Responding with dao: Early Daoist Ethics and the Environment

RESPONDING WITH DAO  : EARLY DAOIST ETHICS ANDTHE ENVIRONMENT
Eric Sean Nelson
Department of Philosophy, University of Massachusetts, Lowell
Introduction
This essay responds to recent scholarly literature that is skeptical of the potentialenvironmental significance of Daoism.
1 Its argument is that ‘‘early Daoist’’ texts such as the
Laozi and the Zhuangzi and later sources such as the
Yuan Dao, aresalient to contemporary ecological issues by indirectly suggesting a critical modelfor environmental ethics.

2  The phrase ‘‘early Daoism,’’ which some scholars prefer to portray as proto-Daoism, designates the overlapping yet divergent tendencies found in the Daodejing and Zhuangzi.

3 Although I avoid the problematic expression‘‘philosophical Daoism’’ (Daojia道家), which retrospectively ascribes a commonidentity to the collection of texts associated with Laozi and Zhuangzi and ques-tionably distinguishes this position from a later ‘‘religious Daoism’’
(Daojiao 道教),

4   I presuppose that Daoist texts of any provenance can have a philosophical import and be philosophically examined.The Daodejing and the Zhuangzi are not relevant to environmental issues bycontributing specific scientific research, political policies, or activist initiatives. It would be anachronistic to have such expectations of ancient texts. What early Dao-ism does suggest is a phenomenology of the experiential orientation and disposition of the embodied heart/mind (xin 心 ) that is timely in being fittingly attuned with its world. Daoism, interpreted in the light of contemporary thought, offers a philosoph-ical basis for a non-reductive naturalistic ethics in the widest sense of these words.Whereas the naturalism of early Daoism can be glimpsed in its openness to naturalphenomena, without reducing things to a specific doctrine or essence of what con-stitutes nature or the natural, ethics signifies its cultivation of life as the lived andunforced performative enactment of responsive freedom. Although classical Daoist texts seem to reject ‘‘ethics,’’ provided that ethics consists of rules, norms, and con-ventions organizing hierarchical and authority-driven social relations, early Daoismis not so much an anti-ethical and aesthetic nihilism as it is an alternative way of liv-ing with things. This naturalistic and anti-conventional approach to the ethical can be described preliminarily as an embodied receptivity to the myriad or ten thousand things (wanwu 萬物) themselves in their specificity, parity, and interconnectedness.
Daoism, Ethics, and the Environment: Problems and Possibilities

The argument that early Daoism undermines essentialism is apt if its ‘‘essences’’ aredynamic processes, contrasting with static characteristics and properties, calling for
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Philosophy East & West Volume 59, Number 3 July 2009 294–316>
2009 by University of Hawai‘i Press

vigilance against the reification that turns self-generating transformative phenomenainto unchanging substances like ‘‘nature’’ and ‘‘being.’’


5  Yet the aspect of Daoismidentified as ‘‘anti-essentialism’’ does not therefore imply the transition from essen-tialism to constructivism, for which signification is a mental, linguistic, or socialproduct. To the degree that nominalism and skepticism can be thematized in theDaoist context, they do not presuppose the primacy of the artificial and constructedthat is distinctive of much contemporary thought. Early Daoist texts provide an alter-native to the modern impasse between essentialism and constructivism if ‘‘dao’’ 道 (as way and, originally, verbal wayfaring and way making) can be articulated as thelived or performative enactment of the intrinsic value and life of the myriad things, of ‘‘sky and earth’’ or the natural world (tiandi 天地) as such and as a whole through which
how and the way humans address and are addressed by them. Daoismepistemologically and ethically ‘‘saves the phenomena,’’ potentially correcting theone-sidedness of anthropocentrism and biocentrism by attending to these things themselves—intrinsically and for their own sake rather than as objects reducedto value, use, and exchange—in the context of the self-cultivation or perfection(
zhen 真 ) of life and reality.


6  Many might question whether ancient ‘‘wisdom-literatures’’ can speak to us‘‘moderns,’’ who both benefit and suffer from our dominion over nature. In Dialectic of Enlightenment,
a crucial work concerning the domination of nature, TheodorAdorno and Max Horkheimer argued that profits come with profound losses as thedefacement of ‘‘external nature’’ (the natural world) is paid for with the mutilation of ‘‘internal nature’’ (the human world).

7  It follows from their analysis that the concernwith nature for its own sake, as more than a product of human concern and calcula-tion, cannot be separated from questions of human welfare and happiness. In con-trast to the binary either/or of biocentrism or anthropocentrism, environmentaldestruction intersects with issues of achieving human health, longevity, and well-being. Curative and preventive means of realizing such ends are accentuated inmany Daoist traditions and by and large in Chinese culture, sometimes themselvescausing destruction to the environment and biological life. One controversy about the ethical character of Daoism is whether it can be reduced to calculations andtechniques of longevity and self-perfection reflecting in the end an anthropocentricand egotistical self-interest oblivious to plants and animals and the environment. Icontend that it should not, since Daoist bio-spiritual practices (1) can be distin-guished from those of macrobiotic hygiene in general Chinese culture


8  and (2)should be situated in relation to dao
and its unforced and incalculable naturalness(ziran 自然).

9 One assessment of the ecological value of Daoist traditions contends that only‘‘modern Western approaches’’ can solve ‘‘modern Western problems.’’ This conten-tion is erroneous if environmental destruction is not exclusively ‘‘Western’’ but global, and not only a modern phenomenon but one of long standing. For Hor-kheimer and Adorno, the domination of nature under instrumental reason did not begin in modernity and with the enlightenment, as anti-modernists contend. It wasalready operative in ancient myth, just as myth persists after enlightenment.

10 Nature
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