160 | Edward Slingerland on Confucianism, Daoism, and Wu Wei

Plato and Aristotle founded much of what we think of as Western philosophy during the fourth and fifth centuries BCE. Interestingly, that historical period also witnessed the foundation of some of the major schools of Chinese philosophy, especially Confucianism and Daoism. This is a long-overdue Mindscape discussion of ancient Chinese ideas, featuring philosopher and religious-studies scholar Edward Slingerland. We talk about the relationship between these two schools of thought, and their differences and similarities with Western philosophy. One of the biggest ideas is wu wei, or “effortless action” — the way that true mastery consists of doing things without too much conscious control. Today we would call it “flow” or “being in the zone,” but the idea stretches back quite a ways.

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Edward Slingerland received his Ph.D. in religious studies from Stanford. He is currently Distinguished University Scholar, Professor of Philosophy, and Associate Member of the departments of Asian Studies and Psychology at the University of British Columbia. He is Director of the Database of Religious History, and co-director of the Center for the Study of Human Evolution, Cognition, and Culture. Among his books are Trying Not to Try: Ancient China, Modern Science, and the Power of Spontaneity, and a translation of Confucius’s Analects. His new book is Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization.

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0:00:00.0 Sean Carroll: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I’m your host, Sean Carroll. Many times here on Mindscape, we’ve had issues that dealt with philosophy, right? Either explicitly about philosophy or talking about biology or physics or politics in a way that involved philosophy. But almost always, the kinds of philosophy that we talked about were based on the Western tradition of philosophy. The tradition that goes back to the Ancient Greeks, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and people like that. We all know that’s not the only tradition out there. It is the tradition that I know the most about, for better or for worse, so it’s harder for me to lead an intelligent conversation about other areas. But for a long time, I thought that we should have a good conversation about Eastern philosophy, Chinese philosophy in particular. There was a very, very active set of schools of philosophy in Ancient China, about the same time as Aristotle and his friends were inventing Greek philosophy.

0:00:54.9 SC: The Warring States Period, in particular, was a period where you were inventing new ideas in Confucianism, Daoism and other kinds of traditions. So obviously, these are huge topics, this is much too big to talk about in one podcast, but that’s what we’re gonna do anyway. Today’s guest is Edward Slingerland, who is a distinguished university scholar and Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia, so he’s an expert in Ancient Chinese philosophy. He’s translated Confucius the whole bit. But one of the reasons why he’s interesting is because he doesn’t simply talk about that ancient philosophy for its own sake, he relates it to modern ideas. He tries to make the point that it is still a vibrant kind of set of ideas that relates in interesting ways to our current predicament as human beings and our current knowledge as scientists, learning more about how we think, how we act in the world. In fact, his most recent book is called Drunk, as in, you’ve had a lot to drink, you are now drunk. The subtitle is, How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization.

0:01:58.6 SC: So, as I ask him… Maybe I shouldn’t give it away, but I probably will. As I ask him in the podcast, what does that have to do with Ancient Chinese philosophy? Well, the answer lies in this idea that is in the title of the podcast episode of Wu wei, which is translated in various ways as either inaction, you know, not doing anything, but perhaps more accurately as effortless action, as doing things in a way where you’re not overly overthinking it, right? Where you’re in the zone, where you’re in that flow state rather than being a little bit too cognitive about what goes on. That was a central preoccupation of both Confucianism and Daoism and other schools of Ancient Chinese thought. It has a lot of resonance with modern ideas about meditation, neuroscience, etcetera, and the reason he got into the history of alcohol and tipsiness was that this is sort of an artificial way to get that not caring too much, not being too cognitive state to engage.

0:02:57.8 SC: Now, the Ancient Chinese philosophers were a little bit more systematic. They didn’t say, Just go out there and get drunk, they offered some advice for how to live better, basically. And I think that’s one of the major differences between Ancient Greek philosophy and Ancient Chinese philosophy. There’s a lot of overlap, they talk a lot about very similar topics, but the emphases are a little bit different, and the Greeks maybe emphasized a little bit more abstract system building, and that the Chinese emphasized a little bit more down to earth practically, how to get this done, kind of stuff. Their philosophy was meant for people and how people live their lives. So, we’re gonna learn about that. It’s a lot to handle, obviously. I apologize for anyone out there who actually knows something about Chinese philosophy, but it’s very educational for people like me who want to know and know almost nothing, that’s the kind of thing that we’re here to do at the Mindscape Podcast. So, let’s go.

[music]

0:04:11.3 SC: Edward Slingerland, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.

0:04:13.7 Edward Slingerland: Thanks for having me.

0:04:14.5 SC: Now, I have to start by apologizing for not being the world’s best podcast host. You have a new book out called Drunk, about alcohol and its historical, cultural history and things like that. So the typical thing would be for me to invite you on the podcast to talk about that, yet I’m not doing that, because I’ve… [laughter]

0:04:34.4 ES: That’s fine, yeah.

0:04:35.3 SC: For a while now, I really wanted to talk more about Ancient Chinese philosophy, because we already had Shadi Bartsch on the show talking about how Chinese people read Ancient Greek philosophy, Plato and Aristotle, and so forth. But we haven’t really talked about the Chinese philosophy. I know you’re an expert in that, but I thought that just to start, I wanna know how it all fits together. You’ve written a book about alcohol, you’ve written a scholarly work about Ancient Chinese philosophy, you also have a web project on comparative religions, and you’ve been involved in modern psychology and neuroscience and so forth. Do you think that all of this work sort of falls in under an umbrella, does it have a theme, or is it just what you happen to think is interesting at the time?

0:05:16.1 ES: It all fits together if you squint [chuckle] and look at it from far enough away. So there’s a strange connection between my early Chinese philosophy work and the latest book on alcohol. So, one of the themes that I’m interested in, in early China is this idea of Wu wei or effortless action.

0:05:37.5 SC: Okay.

0:05:38.2 ES: So I argue… This is going way back to my dissertation. I argued that if you look at these otherwise disparate appearing Confucians and Daoists in early China, what they all have in common is they wanna get you into the spiritual state that’s called Wu wei, which literally means no doing or no trying, no striving. But I translated it as effortless action. It’s a state where you lose a sense of yourself as an agent, you lose a sense of time, it’s like being in the zone. And I talk about parallels with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s idea of flow.

0:06:19.4 SC: Okay. Yeah.

0:06:19.5 ES: It’s not dissimilar from flow. They think if you can get into this state, everything’s gonna work out, you will solve problems, you’ll be creative. People will like you, so you get this… If you get into Wu wei, you get this power that comes with it that unfortunately, in modern mandarin, it is pronounced, “duh”, like Homer Simpson…

[overlapping conversation]

0:06:41.2 ES: [0:06:41.3] ____ undergrads always love this.

0:06:44.4 SC: Let me mention, since this is an audio podcast in English and we’re gonna be using a lot of Ancient Chinese words, maybe when possible, let’s spell them just so people can look them up.

0:06:53.9 ES: Yeah, so these are the only two Chinese terms, I think we’ll need to know. So Wu wei is Wu wei, Wu wei and then De is just D-E.

0:07:06.8 SC: Good.

0:07:08.2 ES: So it’s sometimes translated as Virtue with a capital V. I prefer something like charismatic virtue or charismatic power, it’s when you get into a state of Wu wei… The Early Chinese have a theological explanation for why these two things hold together. So they think you get into Wu wei… Oh, sorry, one of the other term. You’re following the dao, right?

0:07:30.6 SC: The dao. Yeah.

0:07:31.1 ES: So, it used to be spelled T-A-O, with Wade-Giles romanization, now we spell it D-A-O using Pinyin, but same word. You’re in harmony with the Dao, heaven, this kind of supernatural agent, likes you, you’re doing what heaven wants, and so heaven gives you this power that allows you to be successful. So if you’re a Confucian, it’s the power that makes people wanna obey and follow you, even without being forced, they just admire you and they flock from all over to follow you. If you’re a Daoist, it’s what allows you to move through the world skillfully. You relax people around you, you help them, just your presence makes them relax and they become more in the dao, and so you kind of…

0:08:18.0 ES: You give other people little bits of your De, in this contagious way that’s interesting. So I got interested in this just from a historical perspective, so in my dissertation I argued that the centrality of this metaphor, this metaphorical state, can explain lots of other things in the early Chinese thought. So, the central, they face attention, they had this… They want you to get into a state of spontaneity, they want you to be relaxed and to not try. But how do you consciously try to not try? How can you consciously try to be spontaneous when you know that that’s the key to success? So you’re in a situation where you know you have to relax, and how do you try to do that?

0:09:05.3 ES: And so I argued in my dissertation and then later in my first academic book on this topic that, I call this “The paradox of Wu wei, how do you try not to try?” It’s a direct paradox. You can’t… It is a genuine paradox, you can’t solve it. Later on when I wrote a trade book about this… So my first trade book’s called Try Not To Try, I point out how just cognitively, it’s a paradox because you’re activating the part of your brain that you’re trying to shut down when you’re trying not try. It’s a lot like the paradox Dan Wegner, the late Dan Wegner talked about with “Don’t think of the white bear.” If I say that to you, you think of the white… I’m activating the concept, right?

0:09:47.4 SC: I have to ask you to share this wonderful story you told in your TED Talk about Mindball.

0:09:51.6 ES: Oh yeah, Mindball, yeah. I love this game ’cause it takes that tension and boils it down to just the smallest space possible. So Mindball is two ends of a table, you’ve got this metal ball in between you, and the goal is to push the metal ball to the other end of the table and it falls in some hole, and when it does that, you win. But of course, the trick is you’re pushing it with your mind and you’re hooked up to… So the way it works is that you’re hooked up to a EEG monitor and it’s measuring alpha and theta waves, so that’s the signature your brain kicks off when you’re relaxed, when you’re not trying. And the more… The way the game is set up, the more alpha and theta waves you produce, the more force you exert on the ball. So the way to win at Mindball is to not try to win.

0:10:45.3 SC: That’s genius.

0:10:47.5 ES: And it’s… It’s genius, and it’s a perfect microcosm of this tension, right? And the first time I played it, I was like, “Alright dude. I’m a professor of Chinese philosophy, I’m gonna be great at this.” And I played against the neuroscientist who ran the exhibit and she kicked my ass. [laughter] She was so good at it. And it’s funny ’cause I started out, I had my eyes closed and you could hear the ball moving around, so you know something’s happening, and I opened my eyes and I was winning. So the ball was mostly down to the other end of the table, and I thought, “Oh, I’m winning, I am pretty good at this.” And as soon as I thought that, it started rolling back toward me and then I started panicking and I was like…

0:11:28.4 SC: So many lessons.

0:11:28.5 ES: “Wu wei, Wu wei, relax.” And it just didn’t, it didn’t work. And she said she’d just developed tricks to win at this game, so she would just… As soon as the game started, she would think about her favorite vacation on this beach and remembering what it was like to lie in the sand. But this is a great… And so what I argue in the trade book actually is this is a tension we face in our lives all the time, where you’re on your first date and you know that to make a good impression, you should be charming and relaxed and feel confident, but how do you try to do that if you’re not feeling that way? And then professional athletes and performers know that they perform at their best when they’re relaxed and in the zone, and they live in a constant fear of choking, they live in constant fear of that feeling I had when the ball started rolling back toward me and I was like, “Oh, I’m not in Wu wei, I gotta get back in Wu wei.” So this is a real tension, and what the Early Chinese do is come up with various techniques for doing an end run around the tension. So meditate, sit like this and count your breaths.

0:12:39.9 ES: Do a ritual, so the Confucians give you rituals to do, and the idea is that the repetition of that, you’ll start to internalize certain values and they’ll become spontaneous eventually. So there’s a lot of different ways they develop to get around the tension that I think are helpful, but in one of these texts, the Zhuangzi, one of these early Daoist texts. So Z… In current Pinyin, it’s Z-H-U-A-N-G-Z-I, Zhuangzi. Little known Daoist, everyone knows about Lao Tzu and the Daodejing, but Zhuangzi is much more interesting.

0:13:14.9 SC: That does seem to be the consensus. Yeah.

0:13:16.8 ES: He, at one point, compares the Daoist sage to a drunken person, so he tells a story about someone’s going home from a party, they’re really drunk, they’re riding on a cart, and they fall off, and yet they’re not hurt, they just kind of roll with it. And he says, they didn’t know that they were riding, they don’t know that they’ve fallen out, their spirit was whole. And it’s clear at the end, he’s using this as a metaphor. He says, “If you can make your spirit whole in this way, by means of wine, how much more so can you do it with Heaven?” ‘Cause he wants you to be drunk on heaven, he wants you to be drunk on the spiritual force, but that made me…

0:13:56.7 ES: That analogy made me start thinking about alcohol as a cultural technology, so what if it’s the case that cultures… Cultures are aware that there’s this tension, that spontaneity or being open is key to attaining certain goals that are important for the culture and it’s hard to consciously make yourself spontaneous. So maybe one way around the tension is to use this chemical substance to short circuit the paradox, instead of trying with your mind to shut down your mind, you’re taking a chemical and turn down your prefrontal cortex a few notches. So that’s what got me interested in alcohol. So I’m interested in spontaneity and trust, that’s an overarching theme that has to do with why I got interested in Chinese philosophy in the first place. And alcohol actually is not as wild a departure from that as it might seem.

0:14:52.4 SC: Oh yeah, suddenly it makes perfect sense and it fits in with a lot of themes we’ve talked about on the podcast in other episodes, about conscious versus unconscious thought, system 1 versus system 2 cognitive things, and making certain processes more unconscious is often a success strategy, if you have to think about it too much, you’re gonna fail.

0:15:11.9 ES: Yeah, and so that’s what’s distinctive about early Chinese philosophy that appealed to me, is that they… If you wanna think of it this way, they’re a system 1 ethics, they’re virtue ethicists and virtue ethics roughly is this idea that the way to get… Virtue ethics roughly is a system 1 ethics, as opposed to the dominant enlightenment models which are totally dependent on system 2. So the dominant models of ethics in the West are Deontology and Utilitarianism. And what they have in common is they’re both cognitive control system 2 models. And if you’re Kant, what’s the right thing to do, you stop, you apply the categorical imperative, and that tells you what the right thing to do… And then you force yourself to do it. Top-down cognitive control. If you’re Utilitarian, what’s the right thing to do, you stop, you measure the values of the different options, you do the math, and then you force yourself to do the one that maximizes payoff, so again system 2, cognitive-control based.

0:16:21.1 SC: The step in which you do the math is not very system 1, it’s not very unconscious.

0:16:24.7 ES: Yeah. And that’s one of the central flaws I would argue with the Utilitarian, the idea that there’s some kind of metric that’s universal to values, I think is absurd. And I think, yeah what you would point out is that, that step of assigning value is a fully system 1 thing, and that’s where it’s not… Utilitarianism isn’t what Utilitarians think it is. So as opposed to those two, virtue ethics is the idea that the way you determine what the right thing to do is, is spontaneously know what the right thing to do is. The virtuous person in a situation that calls for a given virtue will just know how to do it. And when virtues are intention, so let’s say fairness is intention with empathy, they’ll know how to negotiate that tension intuitively because they’ve internalized these virtues and norms, and they can do it in an Wu wei fashion, basically, they do it in the spontaneous way.

0:17:30.7 SC: I have a very silly version of this, that might resonate with some listeners or even you, which is the progressive rock version of this. Bill Bruford, who is a famous drummer for Yes, one of the great progressive rock groups and he eventually quit and joined King Crimson instead, and the reason why he gave was literally that when he was in Yes, it was great, he was having a good time, but it was just, everything was planned, and they would hyper figure out what note should be and what key during what part of the solo, and he’d be told what to do. And he said he went to King Crimson and just, you play… You’re just supposed to know what to play, and there are no instructions given, and that’s very much the… Because a lot of the progressive rock musicians were classically trained, it’s very much the classical music versus jazz music sort of ethos in some sense.

0:18:19.4 ES: Right, right. But the jazz, so I talk about jazz in Try Not to Try. You are just kind of playing what you wanna play, but if you’re not trained, if you’re not trained, I think you’re gonna play it stupid, it’s gonna sound terrible. So the only way you can solo… My former brother-in-law is a jazz pianist in Rome and he plays very experimental jazz, and it’s all about soloing and improv, but he practices several hours a day. And his ability to improv is completely dependent on his classical training and all of the work he’s put into it, so. Jazz values that spontaneity but it’s because, in some ways, it’s hiding all the work that went into getting there.

0:19:14.0 SC: Well, yeah, that is an issue that came up with me whenever I sort of come into contact with Daoism, in particular but maybe also other kinds of Chinese philosophies. So I wanna dig into that, but we’ve already talked about several of the schools of thought, etcetera. Let’s give the road map to our listeners. Is it okay to think of Confucianism and Daoism as the two poles of this or is it more complicated than that? Where did it all start? All those things. Two minutes, you gotta… [laughter]

0:19:45.0 ES: Yeah, two minutes. All over Chinese philosophy in two minutes. Yeah. There are several schools. I studied the Warring States Period, so my specialty is roughly 5th through 3rd Century BCE, and this is the Golden Age of Chinese philosophy. It’s when all the native schools kinda got going. And then when China gets unified, I lose interest ’cause it gets really boring. [laughter] It gets really boring after that. But this is an exciting period. So the players are roughly the Confucians.

0:20:18.1 ES: So there’s Confucius, I suppose, the founder. We just have record of his teachings and very roughly speaking, we can say they’re the school of trying. So they think that the way you get to Wu wei is by training. They think that you’re incomplete by nature and what you need is cultural training. And so, they have these very elaborate rituals, they have classical learning, so you have to memorize these classical texts, and the idea is that there was this perfect, for Confucius, there was this perfect culture, the Western Zhou, that was lost and he happens to live in the state where the records of that culture were preserved.

0:21:02.4 ES: And he thinks the problem with his contemporaries is they’ve lost the way. They don’t follow this cultural way anymore, and the solution is lifelong training and ritual, and music, and poetry. And the idea is you reshape yourself. The goal is to reach Wu wei but it’s gonna take you a lifetime to do that. So Confucius didn’t get there until age 70. He’s got this autobiography, where he says, “By the age 15, I set my heart on learning and then I learned ritual.” And then at age 70, he says, “I could follow my heart’s desire without transgressing the bounds.” So that’s when he’s reached the state of Wu wei.

0:21:45.3 SC: And it sounds like enlightenment in some sense.

0:21:48.4 ES: Yes, but it’s not…

0:21:49.2 SC: What a Buddhist would call enlightenment?

0:21:51.3 ES: Yeah, I wouldn’t put it that way exactly. It’s a state where, basically, you’ve reshaped your system 1 so thoroughly that it just accords with this external normative culture perfectly, in a way that you don’t have to think about. You can now run on autopilot and you’ll do everything in the right way. So that’s roughly the kind of classical Confucian position. There’s a Confucian named Mencius who tries to… So let me tell you about the Daoists first, and there are so many kinds… I’ll try to split the difference. So the Daoists, on the other hand, say, “If you wanna be spontaneous and natural, culture is deadly and training is deadly, so you need to… ” So the first of these figures, Lao Tzu, thinks that the reason… Everyone agrees that everything sucks right now. They’re in the Warring States, everyone’s fighting with each other…

0:22:46.4 SC: It’s literally called the Warring States Period, right? Yeah.

0:22:50.1 ES: Or it’s the standard thing where the current world is terrible. They all think we can get back to some Golden Age that used to exist. For Lao Tzu, we do that by getting rid of culture. So he thinks that learning and trying are the enemy and that if you become a Confucian and you train in the rituals and you learn the classics, you’re just gonna become a hypocrite. You’ll be able to go through the motions, but you won’t be genuinely virtuous. And so I call him, he’s a primitivist. He wants us to get back to the supposedly natural lifestyle of living in small scale communities, low-tech.

0:23:27.7 ES: In the trade book, I described them as the Warring States Hippies. They’re basically… It’s a lot like this counterculture movement in the ’60s. Let’s get back to nature, get rid of technology. Warfare is bad. It’s all caused by consumerism and greed. Very similar insights in the Daodejing.

0:23:46.0 ES: Then the second are the so-called Daoists, they weren’t a self-recognized school, but it’s a helpful label, is this guy Zhuangzi, and he thinks like Lao Tzu that trying is bad, training and culture can mess you up, but he assumes this has already happened to us and what we have to do is learn how to not… He thinks that escaping to a primitive utopia is an example of trying. That actually, by doing that, we’re falling into the trap of thinking that we can make ourselves good. And so he thinks what we need to do is just make our minds empty, so that we can respond to reality as it really is in front of us. He thinks, normally, we’re using our mind in categories, and so we’re not seeing the world. We’re seeing linguistic categories projected onto the world. But if we can get beyond language and concepts, he thinks we can actually perceive the world directly. And when we can do that, we’ll respond perfectly, we’ll be free of hang-ups, we’ll be free of all the consumerism and stuff that Lao Tzu was worried about.

0:24:57.4 ES: But we do it not by setting up a new type of community, we’re gonna do it… So the Zhuangzian sage doesn’t necessarily look, from the outside, any different from a Confucian. They’re doing Confucian stuff but they’ve now internally changed their attitude toward the world, and that’s what makes them free. So that’s his goal. And then in between is this guy Mencius who thinks that we have the beginnings of virtue in us, or our nature is potentially good. So all the Confucian virtues, he thinks, don’t come from the Zhou Dynasty. He thinks they come from inside of us. Mencius thinks we have all the Confucian virtues in an incipient form inside of us and all we need to do is help them grow. So he uses his agricultural metaphor, so we’re trying to kind of strengthen our sprouts, he calls them sprouts, and we’re trying to strengthen them and grow them into true virtues. And so we need to try, but not too hard, because we don’t wanna be like the farmer from Song who pulled on his sprouts ’cause he was impatient. They weren’t growing fast enough, so he went out and pulled on them and pulled them out of the ground, and killed them.

0:26:07.2 SC: Classic mistake.

0:26:09.1 ES: A classic mistake as an agriculturalist. So he, kind of, is splitting the difference. And then we also have some consequentialists. Some hard core system 2 only consequentialists, who think that all this virtue ethic stuff is dangerous and sloppy, and what we need is a systematic way to determine what’s right and wrong by measuring consequences, and then we can do the right thing. And then we have some legalists too, these people who really were interested in just ordering the state, who believe the key was harsh legal codes enforced consistently, following rules.

0:26:46.7 SC: I love the idea that the name legalism would be a good marketing ploy. That doesn’t sound like a philosophy that anyone is gonna clamor to get behind. [chuckle]

0:26:55.6 ES: Yeah, yeah. The Fajia, the school of regulations is essentially what they were called. So yeah.

0:27:02.8 SC: Can we talk a little bit about the…

0:27:03.5 ES: So it’s a very complex time.

0:27:04.9 SC: Yeah, no. Clearly. And it’s also a very early time, so I was gonna ask just briefly about the historicity of all these folks whose names we are dropping. I’m pretty sure Mencius existed, I’m less clear about the others. What do we know about them? And could you possibly relate the very charming story of how Lao Tzu actually wrote his book.

0:27:26.8 ES: Yeah, probably the least historical, I would say, is Lao Tzu. His name literally means the old master. So if you were gonna write a book and put a name on it that would make people read it, that’s what you would do. [chuckle] The old wise guy wrote this. So the standard story is he was a historical figure and he studied ritual with Confucius, but then realized it was wrong and decided to go off and write this book. Or he decided to go off and just be in touch with the Dao. And then the traditional story is he was going to India, he decided to leave China ’cause China was so messed up, and on his way out, a border official said to him, “I won’t let you leave until you write down your teachings.” And so this is why we have the book because Lao Tzu is very reluctant to use words, but he was forced to by this border official and that’s why we have the Daodejing record of his writings. And then, often the story goes on that he went to India, he became the Buddha.

0:27:36.3 SC: Oh, good.

0:28:37.1 ES: And that’s why when Buddhism came into China, around the beginning of the Common Era, it looked a lot like Daoism and the Chinese explanation was, “Well, of course, ’cause we invented it and exported it to India.” [chuckle] Yeah, so that’s almost certainly not true. I think the Daodejing book, the Lao Tzu book, was probably put together by a community of these primitivists and we have hints of them in the end of the Analects, the writings of the teachings of Confucius. We have his interesting encounters at the end of the Analects where Confucius is running into these people who are living primitive lifestyles and actually absurdly primitive lifestyles. They’re not using technologies that exist. They’re self-consciously… Like one example is if someone’s pulling a plow by themselves and they had oxen, that’s what a normal farmer would be using. And then when Confucius stops and questions them, they quote from The Odes, this classical book of poetry, and they know who Confucius is. So these are clearly not normal farmers, they’re educated elites who have dropped out and gone back to the countryside and withdrawn from society.

0:29:51.4 SC: Are we pretty sure that Confucius existed as a person and wrote the things that we think he wrote?

0:29:57.1 ES: His book… So, the Analects, that is the record of his teachings, is not written by him. It’s a collection of teachings so it’s encounters between him and disciples or stories about things he did. He probably existed, and I think that at least, the first half of the Analects, this book we have, books 1 through 10, is probably early Warring States and does a pretty good job of recording his teachings. But he didn’t write any of it.

0:30:28.2 SC: Both Socrates and Jesus did a pretty good job of being influential, despite never writing anything down, right? If you get the right pupils… [chuckle]

0:30:34.8 ES: Very similar to them, right? So it’s records of the supposed teachings. But then some of these other texts like the Mencius and certainly, the Xunzi, which is a late Warring States Confucian text, were written by individuals who probably really existed.

0:30:50.1 SC: There’s even a legend of a story that Lao Tzu and Confucius met at one point, right?

0:30:55.9 ES: Yeah. So supposedly there’s this… One legend is that Lao Tzu… Or Confucius was studying ritual with Lao Tzu is one version or Lao Tzu was studying ritual with Confucius, and then realized that this was the wrong way to do it. There’s all sorts of myths that arose around these figures. And it’s even more complicated ’cause Confucius also pops up in lots of early texts, delivering… He pops into a scene and delivers some teachings and then leaves. And was that Confucius, really? [laughter] Did he really say that? So there’s lots of stories built up around them that are almost certainly not historically super accurate.

0:31:33.6 SC: It’s kind of amazing, at least to me, but maybe I don’t know a common causal force going on here, but these people are working at roughly the same time as Plato and Aristotle and their friends in Ancient Greece, right? These very far apart by ancient world standards, but the time to invent huge new philosophical school of thoughts was clearly then.

0:31:53.3 ES: Yeah, so there’s this interesting… It’s not just Ancient Greece and China, it’s also when Zoroaster was teaching. It’s probably around the period of the historical Buddha, when some of these early schools of Indian thought were getting going. And so there was this German thinker named Karl Jaspers, who was very impressed by this and came up with this idea of the Axial Age. That it was around this time that… I mean, he had a very kind of Hegelian metaphysical story about this. It’s like when the human geist, the human spirit, became self-conscious, finally. We were kind of grinding along as animals and then we kind of woke up. So his metaphysical story is probably false, but there is something to this idea of an Axial Age and I think it probably has to do with just agriculture gets started and spreads round the world, not exactly at the same time, but it really starts to ramp up around the same time. And once you get enough wealth and complexity, you start to have people whose jobs can be like ours, to sit around and think and write books.

0:33:05.2 SC: Scholars. Yeah, yeah.

0:33:07.5 ES: And so, I think it’s really just a function of around the same time, you got enough excess wealth that it could support parasites like us, who aren’t actually doing useful productive work but we’re thinking about stuff, and writing that stuff down, right?

0:33:24.2 SC: Right, yeah. No, exactly. So let me just focus in, so our audience and me have as clear a picture possible of what is going on with the different schools. So Confucianism, I think, kinda makes sense to the Western mind, even if not a lot of Westerners become Confucianists in their old age, but the idea that there are rituals and ceremonies, and our social role is very important, and learning is important and things like that. Virtue is a way of acting in the world with other people. There’s appropriate social roles, these are all sort of Confucian ideas, yeah?

0:34:07.5 ES: Yeah. Yeah, but taken quite strongly. At least for Confucius, you can’t think without culture, so he really thinks culture is forming the basis of your thought, which I find my students really struggle with sometimes ’cause they tend to think that they think of things on their own, like, “Oh, I had these great ideas.” And this is where I think Confucianism is a corrective to some kind of modern Western views of the self. So where the Confucian view is contradicting, I think our standard modern Western view of the self is he’s dubious about the power of reason unguided by culture. He’s dubious about the power of individual creativity. He doesn’t think that people really come up with something completely new, they’re just kind of reworking older stuff which I think is probably true. He also thinks that who you are as a person is inextricably bound up with your social roles. It’s not just that you, Sean, are this fully formed human being and then you happen to be these other roles as well. Who you, Sean, are is structured by those roles that you play and that you’ve played in the past, and that you will play in the future. And so you don’t really have a meaningful self outside the context of your social roles. So it’s a fairly strong view of the importance of social roles.

0:35:42.8 SC: Yeah, no, that is a little deeper and a little stronger than I was putting it. When I said Westerners can understand it, I think that the questions being asked here. “What is our place in society?” “What is our role vis-a-vis the ancestors and our family?” and so forth are questions that we already value, even if the answers are a little bit different. But what you’re saying, if I can sort of say it back and you can correct me, is that Confucianism is very much against what we might think of as the enlightenment individualistic way of looking at the world.

0:36:14.4 ES: Absolutely.

0:36:15.2 SC: That the world is not a collection of individuals, it’s something… There’s a higher level of emergent structure that is at least as important as determining the individuals, there’s some downward causation going on there.

0:36:26.0 ES: Yeah, and also the other kind of anti-enlightenment thing, part of it is anti-enlightenment individualism. It’s also anti-enlightenment, anti-traditionalism. So the enlightenment is all about waking up and not believing something ’cause the priest told you, but figuring it out on your own. And the paradigmatic example of that is Descartes, sitting down by himself in front of a fire and doubting everything, even down to his own existence, and then lo and behold, from “Cogito, ergo sum”, he’s able to build up…

0:37:04.6 SC: Build everything.

0:37:05.4 ES: The entire body of human knowledge, including the Catholic Church. He gets the Catholic Church back just through the power of his individual reason, right? [laughter] And Confucius would think that’s absurd, that we’re… In the same way that your social role was really deeply shaping who you are as a person, tradition shapes the way you think, and the idea that you could just be like Descartes and independently reproduce all of that on your own is delusional.

0:37:35.0 SC: And one of the things that is appealing about Descartes’ project, even if you don’t agree with his specific steps along the way, is that he’s really looking for certainty, absolute metaphysical grounding that you can’t argue against once you appreciate it. Is there some sense in which either Confucianism or Chinese philosophy more generally is a bit more fallibilistic and a bit more, “We’re working towards something,” rather than, “Here is the once and for all final foundation”?

0:38:02.4 ES: Yeah, that’s an interesting way to put it, I hadn’t thought of it that way. Confucius thinks that the Western Zhou culture is perfectly good and captures everything, all the truths of the world. So in a way, he thinks there was a period of time when people had figured everything out, and there’s suggestions that it may have even been revealed by heaven, so it was a kind of divine revelation of the system. Xunzi is more… You would call him more of a fallibilist, I would think, in that he thinks that humans invented the Confucian way.

0:38:40.0 SC: Okay.

0:38:40.8 ES: And they did it over time. Basically, there was a series of these kind of cultural geniuses who cobbled together the Confucian way for functional purposes, because it helped us live in large-scale societies and be harmonious, and he’s got an interesting description of the state of nature that looks a lot like Hobbes, where he says, human desires are limitless, resources are limited. And so that’s a recipe for disaster. So how do we deal with that? We’ve gotta learn how to restrain desires and reshape them and the Confucian way is the perfect way to do that. So he thinks it’s actually a kind of artifact that was constructed by people over a period of time. He thinks it works perfectly. So he’s also like, yeah, the Confucian way is the only way to be. But in his model, there’s some openness to change, right? So if the environment changed or conditions changed, new sage kings could arise who would innovate and kind of fix the Confucian way, so it fit the new circumstances.

0:39:46.0 SC: Sorry, whose theory are we getting now?

0:39:48.2 ES: This is Xunzi, so X-U-N-Z-I in Pinyin.

0:39:51.6 SC: Okay.

0:39:52.4 ES: He is the end of the Warring States Confucian, who believes he’s the true inheritor of Confucius himself, and who thinks that Mencius is kind of a pseudo-Daoist poser. And he’s probably… And he’s right, I think.

0:40:10.7 SC: Am I right in putting them in the slots of Mencius was emphasizing the intrinsic good of human beings and what was the other person’s name?

0:40:19.7 ES: Xunzi.

0:40:20.7 SC: Xunzi was emphasizing that they’re flawed in various ways, so we had to fix that…

0:40:27.5 ES: They’re bad.

0:40:27.8 SC: They’re bad [chuckle]

0:40:27.9 ES: I mean the famous, the slogans that go with the two of them is with Mencius: Xìng shàn, human nature is good. And then Xunzi wrote a chapter called Xing’e, human nature is bad, [chuckle] and…

0:40:40.3 SC: Fair enough.

0:40:41.6 ES: And his, I think, Xunzi’s formulations’ truer to the original Confucian vision that humans don’t… Basically, humans don’t have internal moral resources, we’re not born with any kind of intuitions that would lead us to morality, we have to learn morality from the outside, from tradition and our teachers and texts that we inherit.

0:41:04.2 SC: And he would have said that then Mencius is just a Daoist in Confucian clothing. Got it.

0:41:08.7 ES: Yeah.

0:41:08.9 SC: Okay. And if I think about the Daoists, then it seems very roughly that as opposed to the Confucian focus on society and people, and relations, the Daoists are much more focused on nature and I don’t wanna say individualism, but at least your personal way of going through the world. Yeah?

0:41:32.2 ES: Yeah. So with Lao Tzu, it seems like he’s, the social unit is the family, so you kinda go back to living in these little villages and maybe you have a family. He talks a lot about the importance of family. But it’s natural relations, not all this filial piety that the Confucians talk about. Zhuangzi, on the other hand, is the closest to an individualist that you get in early China. He was probably influenced by this other philosopher called Yang Zhu, who we don’t… Y-A-N-G and then his last name is Z-H-U. We don’t… Unfortunately, we don’t know much about Yang Zhu. We lost. There was a book that recorded his teachings that we lost, and so almost everything we know about him is from his enemies, like Mencius, who hated him, but he seems to have been an individualist, he was like… The greatest value in the world is to preserve your own life and live out your natural life span, and to experience pleasure. And if that means you don’t serve as an official, if that means that you don’t engage in public life, so be it, go off and live in the woods by yourself. So Zhuangzi is much more of that style of individual… Individual perfection, and he doesn’t seem to have any kind of big story about how are you gonna change society or live in society.

0:42:54.4 SC: And one thing that we have to at least try to do, there’s a famous saying that, “The Dao that cannot be spoken is not the true… That can be spoken is not the true Dao”, but still, it’d be nice if we could explain what this word means a little bit, “Dao”, right? Is it possible to explain it, even though it can’t be said?

0:43:13.3 ES: Yeah, that’s the Daodejing. So there’s [0:43:15.8] ____ suspicious of language that we’re worried about, trying to get trapped in any kind of linguistic formulation. The concept itself is pretty simple, it literally means way, like a road.

0:43:27.4 SC: W-A-Y, yeah. Okay.

0:43:29.2 ES: That’s the original meaning of it, and it continues in classical Warring States, classical Chinese, it’s still used in that literal sense, but it comes to mean, probably the Analects is the first time is used in this philosophical metaphysical sense. It’s the right way to do something and it becomes, in the Analects, almost like a metaphysical reality, like the way the universe is. And so this is the sense of… Sometimes heaven and the way are used interchangeably or they’re used as part of a compound. Tian dao, the way of heaven. So that’s the basic meaning of way. It can also mean teaching, so like, Confucius will talk about my way being manifested in the world, by that he means his teaching.

0:44:18.3 SC: Okay, and to the Western ear, once again, I’m sort of being judgy here of a brilliant people from thousands of years ago, but when I read about Daoism, there’s some wisdom there. Clearly, it’s very, very interesting. But part of me wants to say like, it is just hippie, back to nature stuff. What about making the world a better place? What about struggling against things that are bad in the world, where does that come in? Is that a valid reaction to have or am I just missing something deeper in what they’re saying?

0:44:51.6 ES: That’s a totally valid reaction to have. The central criticism of say, Zhuangzi, is he’s got no story about social justice or how you would help the world. In his defense, so if I were to defend him, he would say, you wanna make the world a better place, so you’d support [0:45:12.3] ____ Oxfam and you join this political party that’s gonna make things better. And he would say, you’re just gonna screw things up. The way you make things better is by you getting in touch with the Dao and then when you do that, you’re gonna have this kind of ripple effect on the people around you.

0:45:36.4 ES: So if you really… Let’s say you suddenly got into Wu wei or let’s say, I suddenly got into Wu wei, so I’m somehow now a Daoist sage, which I most certainly am not, but thought experiment. I have this powerful De, this charisma now, you and I talk and you’re a whatever, effective altruist, you think you’re gonna give away your kidney and do all this great stuff for the world. But through my power, I will make you realize that that’s misguided or you’re gonna just do more harm that way. And I’m gonna make you more relaxed and more in touch with your nature. And so then we’re gonna get off this call and you’re gonna go interact with some people, and now you’re gonna be more relaxed and natural, and so you’re gonna make them more relaxed and natural. So you could argue that he’s got this kind of person-to-person, very slow transformation model of how the world is gonna become a better place, and he thinks that if you try to do it directly and consciously, you’re almost certainly gonna screw it up, you’re gonna make it worse.

0:46:42.2 SC: That is helpful. I do see that that’s at least a strategy. I think there’s an empirical question about whether it’s an effective strategy or not…

0:46:47.6 ES: Whether or not, see, exactly. Yeah, that’s an empirical issue.

0:46:50.6 SC: Yeah, but maybe it goes into, or at least it’s… Rubs shoulders with theories of non-violent resistance or something like that, there’s…

0:46:58.8 ES: Something like that. It fits with people who are skeptical of movements, who are skeptical of large-scale attempts to impose a vision of how the world should be on the world.

0:47:12.8 SC: And am I, again in his favor, am I right to recall that Daoism actually gives women and men more or less equal status unlike almost all the other schools of thought in any part of the world at that time?

0:47:27.7 ES: Yeah, I wouldn’t go that far… The Daodejing uses metaphors of the female to get across its point. So the Daodejing says people wanna be strong, but really you should value weakness. People wanna be bright. You should value darkness. It thinks that in going for these values, you actually end up subverting them and turning them into their opposite.

0:48:00.3 SC: It’s deconstruction then.

0:48:00.9 ES: And the solution is to be weak but it’s “weak”. You’re being weak, in the same way that a martial artist who’s doing Jiu-jitsu is being weak, right? They’re giving way in order to be effective. And so in that context, they talk about the male and the female, so everyone values the male, but you should value the female if you’re a Daoist, because the female is passive, is dark, is the valley as opposed to the mountains. So, is that feminism? [laughter] It’s saying that there’s essentially something that women are alike and it’s weakness, but that… We could model ourselves on that. I’m not sure I’d call that second generation feminism. Second wave… What’s that?

0:48:51.7 SC: But in practice, were their female Daoist sages or was it still more or less a guys’ club?

0:49:01.8 ES: It was mostly a guys’ club, but it’s hard to say because men were primarily the literate ones. We do know that later on, when Daoism becomes an organized religion, there are female devotees, but they’re also doing stuff like once they get into these physical practices, they’re doing sexual practices, for instance, where they need to have sex with a string of virgins but hold their essence in. And that doesn’t seem like super feminist activity. These are elite men who are… It’s almost like Jeffrey Epstein but withholding their semen.

0:49:42.8 SC: I presume it was not female devotees having sex with a string of male virgins.

0:49:49.1 ES: Yeah, we don’t hear about that, so…

0:49:50.8 SC: We don’t hear about that side of the story. Okay.

0:49:53.8 ES: I think it’s overblown the extent to which they’re friendlier to women… But inherently, they are because they don’t believe in the traditional hierarchies.

0:50:03.5 SC: Yeah, okay.

0:50:03.6 ES: Whereas Confucianism believes that the male-female distinction is part of the structure of the universe. The men are in public life, women are in private life, that’s the way it should be.

0:50:15.2 SC: Well, and in fact, I gave Daoism a little bit of a hard time for being quietist about social justice, but presumably Confucianism is just as vulnerable to that kind of criticism.

0:50:28.5 ES: Yeah. And they’re not as bad as Aristotle. We can give them that. So for Aristotle, women and slaves were just not really fully human. Confucian women, they’re not supposed to be in public life, but they’re definitely fully human and one… So people who have been trying to emphasize, maybe we got the beginnings of some feminism we can retrieve out of Confucianism, point out that women do appear in stories where they’re… Men are doing something wrong, they’re not being… They’re not living up to the Confucian way, and the mom or the wife pops in and quotes from The Odes and says, “You’re not doing the right thing.” And the man is shamed and does the right thing, and she goes back to the house. [chuckle] So she’s not doing anything herself, but at least, women, if not active moral agents in the world can reason morally in the same way men can, so that’s something.

0:51:34.5 SC: You said something very briefly there that is worth teasing out. When Daoism turned more into a religion, my impression is, again, correct me if I’m wrong, is that these really were philosophical schools to start, in the similar way as Plato and Aristotle would have been, but Plato and Aristotle didn’t turn into religions, as far as I know, but in some sense, Confucianism and Daoism did and Buddhism, of course.

0:51:58.4 ES: Yeah, I’m a little worried. Maybe I was speaking loosely when I said that. I really should have said when it turned into a popular religious practice. I think that these early schools of thought are religious. I think that all pre-modern philosophy is religious. If you look at Plato or Aristotle, they have religious worldviews and they’re formulating their ethics, in terms of these religious worldviews. I think this distinction between philosophy and religion is a product of the enlightenment. It’s a relatively recent development and it’s in enlightenment [0:52:37.3] ____ that we could talk about values in a way that’s completely divorced from ontological or metaphysical commitments. And so I’m a little leery of talking about philosophy versus religion in that sense, but it’s definitely the case that these were very philosophically-oriented religious movements. And some of them, like Daoism, became these more technical practices that were aimed at things like immortality, personal immortality, and things like that, or controlling the world in various ways.

0:53:11.7 SC: Well, I guess to me that does sound like a question that is legitimate to ask, even if the distinction between philosophy and religion was not so much of a distinction back in the day, what was their metaphysics and ontology? Were they… To what extent were they naturalist versus theist? They talked about heaven and God all the time, but it’s never clear whether it’s just part of a story, in a metaphor or whether it’s more or less as real as a monotheistic Western god would be.

0:53:43.0 ES: I think that Confucius, the historical Confucius, when he talks about Heaven, it’s a pretty full-blooded anthropomorphic being. Heaven gets angry, Heaven can abandon him, he actually complains at one point ’cause Heaven seems to have abandoned him.

0:53:58.3 SC: Good.

0:53:58.8 ES: I think it’s a pretty full-blooded anthropomorphic being. When you get to the end of the Warring States, and a thinker like Zhuangzi, Heaven becomes just this kind of force. It doesn’t really have a personality anymore. And then when you get to Xunzi, Xunzi I think is, at least that I know of, he’s the first, I’d argue, the first atheistic thinker. And you could argue that his system is maybe philosophical and not religious, in the sense that he’s not relying on any kind of metaphysical justification for… He really thinks that the Confucian way was created by humans for humans to… And he’s a virtue ethicist, but his just meta justification for the Confucian way is kind of Utilitarian. He’s like, “We have this state of nature, we gotta figure out how to make it work.” Confucianism does that the best, in the most efficient way. So he arguably is the closest to an atheistic philosopher we have in the Warring States.

0:55:05.1 SC: Interesting, okay. Yeah, I think that that is a fact that I used to know and then forgot. I think I might even have mentioned it in my book The Big Picture. Now that you’re saying all those words, it’s sort of coming back to me ’cause I was looking into the history of naturalism, there were various moments when it sort of came and then kind of got crushed a little bit, but…

0:55:23.0 ES: Yeah, it never took off. But it’s interesting, because he still advocates for religious practice, ’cause he’s got this very Durkheimian view of the function of rituals. So there’s a famous passage where he says, “We do the rain prayer and what happens? It’s gonna rain or it’s not gonna rain. Doing the rain prayer that doesn’t affect the rain at all. So should we get rid of the rain prayer? Absolutely not. We should keep doing it.”

0:55:53.1 SC: That’s very interesting.

0:55:53.9 ES: So why do we do it? Because it brings people together, everyone sits in their hierarchical place, and so they get a visual representation of where they sit in the social hierarchy. They reaffirm their commitment to the ruler and to the way. So he’s got this functional story about religious ritual where he wants… He wants people to keep doing it, but he says the common person is gonna continue to think that we’re doing it to make it rain. The gentleman, his peers, his educated peers, know that it’s gonna rain or it’s not gonna rain, it has no efficacy, except social. We’re doing it for these social reasons. So it’s got this really interesting functional role.

0:56:40.0 SC: I kind of like that, but it also makes me think that we’ve not made any progress in the last 2500 years or whatever… [laughter] We’re having the same conversations.

0:56:47.8 ES: You read Durkheim and you’re like, “Yeah, I know. Xinzu already said that.”

0:56:51.8 SC: Something that’s become clear in many of the examples you’ve given is a stylistic difference that maybe I’m perceiving correctly or incorrectly between the Chinese and the Greeks in this era, namely, they were the Chinese… Well, so let me back up to mention the only one of these texts that I’ve actually been exposed to directly is the Zhuangzi, which is through the cartoon book that you wrote the preface for. Why don’t you mention that? ’cause everyone should read these books.

0:57:21.0 ES: Yeah, that’s a great… That cartoon is great.

0:57:23.9 SC: And there’s a series of them, right?

0:57:26.7 ES: Yeah, he did all the classics in cartoon form.

0:57:29.5 SC: That is good.

0:57:30.6 ES: So, when I lived in Taiwan, I read these in Chinese and I remember thinking, “Oh, when I get back to the States, I wanna translate these.” And Brian Bruya, my colleague beat me to it, so I just wrote the preface to his cartoon. But he did a really nice job of translating it as well.

0:57:44.5 SC: What was the cartoonist’s name again?

0:57:47.5 ES: His surname’s Tsai, I’m trying to remember his given name now.

0:57:51.2 SC: I’ll look it up for the show notes, but…

0:57:54.6 ES: Yeah, Princeton University Press has put out the Zhuangzi one.

0:57:56.8 SC: But anyway, the point being that it’s full of stories and metaphors and parables or whatever you wanna call it, in a more literary vein than I would think of Aristotle talking. Of course, Plato did his dialogues, but usually those were just excuses for the characters to give kind of speeches…

0:58:12.7 ES: The extended speeches, yeah.

0:58:16.0 SC: Yeah, that were not very metaphorical. Sometimes he had the metaphors in there. Is this… Can we think about the differences between Ancient Chinese philosophy and Ancient Greek philosophy? Is that a legitimate difference between them, and how meaningful is that difference?

0:58:30.8 ES: I wouldn’t exaggerate the meaningfulness of it, so I’ve spent some portion of my career arguing against this view of China being metaphorical and kind of holistic and thinking in images, and Greek-based Western culture being analytic and abstract and… It’s… Humans are humans. We all think in metaphors. I’ve spent a chunk of my career doing cognitive linguistic stuff, kinda Lakoff-Johnson and blending theory, so humans think in images, that’s how we think. I think a legitimate way to put it would be Western philosophers were not super comfortable with that, they had this idea that we could get away from images and actually really figure things out literally in an abstract way, and that that should be the goal of philosophy. We should come up with a abstract representation of reality that would be, to the extent possible, stripped of metaphor and that would actually be a literal representation of the world. Whereas the Confucians and… I think this is true of early Chinese thinkers in general, were more pragmatic.

0:59:47.2 SC: Yeah.

0:59:47.7 ES: They thought the goal of philosophy was to get people to live well and to make society function well, and you used whatever tools necessary to make that happen. They weren’t really… So, if you wanna think of it in terms of Gilbert Ryle’s distinction between knowing “that” versus knowing “how”. There is a sense in which Chinese philosophy valued know-how and ability to live well, and they prized that over abstract accounts of the world.

1:00:20.6 SC: Yeah, that’s very good. I’m glad you said that because that is the impression I got, so it’s not completely fake. And as you say, it’s probably matters of degree rather than completely…

1:00:30.4 ES: Absolutely, ’cause you have Western thinkers who were… Aristotle was about know-how.

1:00:34.9 SC: Yeah. Practical reason, yeah.

1:00:35.5 ES: He was training you to be a virtuous person, and phronesis, practical reason, can’t be codified, you just have it or you don’t. So, it’s a classic kind of know-how.

1:00:49.5 SC: With all those warnings in place, if I were to take this distinction and run with it further than probably I should, I can’t help but come at this from the point of view of a theoretical physicist who does all of those things you said the Greeks wanted us to do; inventing abstract representations of the world, is it possible that that sort of Greek predilection paved the way for an abstract scientific view of the world, and helped science catch on in that way, but maybe at the same time, is not as good at living as human beings in the world along the way?

1:01:24.8 ES: Yeah, that’s possible. There’s been loads of books over the decades on this, right? The Greek origins of science. And for a long time, it was a big cottage industry, trying to just explain why science didn’t arise in China ’cause they were technologically way more advanced in the West for a very long time. So, what was going wrong? What was going wrong there? Assuming that science was what we were shooting for, as a human race. So yeah, there’s something to that. There’s something to the valuing of abstract thought. I think individualism also plays a role, but then I think a lot of just historical accidents are playing an important role. So, when science gets started in Europe, Europe’s fragmented between all these different states and different rulers, and if you said something that the Catholic Church didn’t like, you just go to next door into the Protestant rulers’ place and you hang out there. So, there was ability, and arguably this was the result of geographical fragmentation, the fact that Europe is just kinda chopped up. It’s got the Mediterranean in the south, and it’s broken up by mountains.

1:02:42.3 ES: Northern China, so the classic cradle of Chinese civilization, the Yellow River Valley, is organized around this river. It kinda is more like Egypt, if you wanna think of it that way. So, you get large-scale agriculture happening on a massive scale very early, whereas if you look at Greece… So, David Keightley, who’s a famous, he’s passed away about a decade ago, scholar of early China, contrasted Greece and China, and he argued, one of the differences is this focus on the individual versus the group. So, you look at Greek… You look at Greek pottery, it’s portrayals of heroes. So this piece of pottery has Achilles, he’s recognizably Achilles, and he’s doing this famous thing that Achilles did, whereas you look at China and it’s anonymous figures performing music or doing ritual as a group scene, and he traces that back to the fact that Greece… Greece sucks for agriculture. You can’t get any kind of decent large scale agriculture off the ground, so it’s people fishing or herding goats, or growing small patches of vegetables, it’s broken up. They’re trading, they’re traveling around, they’re more individualistic.

1:04:03.7 ES: China, at a very early stage, has rice agriculture, and in the north where they’re not growing rice, it’s very dry, and so they’re having to irrigate. So even if they’re not growing a labor-intensive crop like rice… So, rice is super labor-intensive, you got to flood the fields and you need really elaborate group cooperation to do that. And even in the north, because of the nature of the climate, they needed large scale water control irrigation, flood control and things like that. And so, the argument is the Chinese state got centralized very early on, and economically and agriculturally, it got organized around group activities very early on, that tended to favor the group over individuals.

1:04:51.8 ES: And this may have had something to do with why there’s… You see relatively more individualism in the West. But even in China, there’s a really interesting science article from, I wanna say eight years ago, Talhelm’s the lead author, where he looked at rice versus grain county… Producing counties in China. And looking at them really, they’re close together, so he’s controlling for almost everything, except for the style of agriculture that they have, and on these holistic versus analytic thinking tests that psychologists use, [chuckle] people from rice-growing regions are much more holistic.

1:05:33.1 SC: Interesting. Yeah.

1:05:33.3 ES: And people from the smaller scale, wheat-growing regions are more analytic. So, even within these societies, if your style of life is slightly different, you’re gonna probably think about the individual’s relationship to the group slightly differently.

1:05:48.2 SC: It is, it’s a combination of irresistible set of ideas, and there’s a… You have to resist pushing them too far, right? We had Joe Henry from the show…

1:05:57.4 ES: Yeah.

1:05:58.3 SC: He talked about the weirdness…

1:06:00.3 ES: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

1:06:00.4 SC: Of the West and so forth, and I love it, and I… But it’s too good in some sense to be completely true, so understanding the limitations of these connections is just as important. And so, in that vein, there are examples of the Ancient Chinese thinkers doing what we might think of as metaphysics or abstract thinking, and maybe you can tell the audience who doesn’t know Zhuangzi’s famous butterfly dream story, which has to do with the Mind-Body Problem, yeah?

1:06:33.6 ES: I think it’s more about skepticism.

1:06:36.0 SC: Okay.

1:06:36.5 ES: So it’s, he says, “I had a dream that I was a butterfly, I was flying around, I was happy, and it was wonderful. And then I woke up and I thought, oh, I just dreamt that I was a butterfly. But how do I know that I’m not actually really that butterfly and I’m just now dreaming that I’m Zhuangzi, and… [chuckle] which is the dream and which is reality?” He’s trying… I think the purpose of that story is he’s trying to shake up our confidence that we know what’s going on, that… And in this particular case, I think what he’s targeting is our fear of death.

1:07:17.2 SC: Oh, okay.

1:07:17.4 ES: Right now, we’re living, we think when we die, it’s going to be horrible, but how do we know? We don’t know what’s gonna happen. So, he wants to cultivate epistemically, a kind of humbleness, and that’s… He’s using that skeptical argument as a way to get us to think, oh, maybe we don’t really know what the right way to be is.

1:07:40.0 SC: It is certainly a stark contrast with Descartes. I mean, Descartes does this skeptical exercise and says, “Now I will rebuild everything on a completely firm basis.” And Zhuangzi basically says, “Deal with it. [laughter] Who knows really?”

1:07:51.4 ES: Yeah. [laughter] This is how the world is, it’s… We don’t know, it could be demons fooling us every… It could be demons all the way down, we just don’t know. But I think it’s… Zhuangzi uses metaphysics, he uses logic sometimes, but in a way that deconstructs logic. He probably was trained as a logician, so I actually didn’t mention another school of early Chinese thought, which were the logicians, so these were people who…

1:08:16.3 SC: Okay.

1:08:16.4 ES: Really thought you could capture the structure of reality in words. So, words were categories that map onto distinct groups of objects in the world, and then you could… If you could come up with a completely logical and accurate way of constructing sentences with these terms, you could have an abstract account of reality and an abstract account of how to act in the right way.

1:08:46.2 SC: The logical positivists.

1:08:46.6 ES: So, this was going on in China.

1:08:48.1 SC: Yeah. So, they were logical positivists long before we had any.

1:08:50.5 ES: They were logical positivists and they never took off. So, it’s interesting that Zhuangzi was probably trained as one of these people, ’cause he uses… This is not always picked up by translators, but he’s often using terms in a technical logical sense, not in the standard way the words were used. So, he seems to have been trained in this approach and then abandoned it and thought that it wasn’t the way to live properly.

1:09:16.8 SC: And when you say technological sense, you mean, not technological, technical, comma…

1:09:22.4 ES: Technical…

1:09:22.9 SC: Logical sense… Is that what we think of as syllogisms, deductions, inductive kind of reasoning?

1:09:31.0 ES: Yeah, something very much like that.

1:09:32.5 SC: Okay.

1:09:33.6 ES: And using terms like, this word, qing, Q-I-N-G in Pinyin, which means emotion, typically, in classical Chinese of this time, but in Mohist logic, it refers to the categorical essence of something, so the qing of something is the quality that distinguishes that category from other similar categories.

1:10:01.3 SC: Got it, okay.

1:10:01.6 ES: It’s the distinctive property of that category. And if you don’t understand that, some passages in the Zhuangzi don’t make sense, or it sounds like he’s a bad philosopher, but when you understand he’s using these terms in a technical Mohist sense, it makes more sense.

1:10:15.3 SC: Okay, let me run by you, one wild… One more wild generalization that you can… [laughter]

1:10:20.5 ES: Yeah, go ahead. Fire away.

1:10:21.3 SC: Because you’ve already said that there is this Axial Age idea that humanity reached a stage where parasites like you and I could be supported by society, and so they could have people whose job it was to think these big ideas and write them down and so forth. So in some sense, there’s a sort of right place, right time aspect to these people.

1:10:41.8 ES: Yeah.

1:10:43.2 SC: They could be first, they could put ideas out there, and then there’s fewer gigantic new philosophical schools coming later on because in some sense, they’re reflections or modifications of the previous ones. So here is my crazy idea. If I look at Raphael’s picture, The School of Athens, he has Plato and he’s pointing to the sky, and he has Aristotle pointing to the earth, and in some sense, this is supposed to represent this big dichotomy between thinking and pure rationality. Plato and the forms and so forth, and Aristotle, more empirical, evidence-based experience of the world, and that was the big division between the schools of thought.

1:11:23.9 SC: Whereas it seems to me that in the Chinese thinking, again, to hugely over-generalize, we have this dichotomy between the Confucianists thinking about society and people, and our roles and the Daoists thinking about nature and ourselves and where we put in it, and that’s the distinction that was driven there. Is it completely overreaching to think that these choices of what distinctions to highlight early on played a huge role in how people thought then for the next 2000 years?

1:11:56.3 ES: That’s reasonable. Another way to put it is trying versus not trying. So, confronted with the same paradox, they break different ways. So, the Confucians say, “Yeah, it’s a paradox, but keep trying and it’ll sort itself out. You’ll eventually become like Confucius, just trust us. Do this for a long time, and you’ll become way eventually.” Whereas the Daoists are much more worried about the problem of effort contaminating the end state, and they really are kind of allergic to trying. And I argue in my dissertation that this dichotomy between trying and not trying explains a lot of the divisions that happened later in Chinese philosophy/religion. You constantly have… And what’s interesting is that sometimes, the debate gets solved by doctrinal fiat. When the neo-Confucians come in, this is in the 12th century AD, they say, “Mencius is right, human nature is good, not trying is the right way to do it because we have this good nature. No one’s… It’s wrong to say otherwise.”

1:13:12.3 ES: As soon as you get that, you get people who are like, “Yeah, well, it’s good, but as soon as we’re born, it gets contaminated. And so how do we fix that? Oh, we study the classics and we do ritual, and we rely… ” So, I sometimes call it internalism versus externalism, but it’s a real tension… Or trying, not trying, but basically, where is the source of morality? You’ve got one side that thinks it comes from the outside, it comes from culture or tradition, or other people, teachers. It comes from authority, they tend to be more culturally conservative. On the other side, you have these, you can argue, liberals, who think that it comes from the inside, “We have a good nature, all we have to do is look inside and be authentic and everything will be alright.” And that liberal versus conservative divide or internalist versus externalist or trying versus not trying, is this common fault line you see in Chinese thought. It appears again and again.

1:14:13.7 SC: And I can’t help it, I know we touched on this already, but it seems to me that it would be very difficult to be a good Daoist and a good theoretical physicist because it’s not just gonna happen, you’re not just gonna relax into coming up with the right model of dark matter or something like that, you really… It seems to me like you really have to try… Am I missing a nuance there?

1:14:33.8 ES: Yeah, yeah, but one way to solve that problem or at least contextualize it, I think Daoism is best understood as a reaction to Confucianism rather than a coherent model in itself. So, understood that way, you have to get trained in theoretical physics, you have to do a lot of trying, but if you wanna have a really genuine new insight into theoretical physics, you need to stop trying and you need to be more like the Daoists. So, that’s the way I’ve always understood them, is as you can’t have just complete not trying, it’s not how humans work. But if you see the Daoist position as a corrective to the excesses of trying or the excesses of relying on the prefrontal cortex or on tradition or on writing or logic, it starts to make… It starts to be more plausible.

1:15:25.8 SC: Okay, that is actually very plausible, I mean, to be a good theoretical physicist even requires a little bit of being so into it that ideas come to you, there’s no algorithm for finding the ideas, right?

1:15:38.8 ES: No, no, no no.

1:15:40.7 SC: It’s a little bit mysterious. And so maybe that’s a good sort of final point to make as we wrap up here, bringing it back to the present day, since we’ve done good, all of Chinese thought in an hour…

1:15:50.5 ES: All of Chinese thought in an hour.

1:15:51.8 SC: Let’s do all of modern neuroscience and psychology in five minutes, and you can tell me, is this all just of historical interest, or clearly you’ve already told me the answer, but maybe to illustrate, how does this fit in with more modern ideas about how the brain works or how psychology works? What can we, the individualistic, hedonistic, epicurean, modern Western person take away from these ideas?

1:16:19.6 ES: Yeah, so that’s basically what I explore in Try Not To Try. So, that’s… I’m taking the history and the stuff I did as in, academically and marrying it with my new interest. So, I’ve spent the last 15 years or so hanging out with cognitive scientists, social psychologists, neuroscientists, and marrying these two together. So, one thing you could take away is just the importance of spontaneity, the fact that trying is just the case, and I think modern psychology has come to this on its own, that certain goals can’t be obtained through direct striving. There’s a lot of things you can obtain, like learning math and doing other things, but if you wanna be funny or if you wanna be happy, or you wanna be in love, or you wanna love something for its own sake, that can’t be forced. And in fact, the forcing actively prevents you from getting it. So, one takeaway that I think is useful is at least focusing our attention on the… Because I think we as a society again, it’s partly the fault of Descartes and Kant, and all these enlightenment thinkers, is we have this emphasis on striving, and we think that the key to success is always trying harder.

1:17:43.6 ES: And if we didn’t get it right, we just gotta try harder. That’s not true. There’s a lot of things that actually the right strategy is to back off and relax, and we understand now cognitively why that’s the case. So, there’s a lot of tasks that you can only solve… Like lateral thinking tasks, you wanna think of like the RAT, the Remote Associates Test, you can’t solve that by powering through with an algorithm, you need to just relax and have the answer pop into your head. We now know that these kind of creative insights happen when the PFC just shuts down for a bit and chills out, and lets the parts of the brain that don’t normally communicate, communicate with one another. So, that’s one insight. Another insight is just that it is genuinely a paradox to try not to try, we face it in our lives all the time, and trying to relax before a job interview and trying to fall asleep, if you have insomnia, if you’re worried about something and you’re thinking and you know you need to shut your brain down. And I think because we don’t have words for things like Wu wei or De, we don’t notice them as much, you know words are helpful for picking out…

1:19:01.2 ES: Knowing… Having the word schadenfreude helps you to recognize an emotion that you’ve definitely experienced but until the Germans taught you how enjoyable it is to see the suffering of others, you didn’t have a word for it. And having a word for it helps you notice it. And so, I think having words like Wu wei or at least having the concept at our disposal helps us to recognize situations where spontaneity is what we need, and trying is not gonna be helpful.

1:19:32.3 SC: And is it okay to have a glass of wine along the way, does that help?

1:19:37.0 ES: That segues very nicely into, yeah, the latest project. No, I mean, that’s so… A glass of wine is just a chemical means for short-circuiting that tension and in moderate doses, is really helpful for that.

1:19:52.7 SC: And doses are not always moderate and for news about that, people can buy your latest book.

1:19:57.4 ES: Yeah.

[chuckle]

1:19:58.6 SC: Which we encourage them to do. Edward Slingerland, thanks so much for being on the Mindscape podcast.

1:20:03.4 ES: Thanks for having me. It was a lot of fun.

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