Walking the path
APR 22, 2019 34 MINUTES
Interviewee: Michael Puett
Interview by Nigel Warburton
Nigel Warburton: From outside Chinese philosophy it seems that balance, and particularly within Daoism, is a crucial concept – it’s the balance of forces, that’s an idea that filters through to the West. Is that accurate, that balance does play a large part in Chinese philosophy?
Michael Puett: It does indeed. And one of the key reasons it’s such a key part of Chinese philosophy is that one of the opening assumptions in China is: Imagine the world as a very messy world of constantly flowing energies, often very different energies and different modalities of energies. And therefore, in this world of constant energies things are endlessly bumping against each other, often in poor ways. And this is particularly bad when you get to, for example, humans, who are also these messy things with tons of different energies going on, interplaying with other messy things with tons of energies (other human beings) and we tend to play off against each other very, very badly.
So, the background to a concern with balance is a sense that in a world where humans are interacting within it, is a world that’s always in danger of conflict – where the messiness is always playing off with other messiness in bad ways, and if that’s your opening concern then one of the things you want to do is to learn to work with these competing forces. You’re not trying to even things out, you’re not trying to marginalise things, you want to work with all of these different forces and connect them in ways that leads to some kind of flourishing. And there, and finally to get to the key term, the notion is that one of the goals you are seeking is to balance these different forces so no one of them is, for any lengthy amount of time, predominant over the others.
That’s really interesting because one model of a balance is two pans with a pivot, and there are only two things to find a point of equilibrium between, but the way you have described that, it sounds like there are many other aspects to this ‘balance’ thing.
Yes! Yes! Many. And this is one of the aspects that I think is often not well understood from the West, because it’s understood – and this part is true – that two of the big divisions that energies can be categorised into is yin and yang. So think of yin as the female – “I’m cold” – yang is hot – male – and when we hear this we often think; “Oh, so that means there are two energies just as there are males and females, and the whole world is divided into two things”, and therefore, as you said, it would simply be a question of balancing these two things. But of course, what’s really important to Chinese philosophy is these categories go all the way down and are constantly intermixing.
So it’s not that I, for example as a male, consist of yang energy, it’s that I have a little bit more yang energy, which is why I’m male, but I have tons of yin energies – and it’s energies in the plural – and moreover, these are interacting. I’ve got tons of these different energies in my body, some of which are yang and some of which are yin, these are interacting when I interact with other human beings I am interacting with their yang-ness and their yin-ness, and therefore it’s not really two things that simply need to be balanced; you’re really balancing a multiplicity of radically different forces.
So, to understand that, are you talking about these twin aspects of, for instance, anger or desire, what sort of things are they attached to?
Precisely. One of the things they can be attached to are what we would call emotions. So, if I get angry, in this way of thinking, what’s happening is I’m getting an explosion of the yang form of energy. Which means, of course, if there’s too much yang energy that we can call anger, I will become way overly aggressive, I will cease to see the complexities of situations because I will be overwhelmed with my aggressive angry energy, and therefore I need to balance it out with more moderate forms of energies. So, with my anger, I balance it out with more yin energy. And that’s just internally, but of course if people are dealing with me in such a horrible state, what they would try to do is do things to bring about balancing – do things to calm down this overwhelming anger and do things to allow more of the yin energies to grow within me as well.
Now, people who are reading this won’t be able to see your hands moving, but it’s almost as if you were doing some kind of martial art when you were describing that. So the relations between people is about turning the energies into directions where it’s being used in a positive way, much as a kind of, I don’t know, whether in some kind of Kung Fu or whatever, you take the energy that somebody is using as they run towards you and turn it into a way of incapacitating them rather than getting a blow from them.
Precisely. So just as an example, in Judo, which means ‘the way of softness’ in Chinese, and the goal of this, and the key aspect of martial arts, indeed you are trying to sense the energies of the other person and either work with those energies or use those energies against them if they are trying to attack you. So, in a prototypical example like the one you mentioned, if someone is aggressive towards me, they have an overreliance on a yang energy, by definition according to this way of thinking, that would lead them to be slightly overaggressive, slightly overreaching their resources. I’m trying to sense that moment and use the very energy they’re using against me, against them. In a very literal sense in Judo, like someone trying to lunge at me, I simply shift my body within them and use that to throw them over me, for example.
So, I’m trying to understand the different aspects within which you’re feeling this. So would it be possible, for instance, to be a balanced person, to have an overall equilibrium between these two forces, and yet in some respects, have an excess of one or the other? So in respect of, well we’ve talked about anger, but what about in terms of love – you have an excess of love – and I don’t know which force of the two that would tend to be connected with – but then in some other aspect like anger you have a different balance, yet overall it all evens out. Is that a possibility? Or does each of the aspects in which yin and yang are visible or present, do they all have to be individually balanced in a kind of point of equilibrium, or are we looking at balance between the different aspects of the self?
In a weird way, it’s kind of both but adding in even a third element, which is: add in the temporal element. So, if the constant working of all energies in different situations in dealing with other people – who also have these very complex energies that are coming out, and so the sense would be no one of these energies – if it’s preponderate for too long, will lead you in good directions; any of them. Because any of them, if they are completely preponderate will mean you will fail to see something else where it be overly focused on one thing and not on something else. So, you’d think, to give a standard example in the literature, well, being a warm-hearted person is of course a good thing. Well, the answer is ‘usually’, but if you’re always being too warm there might be a moment when you’re dealing with someone who you really need to be the stronger figure, for a brief moment. But obviously if you’re too strong, that will work against that situation as well.
Instead of thinking, “I have some ‘self’ with some inherent set of personality that I should just accept,” you’re thinking, “No, I’m just a mess of different energy, as is everyone else and therefore I’m capable of becoming a more balanced human being.”
And so, the sense is in any situation you will have briefly the preponderance of one set of energies, but you’re also becoming aware of the inherent dangers that will always set in when any set of energies are preponderant, and you’re immediately trying to balance out. So, getting back to your question, at certain moments, yes, there will be a preponderance –and that’s even a good thing – but it’s always dangerous if that continues for too long, pulling you into situations that would not be the appropriate set of energies for.
And is this philosophy of yin and yang exclusively attached to Daoism, or is it more general than that?
It’s actually quite general. So it develops in a body of literature that’s very much focused on these practices of working with your energies, and then the language is really taken over by both Daoism and Confucianism, and the reason is because regardless of your ultimate philosophical position on all sorts of issues concerning ethics, better ways to live, et cetera, it’s an incredibly rich vocabulary to help the practitioner become incredibly self-conscious of sort of the complex, messy emotional dispositions that we all have, and with this terminology you have a very concrete way of learning to sense that, to work with that, to refine that, and so it really becomes an all-pervasive language across the different ways of thinking across China.
And is it the kind of language that you hear spoken – that somebody actually describes another person within that framework?
Oh, very much so, very much so. You can use it to describe people, you can use it to describe foods – so sometimes if you’re eating a meal it is slightly imbalanced. Not because, say, it’s too spicy, but because it’s too spicy and not being balanced off something else. And so, if you’re serving one dish that has a high yang energy, you’ll want to balance that with another dish that will moderate that a bit. And of course, again, you can think of this temporally – so at one moment in the meal I’ll serve this really, really, really strong yang energy piece, and then balance this right afterwards with something much more moderate. And so, you can talk about people this way, you can talk about foods this way, you can talk about situations this way.
And I might add, along with yang and yin energies, another way to categorise them is in terms of levels of intensity. You can have high energy moments, low energy moments, high energy situations, low energy situations. You can have highly refined feelings of energy, you can have very poorly refined energy which means you’re not highly responsive to situations. So, there are lots of different modalities you’re learning to pay attention to that you’re always trying to, in any given situation, balance out with the other ones.
So, is the energy different from the yin and yang, or is that a description of the yin and yang?
Think of yin and yang as one possible way of categorising these different energies – so it’s one very powerful way of categorising them, but you can also do categories on the level of refinement vs. lack of refinement. So, for example, air is highly, highly refined energy. Mud actually has some energy in it, but it’s really, really, really low in terms of the refinement spectrum. And so the reason that way of thinking can be very helpful is we humans have some more highly refined energies within us and some very poorly refined energies and then the danger of the ways we live our lives is we can dissipate our higher energies, and the goal is to, on the contrary, develop practices that will allow us to, in a very literal sense, energise ourselves – so getting more high energy. So, if you’re feeling very high energy from this way of thinking, you can practice and train yourself to be able to do that more commonly. But again, too much high energy in certain situations is a bad thing, which is why you need to balance it.
So, you spoke of air and mud.
When I think of energy, I’m thinking of the things that allow me to feel strong and do things rather than being listless. And obviously breathing in air is a prerequisite of that, for everyone. Is that why air is high energy, or is it something independent of that, that it just is high energy because of some metaphysical assumptions that some Chinese philosophers make about air?
Well, partly it is. Part of the larger metaphysics would be: Think of the heavens above us as being extremely high energy. So, for example, if spirits exist up there, conceptualised as figures who are exceedingly high energy, who can see perfectly, hear perfectly, interact and respond to other spirits and other natural forces perfectly, meaning that they are highly refined energy. Then below is the Earth. Say, again, we’ll use our example of mud – very low refined energy, which means mud – it’s not alive, it’s not vital, it certainly cannot hear and listen. It does not react to anything, it can react to the pond, I can step on it and move it – but it can’t respond. And air, getting back to your question, of course is more heavenly, mud is earthly.
And the reason this matters so much to them is, of course, because humans are right in between. We have some life, so we have some vitality, we have some consciousness, we are capable of seeing and hearing, but we usually don’t see terribly well – by which they mean seeing the world around us effectively. We don’t really hear very well – we hear in limited perspectival ways – and so the goal of the self-cultivational gene is to train ourselves to become, well, more like those spirits above, right? More vital, more alive, able to see more clearly, hear more clearly, be more responsive to the world around us. We’re humans, so we’ll never get there fully, but the goal is to become more like that in the ways we live our lives.
So do you think the way of seeing the world would be helpful to somebody who sees the world more scientifically, because in a sense, what’s beneath the mud – maybe coal – could have high energy and what’s above, as the air gets thinner, may be low energy in terms of what we can do with it to generate more power; though obviously the Sun has a lot of power. That’s such a different way of conceptualising the world – is it useful to explore this, or should we treat it as an interesting feature of Chinese metaphysics to have divided up the world this way that somehow science has gotten beyond?
Yes. I think it’s a very helpful way to think. And let me actually begin with humans, but then turn to the larger metaphysical world.
So, in terms of humans, very valuable. One of the dangers I think we fall into, particularly in the West and more recently, is we tend to fall into what from this perspective I would even call the ‘danger’ of thinking we have some pre-given authentic selves. So, I’ve got a self here, if I act in certain ways that’s just me, that’s just who I am, and I should be learning to love and embrace who I really am. Of course, from this perspective, you should never think that, because the current way you’re feeling may simply be a set of energies playing out – and assume they’re usually playing out pretty poorly – and then it’s a question of developing practices to change it. So instead of thinking “I have some ‘self’ with some inherent set of personality traits that I should just accept”, you’re thinking, “No, I’m just a mess of different energy, as is everyone else and therefore I’m capable of becoming a more balanced human being, as are those around me.” I can work with others around me to create better situations. So, for humans, absolutely.
Learn to train yourself to not be overly taken with emotional responses to the world that will lead you to be overly-aggressive, or even overly-happy.
But let me also turn to your question about metaphysics here too. I think we tend to buy into similar notions when we read the larger cosmos. We tend to fall into, again from this perspective, a danger of reading the world of consisting of fundamental substances that just are what they are – that follow clear, natural, unchanging laws and if we can understand those laws, we can understand what the substances are and what the forces are that determine their interactions. Now, in certain ways of thinking this can be very productive, it leads to a reductive approach in the sciences that’s been extraordinarily productive, there’s no question, but the danger of course is that it forces you to argue that the world really does consist of these fundamental substances with clearly definable, natural laws that govern their interaction, and I think it’s worth posing the question that that’s possibly just wrong. We certainly know at the quantum level that it’s wrong; could it be wrong at a deeper level?
Imagine a world as we see very strongly worked out in Chinese metaphysics, that’s always being thought of in these endless and ultimately not fully conceptualisable levels of interacting energies, and therefore you’re not going to get clear natural laws that will define everything. You can talk in terms of patterns of interaction, but of course once you’re using a term like ‘patterns of interaction’ you can ask: “Are the patterns always beneficial? Are there ways to work with these patterns in ways that would be more productive for us and other aspects of the larger natural world?” And once you’re posing that question, as with humans, it allows you to then pose the questions of whether we could alter things that we otherwise accept as pre-given and unchangeable, and I think thinking that way can be extraordinarily productive.
You’ve talked about practices – and I know that Chinese philosophy is very much tied to developmental practices to change the way we think about things, particularly in the area of ethics – are there any specific practices tied to particular texts or schools that you think are important in achieving balance in individuals? I’m thinking of somebody reading this who wants to begin to explore Chinese philosophy. Are there pointers to texts and things to do which might jolt them into a different way of being in the world that is in better balance, in the way that you have been describing?
Absolutely. One text I would recommend in particular that does indeed focus very much on practices, is a work called The Inward Training. It actually has a very good translation into English by Harold Roth, and the whole text is – it’s one of the early texts, it’s about the 4th century BCE – it is one of the early texts in China that really tries to work out the implications of thinking in terms of these modalities of different energies. The focus of the text is indeed the basic practices that we could begin engaging in, and the argument of the text is usually our daily practices consist of dissipating our qi, so dissipating our high level energies, and slowly over time we make ourselves tired and sick, bringing about a much earlier death than we would otherwise have to face. The key practice that the text wants to advocate are practices that teach us to, in a very literal since, live better and in an equally literal sense, become more energised. So it’s all about – first some obvious things – learning to eat well and exercise…
We do say a ‘balanced diet’!
Indeed, indeed! Absolutely crucial. But then it goes beyond that – the things we already accept – it goes beyond that and we’ll say as well that equally, the ways we are emotionally involved in the world are also in danger and we need to learn to balance those. Learn to balance your interactions with those around you, learn to train yourself to not be overly taken with emotional responses to the world that will lead you to be overly-aggressive, or even overly-happy, which always will entail a fallback to sadness after the euphoria. And so you’re training yourself to moderate and refine your responses to the world, which this text will say you should be doing right along with exercising, learning to eat well etc. It’s part of the same regime of practices. And eating well and sleeping well we usually don’t do, but we know we should – but this will say; well, equally think of this as a daily practice learning to work with your emotional dispositions, learning to work with your responses to the world. And once you begin thinking in terms of energies, it’s very practical because you have a very concrete way to understand what they’re talking about, because you can certainly feel these energies when you’re practising. You can feel them when you exercise – you can equally feel them just when you’re talking to people and working in situations.
That’s brilliant. Is that text by a known author, and is it within a particular school of philosophy?
Intriguingly, no. Which goes back to your question about how pervasive these ideas are. This is one chapter in a miscellaneous text called the Guanzi, and Guanzi was just a major minister of one of the old states, the state of Qi, and this is simply a body of text that at least was claimed to have been written in this state.There’s no author given to this particular chapter, simply known as The Inward Training. It’s not classified according to any way of thinking; it simply presents itself as a teaching about energies. And yet once this and related texts are being written, this language just becomes pervasive in the tradition. And so then figures that we most certainly known very well – Mencius, Zheng Xuan – start picking up this language, but it seems to initially emerge out of a discussion of self-cultivation and how to cultivate energies within the human body.
And is there a specific word for ‘balance’ that is used repeatedly, the thing that you’re aiming for?
“This amazing app tells you when you are looking your phone too much!”
There is – the main term that’s used is ‘harmony’. And here too, harmony, when it’s translated into English, it gives a slightly dangerous connotation, because we hear the word harmony and we think “Oh, that means it’s all about harmonising things in the sense of homogenising things, making everything fit together.” And in Chinese, the sense of harmony is, on the contrary, “No, no, no. Imagine a world of radically disparate, endlessly poorly-interacting energies, and harmony is not homogenising them, it’s learning to connect them productively.” And as you can see from that way of formulating it, what that will mean in any situation is going to be radically different, so you’re learning to train yourself to sense these complexities, work with these complexities, connect these complexities. And that’s what they really mean by harmony – you don’t get rid of the differences; you are actually working with the differences.
Well you could say that some kinds of harmony, in music, work with dissonances to resolve them eventually over time. So, there’s a sense that Bach’s harmonies have lots of dissonances, but they’re resolved at the end of the piece usually, so the temporal element is absolutely crucial. The metaphor of balance is also important, but it’s something else as well – it’s almost like vectors, getting vectors to pull in the direction you want them to pull in rather than apart.
Yes, that’s a very nice way of putting it. It would be, in a sense, going back to the music analogy, an endless work of these disparate notes that you’re endlessly connecting without there ever being a final resolution because it’s always going to be altering. And the moment you seem to get a perfect resolution, one moment later that’s going to include something very dangerous that you hadn’t noticed and will require some kind of new work of reweaving these different tonal patterns together. ■
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