Dao De Jing: A Process Perspective

This is a profoundly beautiful volume. It provides an eloquent and poetic rendering of the Dao De Jing through the lens of Whiteheadian, process-relational philosophy. The text of this ancient Daoist classic is typically attributed to a single individual, Laozi (“Old Man”), who is thought to have been a keeper of archives at Chou and wrote it in order that he be allowed to leave and to proceed through the Han-Ku Pass by its keeper, Yin Xi. However, the Dao De Jing is perhaps more accurately thought of as an anthology of “wisdom-metaphors” that was put together either by thinkers (or even by villagers) of the Warring States period in China (around 500–400 BCE) in order to try to temper the ongoing atrocities being carried out at the bequest of various rulers. Pointing to its global importance, the Dao De Jing is one chief foundational source of a major philosophical tradition and world religion. This volume presents an all-too-rare and tremendously valuable engagement by process-relational thought with Daoism, making the Dao De Jing accessible to anglophones and Whitehead scholars and enthusiasts alike. Furthermore, it may serve as an introduction to Whitehead and process-relational philosophy for those already attuned to the Dao De Jing and its themes.It has been said that, after the Bible, the Dao De Jing has been the most widely translated of any text. However, Keeton and Fu's translation is not just another “run-of-the-mill” attempt at expressing the (elusive) meaning of the text. It has the advantage of hindsight of multiple prior English translations (e.g., those of Gia-fu Fen and Jane English, Gu Zengkun, Wing-Tsit Chan, D. C. Lau, etc.) within it. It is inspired by these translations as well as by the suggestive process-oriented work of Roger Ames and David Hall (e.g., in Dao De Jing: A Philosophical Translation), building on them all. And, of course, the distinguishing feature of this volume is its full incorporation of Whitehead's holistic concepts and understandings in order to elucidate the text's core meanings. Here, one may recall Whitehead's own statements that his process-relational metaphysics is more aligned with Eastern sensibilities than to the typical inert, substance-oriented positivisms that are typical of Western philosophy.As for the structure of Keeton and Fu's volume, it first fully provides the historical background for their interpretation of the text, the context in which its wisdom-metaphors were written and compiled, and the pictographic or hieroglyphic ancient Chinese language that it was written in. There is a rich explanation of the Dao De Jing's key terms, followed by the Whitehead-inspired translation of the text (which is intermingled with evocative nature images). The volume is completed with the provision of insightful commentary on each of the eighty-one chapters of the text.Keeton and Fu describe their translation method as involving the bringing to the table of a “process-perspective lens” as well as a Wittgenstein-tinged “functional analysis” (which might be viewed as akin to structuralist methods while avoiding some of the abstractions and errors that led to poststructuralism). As they describe it, their “functional analysis” involves “painstakingly comparing every use of characters in the Dao De Jing until we can begin to formulate a variety of English phrases which meet each use in the original manuscript” (17). Keeton and Fu endeavor to “explore new levels of meaning in the Dao De Jing” by way of engaging the text with their “process-perspective-lens” and their “functional analysis filters” (17).Whereas a generic translation of the title of the Dao De Jing might be “The Classic (Jing) of the Way (Dao) of Virtue (De),” Keeton and Fu render it in unique fashion as “The Classical Book of Significant-Living Through Endless Creating” (17). Allied with Whitehead's emphasis on Creativity as the Category of the Ultimate, God and the World moving conversely with one another and being caught in the grip of this Ultimate, this rendering of the title stems from their interpretation of the overall nature of Dao as an everlasting or “Endless-Creating” and/or a “Creating Endlessly” (17). With reference to their functional analysis, Keeton and Fu propose suggestively that each articulation of Dao in the text “entails creativity” (17), such as to warrant their interpretation.In the general fashion of religious discourses, the Dao De Jing postulates that there is a concealed “Ultimate Reality” (although Keeton and Fu indicate that they are critical of this expression) that persons are aware of and can come to understand (in this context, the Ultimate Reality is figuratively named in the text as Dao, “the Way,” or “Endless-Creating”). Persons orienting themselves to this “Ultimate Reality” in the context of their lives, rather than acting waywardly in respect to it, may progressively (1) live, (2) live well, (3) live better, and (4) live sustainably, with increasing satisfaction, avoiding personal, societal, and civilizational calamity, to borrow some phraseology from Whitehead (FR 8). The problem that is waged in the iconic first lines of the Dao De Jing (“The Dao that can be spoken of in words . . . is not Dao-as-Endless-Creating; The name that can be spoken in words . . . is not the name of Endless-Creating”) indicates that human expressions in language of the nature of this “Ultimate Reality” are finite. They inevitably do violence to it and they cannot penetrate to its depths. For instance, through their use of, and dependence on, language, human beings engage in a conceptual “carving-up” of reality into separate, externally related substances, each supposedly containing its own essence, where in truth there are no such divisions or metaphysical signs of identity. No linguistic assertion operating from the perspective of what Keeton and Fu call the “object-ontology” (which is dominant in the West) can provide anything more than a very shadowy and temporal approximation of the Ultimate Truth, which is primitively undivided, primordially interrelated, and in constant creative flux. Yet, of course, language and linguistic expression themselves are a part of this “Ultimate Reality.” As contrasted with the problematic substance or “object-ontological” (12–14) assumption of the nature of reality, Whitehead's more holistic, process-relational event-ontology, which also emphasizes internal relations, provides a deeper representation of the nature of the Ultimate Reality as alluded to in the Dao De Jing. Of course, perhaps taking both substance- and event-ontologies together can get us further in our understanding of the Ultimate Reality, but the Ultimate Reality that is figuratively named as Dao remains inexhaustibly elusive, not only entailing Creativity but also thereby being the wellspring of Endless-Creating.One chief problem with complex human language (which emerged in the evolutionary past and is the medium through which our transgenerational, psychosocial inheritance system has made humanity superdominant of the planet) is that it tends to represent reality by way of dualities (e.g., male and female, big and small, strong and weak, good and evil, beautiful and ugly, true and false, victory and defeat, remembering and forgetting, superior and inferior, logical and emotional, living and dying, being and nothing, and God and the World/Nature). These dualities are typically to be construed as binary oppositions, each of the terms being held logically separate from the other. The understanding of reality through the prism of binary oppositions has become embedded habitually in the human mind as it is reinforced over vast swaths of time through the constant use of language and by logical principle (e.g., as in the principles of identity and the law of the excluded middle). It is also typically assumed that the first, or “yang,” terms in the binaries above have more value and importance than the second or “yin” terms. For example, modern culture tends all-too-simply to value the male, the big, the strong, the good, the beautiful, the true, victory, and so forth (the “yang” terms) over the female, the small, the weak, the evil, the ugly, the false, defeat, and so forth (the “yin” terms). Logocentrism, as postmodernist thinkers have called it, or the overemphasis on the former terms over the latter terms, has led to calamity and tragedy (e.g., typical fast food advertising that privileges a big meal over a small one, which leads to an obesity epidemic; an overemphasis on victory and the shunning of defeat in sport, which leads to tragedy, as athletes resort to unethical means like performance-enhancing drugs in order to win, thus undercutting the whole point of the sports competition they engage in; etc.).Chiefly important among the dualities is the binary of actuality and possibility/potentiality, actuality being privileged over potentiality when it comes to what we desire and have in the way of material possessions as well as when it comes to the existence of God (e.g., for Anselm, actuality is a perfection over potentiality). As exhibited in stanza 2 of the Dao De Jing, it is one of the whole points of the Dao De Jing to assist us to rebalance the value of each of the terms in the pairs and to see how they are commensurate equals in the nature of Ultimate Reality, rather than separate or strictly opposed, as in our culture's logical and logocentric bias. As Keeton and Fu assert, the yin-yang doctrine “teaches that all things and events are products of two elements, forces, or principles, yin, which is negative, passive, weak, focusing, and destructive, and yang, which is positive, active, strong, diffusing, and constructive” (37). Logically, the meaning or identity of the one is dependent on the postulation of its other as well as the negation of that other, but the premise of the Daoist stance in relation to such dualities is that this insinuates that the meaning of the one is thoroughly embedded within the other.As represented by the iconic Daoist “yin-yang” symbol, binary terms interpenetrate dynamically. There is a piece of the one in the other, as each interacts and grows with its other (i.e., concresces) and flows dynamically into the other. In Whiteheadian language, together the terms form a (logical) “contrast,” wherein “opposed elements stand to each other in mutual requirement” (PR 348), dynamically so, and are construed as complementary poles of the creative process. As Keeton and Fu write, these pairs “flow back and forth into-and-through each other . . . they are born together, live together, function together, and nowhere do they exist apart from each other” (20). They are “birth mates” that “have never been disjoined, except through artificial, complex, logical manipulation” (19) and/or “complementary-pairs” that “dynamically ↔ transform one another” in an “endlessly flowing rhythm-pattern” (272). Dao as an everlasting-creating or “Endless-Creating” and/or a “Creating-Endlessly” finds expression, according to Keeton and Fu, “as the process of dynamic ↔ transformation occurring between the complementary pairs of terms” and is exemplified especially in the “dynamic ↔ transformation between possibility (or potentiality) ↔ actuality” (17). For in relation to “the fundamental tension in Western philosophy between ‘possibility’/‘potentiality’ and ‘actuality,’ which has been a major conundrum for Western philosophers [and theologians] since Plato” (23—my addition), it is equally important to “lay up one's treasures in heaven” (Matthew 6:20) as it is to have what one needs in terms of material possessions in order to subsist. It is equally important to pursue authentic life goals as it is to have them actualized. And with reference to the notion that, as far as we know, all actual existents are temporal, namely, subject to the entropic ravages of decay and destruction, it is important to acknowledge God as potentiality rather than as solely actuality. On this note, Saint Anselm is arguably led into incoherence in his Proslogion when he postulated, on the basis of the statements “God is the most perfect being” and “perfection implies actuality” (over mere potentiality), that God is eminently actual. But then he is forced to suggest that God's existence is a particular form of existence that is somehow beyond space and time. As for the creative process that is the cosmos, one should avoid seeing God as an unmoved mover and self-caused substance (causa sui), “creat[ing] everything . . . and dominat[ing] everything as the sole ruler on high” (273–274). For God to truly be the Creator, it is important to associate God (as Whitehead does, for example, through his notions that God has primordial, consequent, and superjective natures) with potentiality rather than merely with actuality. Overall, as Keeton and Fu assert, “these interconnected complementary-pairs are actually two poles of the same Dao . . . these pairs, interdependent with each other, form a unified whole” (260–261). Of course, it is to be acknowledged that the supposed “nonbinary” way of thinking that is emphasized in the Dao De Jing is also part of a duality, given that the term “nonbinary” contrasts with “binary.”In regard to the Daoist wisdom of “how one should live (significantly)” in light of the Ultimate Reality that is figuratively known as Dao, wisely aligning ourselves with and living in harmony with Dao, I now turn to Keeton and Fu's discussion of the key Daoist notion of wu wei. Wu wei has typically been rendered in English as “action-in-inaction” (e.g., Lau translation). This is not wrong, but Keeton and Fu emphasize that wu wei should not be seen as translating into mere passivity or quietude, or as the “negation of all activities” (23). Rather, wu wei “expresses the foundation of the process” (23) of mutual dynamic ↔ transformation, and it should only be seen as negating “those human activities that work against or interfere with the flow of natural process” (23). Wu wei entails the artful skill of nonaction in the sense of stopping before reaching excess or deficiency, especially in terms of our actions, our graspings, our desires, and/or our ambitions, for “reaching too high, taking over-sized steps, or valuing only ourselves is not sustainable” (270). Both going too far toward excess (e.g., overindulging, overdevelopment) or going too far toward deficiency (e.g., starving oneself, underdevelopment) are unsustainable and inevitably lead to calamity. As highlighted objectively by the homeostatic, chronobiological, and autopoietic processes (the ancient Dao De Jing can be said to present a keen intuition of such objective, biological processes as they are known today) that belong to the natural unfolding and healthy functioning of living bodies and minds, in relation to the waxing and waning that characterizes the self-adjustment of human thought and action, the wisdom of wu wei involves moderation, namely, a stopping of oneself before crossing over from a mean state of well-being into either excess or deficiency. Otherwise, one experiences the calamity of a quick and chaotic reversion from excess to deficiency and/or from deficiency to excess (e.g., overeating leading to where one oneself, which in turn further Laozi and one of the other chief Daoist wu wei can be translated as and that and in terms of out beyond deficiency and excess that is with Here, in their of the meaning of wu Keeton and Fu the Whiteheadian of the creative process in which the subject that may become in the leading to as with the of in light of that is Dao, as in the Dao De and Fu the that in the of the Dao De Jing and that the wisdom of wu wei as it into the of and the between and is that of victory in (e.g., comes to are a given the and ongoing and that is on and For instance, it is that one as a of the of in and its and there is an ongoing that has from the of in the that The Dao De Jing's wisdom is an of wu that while is to there be then should to a of and then as as rather than On the of one become a or one not to or it in a that or on or on those of Rather, they to Dao, to wu wei in relation to of to a and themselves their as their rather than them as for their own for their In moderation, they to and engage with their rather than and at which do more than to how said have with the who is aligned with Dao their them to be the of English translations of the Dao De Jing, a (e.g., Lau, Ames and etc.) the wisdom of that is to be by way of wu wei in a way through the expression of the namely, the (as or of that a may use to their The of translations are and this rich in rendering the meaning of in general what it But this finds that is when this is Keeton and Fu's translation to the translating in the context of the “the of Endless a this finds that the of rendered in the context of the provides a and of the dynamic of and actuality within the creative process and their importance which Keeton and Fu emphasize in their Furthermore, it the of these terms with wu wei. In other by bringing together the of the importance of and not just actuality in the creative process and this with wu the rendering in the context of the an understanding of how one is to live in with the is a of in that has been out of the It is It is to become anything at all at this However, when a to excess by out too out of their or an in then the value is The that he or cannot material back the and that the is in some such cannot be at not With each that one and with each desire that one in their lives, one is their own as in a process of (as in the Here, it is to recall Whitehead that the of the the indicates a (PR As one their and goals and in one out and/or who one The of the points to the wisdom of being and what one is when one a in the Through the of wu this and that one truly to one's in this fashion and not at one's or to in that inevitably lead to calamity or to an unsustainable making too and/or by to too and goals too one may up oneself in too which tends to both a and their going Pointing to the importance of it is important to one on the (i.e., the of potentiality) as one and in the so that one the that one truly to with their rather than a being too in making a to one's or to live a life is a But this is For at the of one's life one only have the (i.e., the of potentiality), which a life not that is equally or a calamity. a key to be to the by stopping before reaching excess or deficiency with reference to the wisdom of wu the Keeton and Fu's volume is a major that has and global It not only provides a on Daoist but their importance in of the global to from a civilizational on and so as to avoid civilizational The Dao De Jing's wisdom-metaphors provide biological wisdom that is to a of Furthermore, this volume how well and Whiteheadian process-relational philosophy together as understanding and It a mutual of the meaning of the Dao De Jing's wisdom-metaphors through Whiteheadian concepts and Whiteheadian process-relational philosophy through Daoist and In this Keeton and Fu's work can also be seen as a and for the of and for the of the global that we in a time of their and It is that this volume further in the of

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.