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 äžćž (the most obvious Chinese equivalent) didnât evoke the same associations as the term Deus did in Latin. Instead, they adopted a more obscure wordâtianzhu 怩䞻âso 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 èȘç¶ and wu wei çĄçș.2 I will often use ziran, or âspontaneity,â 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 textsâfirst, 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 èȘç¶
At first glance, interpreting the Chinese word ziran èȘç¶ 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 èȘç¶ 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 ç¶ 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 âdao of natureâ and then says of the âdao of people,â bu ran äžç¶âthat it is not like this (i.e., it is different). The preposition ranhou ç¶ćŸ (afterward/and then) in contemporary Chinese is derived from this meaning, combining ran ç¶ and hou ćŸ (after) to get after such (see Laozi 65). Ran occurs in this sense also in chapters 54 (ćŸäœä»„ç„怩äžç¶ć, how do I know the world is like this?) and 57 (ćŸäœä»„ç„ć
¶ç¶ć, how do I know it is like this?).
Ran ç¶ 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 è¶
ç¶âaloof in appearance. It also appears in this sense in Laozi chapters 53 (jie ran ä»ç¶) and 73 (chan ran çčç¶).
Outside of the above seven occurrences in the Laozi, the character ran ç¶ occurs five more times, all preceded by the character zi èȘ. 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 èȘ mean?
If you ask a scholar of Classical Chinese grammar what zi èȘ means, the first response you will get is probably something such as, âThatâs easy, it is a coverb meaning action from.â The following are examples in which the word zi carries the meaning action from:
èȘć€ćä» from the past up to the present (Laozi 21)4
èȘæ€ä»„ćŸ going on from here (Zhuangzi 2)
èȘćŸć·æ§æ€ä»„éšć€«ć since we took up our axes to follow you, sir (Zhuangzi 4)
èȘć
¶ćè
èŠäč look at them from the viewpoint of their similarities (Zhuangzi 5)
The zi èȘ of ziran èȘç¶, however, cannot mean action from, otherwise the entire two-character term would mean something like being in the state of from, which wouldnât make much sense.
Another meaning of zi èȘ is as a reflexive pronominal adverb, meaning to do oneself or to do for oneself. For instance:
èȘèŹ to refer to oneself (Laozi 39)
èȘéșć
¶ć bring tragedy upon themselves (Laozi 9)
èȘç„è
æ to know oneself is acuity (Laozi 33)
èȘäșć
¶ćżè
in service to oneâs own mind (Zhuangzi 4)
äžèœèȘè§Łè
cannot free oneself from bonds (Zhuangzi 6)
This seems like a more useful way of understanding zi èȘ for our purposes. One example that seems at first glance to also fit this pattern is in the phrase min zi zheng æ°èȘæŁ, 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 âof themselvesâ?
Letâs call the first interpretation (âthe people correct themselvesâ) the typical interpretation of zi, and letâs call the âof themselvesâ 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: âthe people of themselves become correctâ? 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 Iâm suggesting is that the special interpretation is the proper understanding of the zi èȘ of ziran èȘç¶. 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. Itâs 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:
æçĄçșïŒèæ°èȘćïŒ
æć„œéïŒèæ°èȘæŁïŒ
æçĄäșïŒèæ°èȘćŻïŒ
æçĄæŹČïŒèæ°èȘæšž.
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 nobodyâs doing it to the universe. Itâs just happening. This is the sense of zi èȘ in ziran èȘç¶. 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 èȘ 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, âGrow!â 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 ziranâit 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 seedâwhat we might call its selfâwill blur in that connection. So you donât 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 natureâmountains, forests, etc.âis 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 çĄçș
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 çĄçș, 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 çșçĄçșïŒćçĄäžæČ» (Laozi 3)
Dao always wu wei, and everything gets done éćžžçĄçșèçĄäžçș (Laozi 37)
Lessening and lessening, until finally reaching wu wei æäčćæïŒä»„èłæŒçĄçș (Laozi 48)
I wu wei, and the people transform spontaneously æçĄçșïŒèæ°èȘć (Laozi 57)
The sage wu wei, and for this reason nothing is ruined èäșșçĄçșæ
çĄæ (Laozi 64)
In the first passage, we see a description of how a leader governs. The leader doesnât do a whole lot, and yet everything gets done. In the second, we see a description of how the Dao functionsâthat is, of how the processes of nature function. Thereâs not a lot of intentional action going on, but everything that need...