Ziran

The Philosophy of Spontaneous Self-Causation

Brian Bruya

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781438488325
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Eastern Philosophy

Ziran, an idea from ancient Daoism, defies easy translation into English but can almost be captured by the term "spontaneity." It means "self-causation, " if "self" is understood as fundamentally plural, and "causation" is understood as sensitivity and responsiveness. Applying ziran to the fields of action theory, attention theory, and aesthetics, Brian Bruya uses easy-to-read, straightforward prose to show, step-by-step, how this philosophical concept from an ancient tradition can be used to advance theory today. Incorporated into contemporary philosophy of action, ziran opens us to the notion of movement and action as self-organizing. Incorporated into contemporary cognitive science, ziran opens us to the possibility of effortless attention, contrary to the reigning paradigm. Incorporated into contemporary aesthetics, ziran opens us to a new category of art—somatic art—and a new, refined understanding of improvisation.

Chapter 1

Ziran and Its Absence in Western Philosophy

Spontaneous Self-Causation, or Natural Action, in Daoism

Importing a concept from one tradition into another is challenging. Not only do the languages not exactly match up, neither do the conceptual schemes. When Catholic Jesuit missionaries first went to China and tried to explain their idea of God to the Chinese, translating God as shangdi 上帝 (the most obvious Chinese equivalent) didn’t evoke the same associations as the term Deus did in Latin. Instead, they adopted a more obscure word—tianzhu 天主—so that they could infuse it with their own associations.¹

In the first three chapters of this book, I import the ancient Chinese concept of spontaneous self-causation, or natural action, into contemporary thought. In the classical Chinese tradition, there were two basic terms for this: ziran 自然 and wu wei 無為.² I will often use ziran, or “spontaneity,” as a blanket term for the idea.

The first step will be to explain the idea in its original context. To do this, I will run through three distinct ways of expressing it in classical Daoist texts—first, through the term ziran; second, through the term wu wei; finally, through the skill episodes in the Zhuangzi. After giving a full explanation of the idea in its original context, I will canvass the Western philosophical tradition for a robustly theorized equivalent idea. Spoiler alert: there is none. The closest we come prior to the twentieth century is the idea of spontaneity (from the Latin sponte). As the exploration unfolds, it will become clear why that idea is philosophically problematic.

Ziran 自然

At first glance, interpreting the Chinese word ziran 自然 seems easy and straightforward. It means nature, as in forests, streams, mountains, and sunsets, cranes migrating north and pandas munching on bamboo. But this is its meaning in contemporary Chinese. We are interested in its meaning in Classical Chinese, the Chinese of the Daoists Laozi and Zhuangzi³ in particular, who lived in the first few centuries BCE.

In contemporary Chinese, most words have two characters. In Classical Chinese, most words have one character. So when we see a word such as 自然 from classical Chinese and want to understand exactly what it means, it helps to break it down and look at the characters separately. When we do this, we find that the term is actually quite complicated.

The meaning of the character ran 然 is itself difficult to pin down, as it functions in two related but distinct ways. When occurring by itself, it means such as this or like this, or just such or this. For example, chapter 77 of the Laozi describe the “dao of nature” and then says of the “dao of people,” bu ran 不然—that it is not like this (i.e., it is different). The preposition ranhou 然後 (afterward/and then) in contemporary Chinese is derived from this meaning, combining ran 然 and hou 後 (after) to get after such (see Laozi 65). Ran occurs in this sense also in chapters 54 (吾何以知天下然哉, how do I know the world is like this?) and 57 (吾何以知其然哉, how do I know it is like this?).

Ran 然 also means something like having the appearance of or being in a state of. In this sense, it invariably occurs immediately following an adjective. We see an example of this in Laozi 26 chao ran 超然—aloof in appearance. It also appears in this sense in Laozi chapters 53 (jie ran 介然) and 73 (chan ran 繟然).

Outside of the above seven occurrences in the Laozi, the character ran 然 occurs five more times, all preceded by the character zi 自. As the second of two characters, it seems at first glance to also mean in these instances having the appearance of or being in a state of. But what does zi 自 mean?

If you ask a scholar of Classical Chinese grammar what zi 自 means, the first response you will get is probably something such as, “That’s easy, it is a coverb meaning action from.” The following are examples in which the word zi carries the meaning action from:

自古及今 from the past up to the present (Laozi 21)⁴

自此以往 going on from here (Zhuangzi 2)

自吾執斧斤以隨夫子 since we took up our axes to follow you, sir (Zhuangzi 4)

自其同者視之 look at them from the viewpoint of their similarities (Zhuangzi 5)

The zi 自 of ziran 自然, however, cannot mean action from, otherwise the entire two-character term would mean something like being in the state of from, which wouldn’t make much sense.

Another meaning of zi 自 is as a reflexive pronominal adverb, meaning to do oneself or to do for oneself. For instance:

自謂 to refer to oneself (Laozi 39)

自遺其咎 bring tragedy upon themselves (Laozi 9)

自知者明 to know oneself is acuity (Laozi 33)

自事其心者 in service to one’s own mind (Zhuangzi 4)

不能自解者 cannot free oneself from bonds (Zhuangzi 6)

This seems like a more useful way of understanding zi 自 for our purposes. One example that seems at first glance to also fit this pattern is in the phrase min zi zheng 民自正, which under this construal would mean the people correct themselves. Interestingly, however, that is not how translators tend to render it. Here are two translations from well-known Chinese scholars:

The people of themselves become correct.⁵

The people are rectified of themselves.⁶

What do the translators mean by “of themselves”?

Let’s call the first interpretation (“the people correct themselves”) the typical interpretation of zi, and let’s call the “of themselves” rendering the special interpretation of zi. In the typical interpretation, there is a discrete subject, a discrete object, and the subject is doing something to the object. In this example, the subject and object happen to be the same. The form of the sentence under this interpretation is that there is an action, and one is doing the action to oneself. There is a subject/object dichotomy, there is intentionality, and there is a clear path of causation.

What about the special interpretation of zi: “the people of themselves become correct”? This is a very different way of saying that something is happening. There is no directionality to it. There is no intentionality to it. And there is no subject/object dichotomy.

What I’m suggesting is that the special interpretation is the proper understanding of the zi 自 of ziran 自然. There is an emphasis on the impetus over the effect. Thus, it is not that the people are correcting themselves. Rather, it is that the people are becoming correct, and nobody outside is doing it to them. It’s just happening. There is a softening of causation away from a single impetus deliberateness to what I call a more vague multivalent causation. The same chapter has three more examples of this usage. Here are all four together:

我無為，而民自化；

我好靜，而民自正；

我無事，而民自富；

我無欲，而民自樸.

I take no action and the people are transformed of themselves;

I prefer stillness and the people are rectified of themselves;

I am not meddlesome and the people prosper of themselves;

I am free from desire and the people of themselves become simple like the uncarved block.

To get a better sense of the distinction between these two understandings of causation, consider the following two sentences in plain English:

The universe moves itself

The universe moves of itself.

In the first, there is the universe as the subject, there is the universe as the object, and the universe is doing something to itself. Now, consider the second one. It is a very different sense. All we really know is that the universe is moving and nobody’s doing it to the universe. It’s just happening. This is the sense of zi 自 in ziran 自然. There is no presupposition regarding a self, causation, or the relationship. Something is just happening and there is a self somehow involved in initiating it.

The word zi 自 occurs many times across the Laozi and Zhuangzi. It occurs seventeen times in this sense, and half of them are in the term ziran, but half of them are not. This sense of zi is what I want to point out as a unique idea in the philosophy of action stemming from the early Daoist tradition. We can define it as movement, or action, from internal resources, with no interference, in a multivalent causality. Like many philosophers around the world, the Daoists were trying to account for movement and changes that we see in the world. They wanted to know: When things move in the world, how do we make sense of that movement? Where does it come from? What are its effects? What can we say about the process?

What we are talking about in technical terms is self-causation, and the best English term for this kind of self-causation is spontaneity. To understand the idea of zi as spontaneous self-causation, I like to think of the example of a seed. If I take a seed and put it right here on the desk and say, “Grow!” it is not going to listen to me, even if I threaten it. I cannot force it to grow. But if I put it in its natural environment (moist, warm soil), it will ziran—it will grow of its own accord. It will grow from its own resources. Then it will connect to its environment, and the objective boundaries of the seed—what we might call its self—will blur in that connection. So you don’t have the very clear sense of a discrete, enduring individual here (this latter point will become important later on).

We can easily see now why the contemporary sense of nature—mountains, forests, etc.—is not an appropriate sense of ziran in the early period. However, the adverb naturally seems to work better, as it has a sense of a process growing out of itself. And the adjective natural can work when paired with motion or action.

In the 1970s in the West, the biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Verala felt that there was no good term for describing the processes of nature unfolding and self-creating, so they proposed a new word: autopoiesis, which derives from the Greek and means to self-create. I think this is very close to the idea of ziran. The English word spontaneity derives from the Latin sponte, which means self-caused. Unfortunately, in colloquial English, it can also mean impulsive, so if we use it as a technical translation of ziran, the meaning must be specified.

Wu Wei 無為

So far, we have looked at the term ziran to get at this special notion of self-causation from Daoism. There are two more ways to get at it. The second way is through wu wei 無為, which literally means an absence of action and is often translated non-action. We find the term in both the Laozi and Zhuangzi. Consider the following passages:

Do wu wei and everything is governed 為無為，則無不治 (Laozi 3)

Dao always wu wei, and everything gets done 道常無為而無不為 (Laozi 37)

Lessening and lessening, until finally reaching wu wei 損之又損，以至於無為 (Laozi 48)

I wu wei, and the people transform spontaneously 我無為，而民自化 (Laozi 57)

The sage wu wei, and for this reason nothing is ruined 聖人無為故無敗 (Laozi 64)

In the first passage, we see a description of how a leader governs. The leader doesn’t do a whole lot, and yet everything gets done. In the second, we see a description of how the Dao functions—that is, of how the processes of nature function. There’s not a lot of intentional action going on, but everything that need...