Between the Ideal and the Real
January 19th, 2009 
Chinese Philosophy, Life, Taoism 
Chris
Tao Te Ching 63 offers some good practical advice. When I discuss this poem with students, I am often struck by how fiercely their heads nod in an affirmative direction that indicates that their present dispositions, with respect to the subject of this poem, are not only decidedly non-Taoist, but moreover that they recognize that this may not be a very good thing.
Warning: a very long, very rambling, stream-of-consciousness post is below the fold.
Here’s TTC 63:
Act without action
Manage without meddling
Taste without tasting
Great, small, many, few
Respond to hatred with virtue
Plan difficult tasks through the smallest tasks
Achieve large tasks through the smallest tasks
The difficult tasks of the world
Must be handled through the simple tasks
The large tasks of the world
Must be handled through the small tasks
Therefore, sages never attempt great deeds all through life
Thus they can achieve greatness
One who makes promises lightly deserve little trust
One who sees many easy tasks must encounter much difficulty
Therefore, sages regard things as difficult
So they never encounter difficulties throughout life
(translated by Derek Lin)
There is a lot of good advice packed in here, but I want to concentrate on the second stanza out of context for a moment.
One of the main things that I think get in our way in life is our desire to plan big. I mean look – there’s nothing wrong with ambition. But it’s the way in which we make those plans that causes so many problems. In short, we start to fall prey to a vision of how the future must look. We see it, and then we look at how things are “now” and we become overwhelmed by the demons that emerge in the “space” between the way things “are” and the ways things “ought to be.” In fact, I like Laozi’s apparent reference to these unfortunate psychological results that occur as a consequence of obsessive big-planning in TTC 55. There, he talks about how, for the “newborn infant” (who is simple and unimposing):
Poisoning insects do not sting them
Wild beasts do not claw them
Birds of prey do not attack them
Who can claim to not have experience of the demons that emerge within that wretched space? I know I have! I also know that when you experience those demons, you just can’t get shit done. Why? Because you feel disconnected from your life – you feel defeated, without power and useless. All in all, you feel overwhelmed by anxiety and frustration. The only thing that follows from these feelings is a grab for the controller of your Sony Playstation and a firm disconnection from the business of actual embodied living. A little distraction, please.
I remember seeing this in play on a smaller scale in graduate school. For many of my cohort, writing a dissertation was the composing of one’s “magnum opus.” For some reason (I’m not sure why) there was a strange mythos surrounding the dissertation. Perhaps it was because some philosophers got famous as a result of their dissertations. Perhaps it was simply because it was your first “monograph” of sorts, and you thus wanted to make sure that it fully represented all your potential in glowing form. I don’t know. But I do know the climate existed.
So what was the result of it? Well, for many, it meant unfinished dissertations. Or it meant dissertations that took years and years longer to write than necessary. Why? Simple: every time you thought about the thing, you found yourself paralyzed by anxiety and frustration. It needs to be so long. It needs to be so good. It needs to exemplify genius. And then you stare at the blank screen. You have nothing written yet. Or maybe just a bit. There’s an awfully big “gulf” there between the way “things are” and the way things “ought to be.” Maybe it would be best to watch a little television. Or surf the web. Or go get a beer. A little distraction, please. Thus the situation unfolds, over and over again, like Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence. Before you know it: you’ve dropped out, been kicked out, or finally finish after 10+ years of tortured writing.
How do you get by this? I must admit, I was good at this problem (the dissertation). I never bought into the whole deification of philosophy thing (probably due to too many years in the work world before going to graduate school) so I never formed that ideal notion of what the thing should look like. I chopped it up into chapters, and just wrote each chapter without thinking much about the rest of them. And within each chapter, I wrote the sections without thinking much about the other ones. Before I knew it, I had chapters, and then before I knew it, I had a dissertation. I focused on the small parts, and had fun with them on their own. In doing this, the actual shape of the “whole project” evolved as I went, in a natural unforced way. I didn’t “hem myself in” by a preconceived notion of what the end product had to look like. I’m not tooting my own horn here. In other areas of life, I’m not too good at this. I just had a good strategy for writing my dissertation.
I tell this story to students as a way of thinking about TTC 63, and as a way of thinking about life in general (“life as dissertation” – there’s something to that whole notion of “curriculum vita” after all). We can focus obsessively on the “end product” – how one’s life should look in 5, 10, or 20 years. We can then look at where we are now and be paralyzed by anxiety, frustrated when the actual world does not cooperate in the construction of that ideal goal, and also paralyzed by the belief that all of the present parts “must fit just the right way”. Like agonizing over a dissertation, I can’t think of a more antagonistic way to go about one’s life. It doesn’t sound particularly fun, and it does sound to me to put a lot of therapists in business. It leads to distracted lives.
When we talk about this stuff, it becomes obvious to me that just as I suffer from these problems, so do my students. They are more than well aware of these things. They are given very firm instructions by their parents and by society for “how their lives should look” later on down the road. These instructions are varied, but share very familiar themes. Students, as a result, feel and experience the “fallout” that comes as a result of living under these oppressive and obsessive ideal portraits. They don’t “enjoy the moment” (outside of partying). They see their educations as “means” to an end. They think only about consumption. They talk a lot about “living in the moment” and enjoying “the small tasks” but they are not very good at it. They talk a lot about “letting life just unfold in an natural way” and “enjoying the moment” (carpe diem and all that) but they know deep down that in reality this is not what they are doing at all (I mean really — who is?).
In the end, we are all – my students, my friends, my family, me – living in a madhouse that takes form in that “space” between the ideal and real worlds. It’s hard to find the way out, isn’t it? It’s a terrible realization to make. When we talk about it in class, usually a somber mood falls upon the conversation as we all – myself included – realize that we have become prisoners to our own obsessive grasping ways of going about “attacking” (as opposed to experiencing) life. We start to realize that we don’t respect life or open up to its mysteries — we want to consume it like a bag of junk food. We want it to do what we want it to do, and that’s just about it. Life is like a disposable appliance.
So Laozi is whispering in our ears. But after all, who is up to this task? Who is ready to live in a way focused on the small tasks, and let greatness naturally unfold in an organic way? Who is really ready to cede typical understandings of “control” – to submit to life in a way that, in the end, allows one to live “as a sovereign” (as Laozi puts it)?
Maybe this is really all bullshit?
Tags: Chinese Philosophy, Life
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