§107. Sitting in Oblivion
Of all the Daoist literature known to me, Zhuangzi, an indisputable classic and a scripture of the Daoist Canon, has the most pregnant hints about a philosophical lesson to take from the technical experience of artisans.
In one of the work’s many tales, a duke is reading while a wheelwright labors nearby, chiseling a wheel. The craftsman asks what the duke is reading. “The words of a sage.” He calls such writings rubbish, which provokes the duke to demand an explanation or he dies! The wheelwright replies, “I see it in terms of my own work.” To describe his use of the chisel all he can say is, “I feel it in the hand and respond from the heart.” Words take him no further; he cannot even convey the art to his son, and it is the same with sages. “The men of old and their untransmissible message are dead. So what my lord is reading is the dregs of the men of old, isn’t it?”63Zhuangzi introduces a distinction between great and small knowledge. Both are knowledge but only one is sagacious. Small knowledge is seeing and hearing, making linguistic distinctions, using common sense, and bandying a scholar’s so-called facts. This is knowledge because what it lacks is not truth or justification but sagacity. Such knowledge thrives in scholarship. Any dispute, any contention, about what is called what, or how words are used, is ipso facto little knowledge.
To explain what is great about great knowledge Zhuangzi turns to examples from the arts, referring to more than a dozen different artisans and their works. Something about artful, technical knowledge helps orient the cultivation of sagacity. In Vanishing into Things I identified this as the quality expressed in Chinese as wu wei, effortless efficacy; doing very little, almost nothing, yet leaving nothing undone. We glimpse such effectiveness in the arts, though in a mutilated form due to the necessity of labor.
Artisan perception is unencumbered by conventional thinking and scholarly baggage, and responds spontaneously to whatever opportunity the material offers (like nomad empiricism). Zhuangzi suggests life can be lived like that. Besides the many arts, each with special tools, materials, and methods, there is an unspecialized surplus, an art of response, of resonant reply, a dao-art of viably changing with changes. This efficacy and procedures to cultivate it are extended, not problematically from one field to another, but ethically and unconditionally. Liberated from instrumentality, art's effortless wu wei efficacy becomes the criterion of virtue and sagacity.64The transition to greater knowledge requires seeing through boundaries, eluding perspectives, forgetting names, and thinking in terms of process and duration, much as Bergson suggests (§80). To think in terms of time is to think of movement rather than stops, emptying consciousness of quasi- spatial boundaries. Bergson says that thinking duration “starts from movement, posits it, or rather perceives it as reality itself, and sees in immobility only an abstract moment, a snapshot taken by our mind, of mobility.” He had no idea of his resonance with the Daoist classic. “The blessed stop stopping. Not stopping means galloping while you sit.... This is the transformation of ten thousand things, the secret of the ancient sages.”65
To think in terms of spatially distinct forms—this and not that, here and not there, wrong, not right—is to be condemned to the hell of little knowledge, of which Zhuangzi gives us this impression. “If they are right in a way, they are wrong in a way. If they are wrong in a way, they are right in a way.... What is this is also that, and what is that is also this. That is both right and wrong. This is also both right and wrong.” And so on, and so on. Bergson felt that philosophers were stuck in a similar quagmire. “There is scarcely any concrete reality upon which one cannot take two opposing views at the same time and which is consequently not subsumed upon the two antagonistic concepts.
Hence a thesis and an antithesis that it would be vain for us to try logically to reconcile, for the simple reason that never, with concepts or points of view, will you make a thing.”66Liberation from small knowledge requires that we settle into what Zhuangzi calls the pivot of the dao. “The place where neither this nor that finds its counterpart is called the pivot (shu) of the dao. Once the pivot finds its socket it can respond endlessly.” The pivot of the dao is the continuity of time and becoming, which illuminate the interpenetration of same and different and defeat timeless form and identity. A freely swinging pivot is an image of continuous becoming; it can go on forever, rolling around obstacles. To pivot with the dao is to never not be in movement. Bergson again echoes the Daoist classic. “Of what is not abstract and conventional but real and concrete, and all the more so of what... has not been cut out of the whole of reality either by the understanding or by common sense or by language, one cannot give any idea unless one takes views of it that are multiple, complementary, and not at all equivalent... making the necessary effort to embrace the whole.”67
The Daoist motivation for their version of “thinking in duration” is to encounter less opposition, cultivating an art of the unobstructed path. It takes practice. An experience described as “sitting and forgetting” or “sitting in oblivion” (zuo wang) became the model of later Daoist meditation. In a whimsical dialogue between an imaginary Confucius and his favorite disciple, Yan Hui exclaims, “I'm improving!” How? He has forgotten about benevolence and righteousness, the chief Confucian virtues. The next day he has forgotten about rites and music, the chief Confucian performances. On the third day, however, improvements stop. Now, he says, “I just sit and forget.” Confucius asks for an explanation. “I cast off my limbs, dismiss my hearing and sight, leave my form, abandon knowledge, and unify them in the great comprehension.” Gaping, as we might imagine it, Confucius asks to become Yan's disciple!68
Forgetting means not operating through conscious mental functions.
Forget plans, purposes, commitments, agreements, and promises. Forget to mind them, forget to care for or expect anything of them. One might recollect such things and how they once bound you, but they have no more weight than the memory of a dream. Such forgetting requires overcoming the glaring discontinuities introduced by everyday life and language no less than the laboriously instilled distinctions of scholarship. To be able to forget all of that would be a cognitive breakthrough and Zhuangzi suggests that artisans are models of how to do it. To think time intuitively is to think motion and movement and forget about halting. The moving never think of halting; movement only halts before an obstacle, an imposed passivity. To think in time is to act in a certain way, moving without halt, evading obstacles so successfully that one can finally just forget about them.Deletion is only one model of forgetting and an obviously mechanical one. Forgetting can also be the effect of enhanced continuity. One becomes oblivious to boundaries that others cannot avoid and which remain obstacles. One forgets to stop there; it is no longer a distinct place, bounded, external to what surrounds it. This forgetting is not deleting memory but sublimating it, removing what makes it limited, which is spatialization, the compulsion to think in terms of static forms and motion halted rather than continuous. No form endures, no form is essential, so forget about form and think instead on transformation. The more that memory enhances continuity, the more free and competent we are to forget names and boundaries. Experience is relieved of the fragmentation that kept knowledge small, and accedes to a greater experience of passage, free to forget what makes some halt and others stumble.
Zhuangzi disavows the Confucian veneration of scholarship and looks to artisanal experience to understand the source of sagacity. Sage knowledge resembles skill or technical art more than classical learning and ceremonies.
Artisans forget themselves and perform superlatively. For the Daoist, problems are obstacles to be comprehensively evaded by an ethical art of the unobstructed path. This is a hyper-empirical turn that takes empiricism beyond the limits of common sense, small knowledge, and even artisanal techne. Zhuangzi has no interest in a topic-neutral method to meet miscellaneous problems of knowledge, the interest in technical experience being to learn something about life, extending the artisan's effortless efficacy from production to ethics and methods of self-cultivation. What was a problematic means of production for the artisan becomes a telos of ethical selfcultivation for the adept.This Daoist is, then, a kind of empiricist, learning from experience what makes knowledge wise, but learning this in the practice of self-cultivation rather than experimental inquiry. The self-cultivation is not even one of those experiments in life that Mill and Nietzsche laud (§63). The Daoist is not aiming to become something new and different, and would prefer to vanish into things rather than command them. The telos is ethical, not epistemic, an empiricism perhaps, but without experiments or problems of knowledge.