§108. Winds of Change

The Dao de jing, or “Classic of the Dao and Its Virtue,” sounds a theme that is not prominent in Zhuangzi but was accentuated in later Daoist works. One such passage reads, “The five colors blind our eyes.

This barely hinted argument becomes a motif of the later Huainanzi, or Book of the Huainan Masters, which introduces it with a paraphrase of the Dao de jing: “The five colors disrupt the eyes and cause them to be unclear; the five sounds confuse the ears and cause them not to be acute; the five flavors disrupt the mouth and cause it to lose the ability to taste.” The text goes on to explain why this happens, which is because relying on the senses wears the body out. “Those who rely on their ears and their eyes to hear and see tire out their bodies and are not clear.” It is a reactive, wearying, depleting way to live. We become captive to preferences and alienating attachments, which harm our nature and make it impossible to understand the patterns in what we perceive.⁷⁰

More than intelligent discipline, the senses require transcendence, an observation the Dao de jing had already made. “When the heart (mind) is used to guide the qi, this is called ‘forcing things.' ” Zhuangzi makes a similar point. “Do not listen with your ears, but listen with your heart (mind).

Normal perception perceives bodies; it does not perceive continuity, movement, or change. As Bergson said, “To perceive means to immobilize.” The Huainan Masters say, “Investigations by ear and eye are not adequate to discern the principles of things; discussions employing the heart (mind) and its conceptions are not adequate to distinguish true and false.” Only one who “penetrates to Supreme Harmony and who grasps the responses of the nat­ural” is in a position to make those determinations of principle and truth well. To penetrate Supreme Harmony requires Bergsonian intuition, thinking in duration, feeling continuity and interpenetration, forgetting instantaneous or tenseless same and different. The Huainan Masters call that “finding the formless.” Look for it and you cannot see it, listen and you cannot hear it, because it is without form. “It is a formlessness from which forms are gener­ated; it is a soundlessness from which the five tones call out.”⁷²

A transcendent perception of the normally imperceptible qi is necessary for superior efficacy in matching perception to action. That is why perfected people, whose inborn nature has merged with the dao, “cast aside sensory perception.” Their mental activity is “concentrated internally and penetrates through to comport with the One.” This is no ordinary perception now, but rather extraordinary clarity, daimonic acuity.

The problem with the senses is that they individuate and isolate. They dis­cover figures on a background, they posit discontinuity and convincingly recognize enduring objects, but what they overlook is the continuity by which these solid things melt into each other. Perception breaks up, isolates, enforces discontinuity, and leaves experience wracked by inconsistency, now this, now that. Continuity and consistency have their source elsewhere, though not on this account in the thinking heart, which is just another ob­ject and more to forget. Serial sense perception is all stops. What is missing is movement, continuity, interpenetration, enduring consistency—all the qualities by which Bergson recognizes time. Time is missing.

Perception only perceives the present. It is always starting over; it is always now, the present. What has to be added to bodies is the duration in which they become what they are. Continuity and interpenetration are temporal concepts, presupposing and expressing duration. A plausible thesis of com­parative philosophy equates the Daoist’s dao and Bergson’s duree. Both intro­duce an idea of transcendence, but the transcendence is immanent or at least not otherworldly. What the transcendent transcends is fixity, form, and the attendant discontinuity, which it transcends as the movement of which they are terminations, fixed by names and common purposes. Motion, move­ment, becoming, changing—all of that is precisely transcendent, wholly dif­ferent from the terms that indicate their termination, as different as space and time.

Chinese tradition tended to experience the transcendent continuity of things, their resonance and ultimate consistency, as spirit-like, numinous, and daimonic.

Those who are able to achieve victory by changing and transforming in re­sponse to the dispositions of their enemies are called “spirit- like.”... Subtle! So subtle! They are without form. Spirit-like! So spirit-like! They make no sound. And so, the enemy's fate lies in their hands.

The Book of Changes (Yi jing) says, “What cannot be measured by yin and yang is called spirit.” Yin and yang measure, that is, correlate, bodies. What these cannot measure is the transition that changes one into the other. Yin and yang are endpoints, resting phases, patterns in outcomes; they are not the happening, the changing, the process. To apprehend that, you have to forget about yin and yang, forget about correlation, forget about forms or figures on a background. “The activity of spirit shows itself in the totality of phenomena; this is transformation.”⁷⁴

Francois Jullien finds this Chinese transcendence in the art of landscape painting. A Chinese landscape is dominated by emptiness, littered with discrete forms calling and responding to each other. Such works suasively convey the idea that vitality and power lie in correlation and continuity. These painters were literati, not technical professionals, and like calligraphy or po­etry, their painting was a gentleman's art. It began in response to something lacking in professional portraiture, which they felt to be lifeless and vapid, all form and no qi. That was the deficiency they sought to overcome with their landscapes, which made the mimesis of form secondary. They seek instead to paint the resonance, the continuity, the transcendent vitality by which this imaginary environment exceeds the discrete bodies it envelops. It has been said that “landscape painting precisely expresses the Chinese style in natural philosophy.” Thus for instance the Song dynasty Tradition in Painting: “What is the one [consummate method of painting]? One can say: ‘To convey the spirit (chuan shen), that is all.' People merely know that human beings have spirit and do not realize that all things have spirit,” that being what painter Wang Lu learned from Mt.

To convey this spirit the work itself has to have (i.e., exemplify) the rhythmic qi that it would express, which requires a painter who can feel mi­lieus in the tip of a brush. Actually feeling that qi at the creation endows the painting with qi as well, a quality of it as an artifact no less than its lines or colors. “Landscape painting is the essence of the shaping powers of nature.

Thus through the vicissitudes of yin and yang—weather, time, and climate— the charm of inexhaustible transformation is unfailingly visible. If you your­self do not possess that grand wave-like vastness of mountain and valley within your heart and mind, you will be unable to capture it with ease in your painting.”⁷⁶

Spirit is physical, natural, as material as the wind; but like wind it is formless and draws things into motion, which in the case of forms means destruction through transformation, a thought comparable to the energetic deterritorial- ization of anorganic life (§97). Spirit, qi, enjoys what Jullien calls an “internal transcendence... freed from the limits of the sensible yet not abandoning the sensible altogether.” He concludes that “China quickened to something that in the West drew scant attention: the transmission of an influence all the more effective (imbuing and pervasive) for being impossible to grasp or apprehend,” which he regards as “one of Chinese thought's most interesting contributions.” “Nothing ‘is,' but everything correlates.” By looking at eve­rything in terms of correlation, this moment of Chinese thought “breaches the walls behind which Europe's psychological (insular) notion of the self­subject lies entrenched.” Spirits are as material as bodies, but are powers of movement and not things moved, an emanation of bodies, as in distillation, spirit of wine, a product of decanting, a vapor exuded from a body as from a chunk of camphor. Spirit such as that is “an expansion of physicality, not a break from it.” However tenuous, “It momentarily reseals the great cleaving of the world,” that is, the division into discontinuous sense-bodies.⁷⁷

This idea may not be as Chinese as Jullien suggests.

Comparable notions were not uncommon in early-modern natural phi­losophy. Mechanists like Descartes and Hobbes avoid them, but others be­sides Newton thought they remained valuable in accounting for phenomena that mechanism just has to ignore. “For us physicians,” said William Harvey, “spirit is that which Hippocrates called impetum faciens, namely whatso­ever attempts anything by its own endeavor and arouses any motion with agility and vehemence, or initiates any action.” Galileo took the same view. “It seems to me that there exists in nature a most tenuous, rapid, and subtle substance, which is diffused throughout the universe and penetrates every­where without impediment. It warms, vivifies, and renders fertile all living creatures. Our senses themselves would seem to indicate that the main reservoir of this spirit is the sun, from which an enormous light expands throughout the universe, accompanied by this calorific spirit penetrating all vegetable matter and making it alive and fertile”⁷⁹

Newton was convinced that alchemy was a promising avenue of re­search into these spiritual agencies. He began to study alchemy in his early twenties, and spent years at alchemical experimentation, work that con­tinued unabated after the publication of the Principles. As he struggled to develop a theory of these agencies Newton repeatedly turned to the Stoic idea of pneuma. There was, as Stoics said, something divine about the ten­sion binding all parts of the cosmos, penetrating and mingling all bodies. On the Stoic theory, original matter (hyle) is passive and formless, without cohe­sive force (sunektike dunamis). Natural forms appear when a fiery pneuma introduces tension (tonos), which mixes with everything and makes distant parts continuous. Pneuma is corporeal because it acts and is acted on, which is the Stoics' definition of body, though they regard pneuma “as something akin not to matter, but rather to force... a continuous field of force inter­penetrating matter and spreading through space, and thus being the cause of physical phenomena” Pneuma's first effect is tension, the interpenetration of space by pneumatic energy, making all things continuous. Sambursky calls their pneumatic tonos the first version of ether, “with all the characteristic functions ascribed to it from the seventeenth century on”⁸⁰

For Bergson esprit (spirit) is the power that contracts duration, the ten­sion that makes moments interpenetrate. “The humblest function of spirit is to bind together the successive moments of the duration of things.” It is therefore also the power of memory, which is the substance of consciousness. “With memory we are in very truth in the domain of spirit.” As in Newton, this spirit is continuous with matter. “We pass insensibly from one to the other.” To ascribe such effects as temporal interpenetration and memory to “spirit” indicates a difference between its efficacy and mechanical causation. Memory is not a mechanism; it is a power that works entirely in time, a syn­thetic power of temporal interpenetration. No machine can do that; spirit is a power but not a mechanical cause, though that does not make it occult. Such efficacy is characteristic of tendency, expressing the power of the virtual, its nisus to actuality, its “will to power.”⁸¹

Stoic pneuma seems as close as European thought comes to the Chinese idea of qi. Qi is a word for any gaseous substance—steam, clouds, smoke, the air, and breath itself. It is also the modern Chinese word for weather. In natural philosophy, qi has extension and is material, provided that matter is understood dynamically, as interchangeable with energy and never at rest. This qi is in constant transformation independently of awareness, being the original material of all things, penetrating all things and making them flow. It has always been associated with the dynamics of yin and yang, as the stuff of which they are phases or the material of their continuum. This concept of qi may go back to Zou Yan in the third century bce, who is credited with introducing yin-yang thinking into natural philosophy. The idea receives development in the Huainanzi, and by the Song dynasty it has become or­thodox. Neo-Confucian thought traces the genesis of qi to the primordial interaction of the empty and the full. Concentration disperses, the dispersed coalesces, phases of empty and full spontaneously transform into each other, the empty tending to actuality, the actual decaying into virtual emptiness. The oscillations locally synchronize and quasi-materialize in the energetic ether of qi, whose passage through an endless series of yin-yang transform­ations defines our actuality.⁸²

The argument of the Dao de jing, as amplified by the Book of the Huainan Masters, is that sagacity requires transcending ordinary sense perception. The conditions of clarity and superior acuity require that we perceive what cannot be distinctly perceived, what is implicit, virtual, incipient, merely tending. That cannot normally be perceived, not because it is immaterial, but because it is not a fully present form, being instead form birthing, melting, incipient, and transitional, passage, a phenomenon of duration. We see things best when we see them melting like icicles in the sun. The superior ex­ercise of perception perceives not present bodies, but what they are tending to vanish into.

Daoists think that learning to perceive incipience enhances perception, makes it wiser in the way of the world, and not fixated on “beings.” Newton was trying to crack the mystery that unlocked all others, hoping to use the best science to refute atheism once and for all. These unlikely interlocutors meet on the thought that though bodies may appear inert they cannot be so; they are moved by something that is not just another body's mechan­ical force. The Daoists propose that we can perceive and thereby act and live better, more sagaciously, whereas Newton wants to know better, know a higher, better truth that he might contemplate like a wonderful theorem.

Newton's empiricism, his experimentation, and hypothetical reasoning are trenchantly “problematic,” but this empirical natural philosophy supplements a theology drenched in Christian Platonism. The Daoists, if they are empiricists, are no more theorematic than problematic in their empiricism, since they lack a Western contemplative concept of truth, and do not constrain their empiricism to problems of knowledge. If empiricists originate all knowledge in the senses, these Daoists are superior empiricists, discounting the normal behavior of the senses, and training perception to the subtle phenomena of duration and passage. The training is ethical, a su­perior self-cultivation, a transcendence (of fixed form) that can also be called untrammeled immanence, at ease in any perspective and stuck in none.