All men,” they said, “have seven openings so they can see, hear, eat, and breathe. But Hun-tun alone doesn’t have any. Let’s trying boring him some!” Every day they bored another hole, and on the seventh day Hun-tun died.”

“The ruler of the Southern Sea is called Change; the ruler of the Northern Sea is called Uncertainty, and the ruler of the Centre is called Primitivity（浑沌）. Change and Uncertainty often met on the territory of Primitivity, and being always well treated by him, determined to repay his kindness. They said: “All men have seven holes for seeing, hearing, eating, and breathing. Primitivity alone has none of these. Let us try to bore some for him.” So every day they bored one hole; but on the seventh day Primitivity died.”

Dunamis

2

Dunamis,

Your excerpts are a reiteration of the phrase “The Tao that can be named is not the Tao”.

My understanding is that the writers were trying to emphasize that concepts and language are an abstraction and not what has been ‘named’. From these abstractions come knowing or knowledge and pre-conceived notions, which give’s rise to the confusion in which man is caught up.

The Tao says that the Way is a daily giving up of knowledge. A paring away until nothing is left but the Way itself. Man is then left to act out of his ‘true nature’, which is kindness, compassion, and selflessness. (vitrtue) The Way is the path back to primitivity (without holes), where all that is, is seen directly and acted upon directly. Thus, the wise person does nothing, and yet nothing is left undone.

Path making is neither good nor bad, but a means to act. It only becomes ‘bad’ when we attempt to give the concepts or language the same value and power as the reality. The photo of a loved one you carry in your wallet is not the loved one, but a visual abstraction of that person.

JT

3

JT.,

Your explanation of the Tao was incredibly conceptual. (I am familiar with what the Tao is supposed to be). What interests me here, and perhaps not others, is the “civilizing” aspect of “Western” philosophy, the inroad-making of it, and the result of those roads. Behind this floats concepts of Naturalness and mastery.

“Path making is neither good nor bad, but a means to act.”

“Sudden” and “Brief” both acted by boring holes into Chaos, killing it. The sense here is that such boring or pathmaking is bad, that is the killing of generous host that you intend to do a favor for. In Taoism, there is also the message of cutting, or acting along natural lines, keeping what’s whole, as whole as possible. What is interesting is the parallel between this path-cutting and Socratian attempts to cut through logical tangles of argument. One tries not to bulldoze roads, but to “feel” their path, their way. But Chaos has no roads, no holes. There also is another term in Greek Philosophy, “aletheia” which means the Truth, literally “the uncovered” or “the unforgotten”. It is between these two, perhaps contradictory methods, -cutting into, reasoned dissection, and the “revelation”, the “appearance” of the Truth- that Plato oscillates, between a passive awe for the revealed which borders on mysticism, and mental dissection of the environment.

The question remains, is it possible to make an unnatural road into Chaos, or even a natural one? And more subtly, are not the roads themselves a function only of the implement that makes the road and the desired goal, and the “knowledge” produced a very limited by-product. That Cartesianism has succeeded does not necessarily tell us that the universe is Cartesian, but only that it surrenders some particular results under Cartesian analysis.

Levins and Lewontin write in The Dialectical Biologist, commenting on the nature of recent advances in molecular biology,

“The great success of Cartesian method and Cartesian view of nature is in part a result of a historical path of least resistance (is this not rather Tao?). Those problems that yield to the attack are pursued most vigorously, precisely because the method works there. Other problems and other phenomena are left behind, walled off from understanding by the commitment to Cartesianism. The harder problems are not tackled, if for no other reason than that brilliant scientific careers are not built on persistent failure. So the problems of understanding embryonic and psychic development and the structure and function of the central nervous system remain in much the same unsatisfactory state they were fifty years ago, while molecular biologist go from triumph to triumph in describing and manipulating genes.”

And E. Chargaff in Heraclitean Fire writes similarly,

“The insufficiency of all biological experimentation, when confronted with the vastness of life, is often considered to be redeemed by recourse to a firm methodology. But definite procedures presuppose highly limited objects.”

At bottom, the metaphor behind the boring of holes into Chaos, is that of social intercourse. The Logos rationality that lies behind much of Greek thought, also conceals a similar meaning. Logos is not just rationality, but the very common word meaning “speech, language, narrative, talk”. Behind Logos is communication, the kind of communication that the guests of Chaos were trying to achieve with their inaccessable host. Is all philosophical speculation an attempt to preserve a dialogue that does not exist? Does every question set the stage for aletheia, or preclude it?

Dunamis

4

Dunamis,

I have found that every culture, in every time, has attempted to find a way of explaining that awareness that goes beyond language and conceptual capacity. Early Greek and Asiatic philosophy, most eastern philosophy, center’s around the illusion of language as reality. Even the christian gnostics understood that the language prevented one’s ‘return to the light’ (god). Modern western thought, in large part, created a rigorous form of ever tightening dissection and definition of language and concept, which may have produced ever greater ‘knowledge’, but perhaps not so much more understanding. Sudden and brief meant well, and so they proceeded to act out their preconceived ideas (knowledge) without the understanding that they were killing the host.

There is no particular method of assigning meaning that is necessarily better than another. The collective methods are simply man-made tools to examine that which is. The scientific method, with all its’ power of explanation and prediction has dominated western culture for several centuries. It is a powerful ‘tool’ for explaining ‘what’. What seems to have been lost is our explanation of ‘why’?

Yes, we can and do make paths that, depending on their structure, may lead us into new understanding. It depends on that which you seek.
Philosophy, in its’ inability to provide ‘the final answer’, does maintain the dialogue, even as it obscures the same.

It is the intent (known or not) that makes the question support the underlying truth or deny it.

Remember, we the sentient, are the only conduit of meaning. “Thou art not August unless I make thee so.”

JT

5

J.T.,

“I have found that every culture, in every time, has attempted to find a way of explaining that awareness that goes beyond language and conceptual capacity.”

What does this mean? It seems to imply that there is some universal truth here. But the opposite can be said, even more forcefully, that every culture has attempted to explain things with language and concepts. If you mean only that there is an inadequacy to concepts, with this I fundamentally agree, but the question is ‘what is the value of the things discovered through concepts?’, and does this play its part in the uncovering of “aletheia” or obscuring it.

Dunamis

6

Dunamis,

Well, the short answer is there is no value of things discovered through concepts without assigning value. Concepts, as well as language, are constructs. They have no intrinsic value and/or meaning. They may provide us insight or not, depending on the construction. Our constructs may lead us to the underlying reality or may bury it under layer after layer of ‘knowing’.

It finally comes to, ‘pick a card, any card’. :slight_smile:

JT

7

J.T.

“They may provide us insight or not, depending on the construction.”

I too can talk like a zen-master. Black is black, except when it is white. Your quote suggests that some constructs provide insight, some do not. But if “with insight” and “without insight” lies within the Tao, the Taoist prescriptives are meaningless. Pick a card, any card is not really the Taoist answer. Nor is it the philosopher’s answer, unless you are Nihilist. But perhaps you are a nihilist, in which case all is excused, or at least understood.

Dunamis

8

I apologize if I intrude.

The men who kill Chaos say, “All have seven holes” This is not true. Chaos obviously lacks seven holes. Yet they assume that it must be some kind of mistake that Chaos lacks seven holes. So because they think that they are right, they seek to bring Chaos into alignment with the idea of what is true. Yet in fact they were mistaken because Chaos dies when he has seven holes. Instead of accepting the world they wanted to reshape the world in their own image of what is should be. They even thought their actions would result in a benefit for Chaos.

Men want the Truth to be simple and yet they face a complex world. In order to have simple Truth they must either ignore most of the world or seek to transform it.

Do I come with a beginner’s mind or an experts mind? A beginner knows little and sees much. An expert knows much and sees little. In his area of expertise he does not have to see much, he can rely on what he knows. Yet he may not accept the limit of his knowledge and may carry the same attitude everywhere he goes. So even when he is far beyond his expertise he may still pay attention to his knowledge and ignore his eyes.

Does one bring his or her preconceived order to the chaos? Or does one study the chaos and seek to find the order that is hidden within it?

9

Xanderman,

Please jump right in.

“Does one bring his or her preconceived order to the chaos? Or does one study the chaos and seek to find the order that is hidden within it?”

Would you consider asking a question to be “boring a hole” into Chaos?

Dunamis

10

Thank you, Xander, for getting the thread out of that “would a rose by any other name smell as sweet” hole it seems to have bored itself into. Xander I definitely think you’ve nailed the hammer on the hard spot. Humanity destroys its most beautiful and precious host, Chaos, when it trys to shape it like humanity. Instead, should humanity not attempt to make itself more like Chaos, gracious and generous, before its brief and sudden time has passed?

So the question is now: “Is questioning itself, looking for ‘truth’ destroying our gracious host?” Have pinpointed the problem, correctly cornered the query?

I don’t think that was the original point of the story. But what you are getting at is, I think, “Is understanding and the search of truth killing the joy of innocence and chaos?”

Well to take from the Greeks, Is the unexamened life worth living?

11

PLWKSC,

"I don’t think that was the original point of the story. But what you are getting at is, I think, “Is understanding and the search of truth killing the joy of innocence and chaos?”

I’m not sure it wasn’t the original point of the story. The question in the hands of Socrates, the master of the examined life, cuts through aporic states, perhaps much as “sudden” and “brief” bored through chaos. The examined life seems much to be against the “uncarved block” of Taoist understanding, in fact antithetical to it. And as “brief” and “sudden” are the offenders here, it seems that it is the contingency of the moment, the desire to narrate, predict and control events that may lie at the bottom of the dissecting mind.

Dunamis

12

Change and Uncertainty killed primitivity just as Brief and Sudden killed chaos.

Was Primitivity’s death unaviodable, or is Change and Uncertainty unavoidable? Is Brievity and Suddeness the death of Chaos? Is the problem that the Chinese folkstory is vague or that you’re trying to analyze it through a Greek perspective? Is it more fun to fit the square block into the square hole or the round one?

13

PLWKSC,

“Is the problem that the Chinese folkstory is vague or that you’re trying to analyze it through a Greek perspective?”

I am looking at them in light of each other. This is what is done in philosophy sometimes. Concepts from different systems are compared to each other. Here we have a thoroughly Eastern concept, and a thoroughly Western concept. One advocates not cutting through, the other cutting through. Both seek a revelation of the Truth. The Eastern view seems to contradict itself in that Man too is part of the Tao and everything he does would be part of the Tao. The Western view has to take into account the determinative nature of the question, how it possibly frames the answer ahead of time, reveals little more than the destination, and that knowledge is more a question of the question and its end-point, than anything else. And it too might be following a historical path of least resistance. Each view has its contradictions. Beneath each is a conception of the Natural and the attempt to reveal it.

Dunamis

14

Dunamis,

My ‘card’ reference may have sounded cheeky, but I was serious. Let me try again.

Simple. Keep it simple. Western thought revolve’s around dissection in ever increasingly small parts attempting to know or understand the whole. Eastern thought promotes a methodology of clearing away the minute in an attempt to see the whole. Neither method claims to explain ultimate reality but both hope to illuminate it. Is either methodology better than the other? Having studied both, I found advantages and disadvantages in both. Western thought is easier at the beginning. We love taking things apart. But the complexity of meta-meta-meta as we get into deeper detail may bog us down. Eastern thought is frustrating at first because one has to release so many preconceived ideas in order to see anything.

Ultimately, I believe that either way of thinking can bring understanding. The critical issue (for me) is less the method than remembering that the result is a construct, not the reality.

JT

15

Ten.,

“Western thought revolve’s around dissection in ever increasingly small parts attempting to know or understand the whole. Eastern thought promotes a methodology of clearing away the minute in an attempt to see the whole. Neither method claims to explain ultimate reality but both hope to illuminate it.”

You can keep it simple. I prefer to think a little more about things. Your summation of “Western thought” actually misses the direction that Platonic thinking is heading. It works from the individual, building towards the general in order to reach the abstract, transcendent whole; it strips away the differences and produce “aletheia”, the revelation. As to neither method claiming to explain ulitimate reality, but only illuminate it, this seems like word play to me. In Plato to explain would be to illumine. This is philosophy, but you suggest, hey, don’t mind the details, its all the same soft mushy thing. Since you are serious about “pick a card” philosophy, I at least know where you stand. Everything you have said is about as true as anything you have not said. I’ll hold you to that, if you don’t mind. :slight_smile:

Dunamis

16

In and of itself, no. I doubt the story was about asking questions. Chaos was apparently beyond the comprehension of the two other characters. They did not merely investigate Chaos or explore him, they tried to reform Chaos into a pattern that was already familiar to them. They didn’t just accept Chaos as different.

I think Tentative points out an important distinction between the Western perspective and the Eastern perspective. The West analyzes the world from an atomist model while the Eastern mind sees a more holistic picture. Our most common examination of the world, the scientific method, is focused on the tiny parts and how they interact. This reaches further and further into microscopic words with operations almost beyond belief.

Now this atomist model has led us to develop magnificent technology. We are now able to customer biological molecules in corn. Yet we have no idea what will happen when we introduce the new corn into the existing ecosystem.

Historically the Eastern model was more holistic. One did not just break the system into part and then try to figure out how those bits went back together again, you studied the whole system and tried to make sense of it that way.

Yet the real mystery is not just in the microcosm or the macrocosm but in the mesocosm where the two worlds intersect. How do we reunite these two different and independently useful models together? To discover truth the microscopic information must come be reunited. We must not just have a number of independent hyper-specialized truths, but a singular whole Truth that encompasses all of them.

17

Dunamis,

By all means, continue with knowing. It’s a fun pastime. :smiley:

JT

18

Xanderman,

“In and of itself, no. I doubt the story was about asking questions.”

I disagree. The story was about any attempt to accommodate Chaos to one’s own perspective. And a question is exactly this kind of thing. (Note the role of the question and non-answer in Zen koans). But this is getting into a very broad brush East/West talk, the kind of thing that really doesn’t go far. For me both the East and the West have projected fantasies of the “Natural” and methods on how to get to it, or remain true to it. It’s not East vs. West, its Natural vs. Artificial. Both have presumptions that seem to be in error.

Dunamis

19

I can hear my old English teacher, Dr. Speckt telling his students to go back to the text.

The goal of the characters appears to be benevolent. They wanted to “repay his kindness.” In each version they give something to compensate for an apparent deficiency. I see this additive quality as the factor makes their action harmful. They are giving what is unneeded. Chaos does not need anything from outside of it to survive.

Yet before when they were receptive to Chaos then each of the men benefited.

Is there a meaning to the text that is obscured by the translation? Why do you see asking questions as being one meaning of idea ‘boring holes’?

20

Dunamis wrote:

As I understand it, there is a genuine objective relationship between wholeness and its ultimate divisions into things or fractions of the whole. In the discussion on Kant’s "thing-in-itself, any "thing, would have to additionally be recognized as a fraction and as such, connected cosmologically to a universal structure.

But apparently we cannot do this. We get in our own way. It is much easier for me to grasp the problem from a Christian perspective such as that given by Father Sylvan:

For us to grasp the objective relationship between the universal wholeness and its parts would require learning how to “understand” so as not to get in our own way by falling victim to conceptualization and losing the value of the process itself of the inner simultaneous experience of the whole and its parts. So for me, the value of pathmaking is directly related to the ability to “understand.”

Can such a search produce happiness? I don’t think so. I believe it can lead to the experience of something above happiness.

Socrates seems to agree that the philosophical search and happiness are not necessarily related but it is advisable to attempt to choose one or the other.:

:slight_smile:

I don’t really think my delving into hidden realities is for the sake of happiness. It is more for the purpose of scratching a perpetual itch.