Tao, Creation, and Nothingness

Reading of "Understanding the Tao" #7

In a previous post, I offered to start reading the book Comprendre le Tao (Understanding the Tao) by the French scholar Isabelle Robinet. She was an internationally renowned French Sinologist. While some of her work has been translated into English, this book is not. However, you can take a look at her book, Taoism: Growth of a Religion, published by Stanford University Press in 1997.

I have already published several posts about this book by Robinet. You can read or reread them here: Taoism.

With these posts we finished the first part of the book. In this new one, I would like to continue my reading and begin the second part.

The Tao (道) and the Way

Robinet begins this section with a thorough explanation of the concept of Tao (道). She writes that this character refers to the way, the method, but that Laozi used it as the ground of the world and the wholeness of the world itself. So there are two dimensions in this character, a methodological one and a metaphysical one.

She adds that in Taoism, the word Tao can also refer to the experience of “intimate presence” born of meditation. She points out that unlike what European theologians did with important Christian concepts such as that of God, there was no real theoretical speculation in China around the concept of Tao.

She explains:

The Tao is the ultimate and constitutional foundation of the world and of life, its origin, the Source, the Root. It is therefore a hopeless enterprise to try to speak with the language of that which is the foundation of language, to know that which is the foundation of knowledge. (p. 76)

There are two ways of talking about the Tao: a negative one and an affirmative one. According to the negative way, the Tao is ineffable, unknowable, which is important to avoid interpreting Taoism as vitalism, to assimilate it to the idea of the flow of life.

The negative way is not specific to Taoism, but it is the common attitude of many theologians and mystics all over the world. The Tao “possesses no qualities, nor does their negation” (p. 77).

This approach to the Tao leads to a critique of knowledge, which is based on an ontological foundation. Knowledge can only be produced by operating objectively, by externalizing its object; in this sense, it moves away from the Tao, from the One, and is not a path. Zhuangzi (…) contrasts it with a process of knowledge and concrete efficiency that he compares to that of artisans. A lived experience, it cannot be transmitted. (p. 79)

Robinet believes that the Tao that remains hidden is both everywhere and nowhere. It is a way, a path made by walking. Such an expression echoes that of the poet Antonio Machado: “Traveler, there is no path; the path is made by walking.”

Yet for the Taoist, there is a path, a path that penetrates everything and is already here with all of us.

The Tao (道) and the Creation

Furthermore, the Tao precedes everything and is the foundation of what exists today.

Therefore, it has been understood as the “mother,” the primary principle of the universe, from which everything is born. Even though it is empty, and because it is empty, it contains the seeds (which are not a “something”) of life. The Tao creates everything without being influenced by anything (p. 85).

In this sense, the Tao plays the role of creator. It is also so if we take the notion of creation in the sense given to it by Thomas Aquinas as the current relationship of ontological dependence of the whole world in relation to what is primary and does not depend on anything else. (p. 85)

Robinet also describes the Tao as preceding any existence and any operation, as the organizer of the universe that engenders and deploys the world through Tao’s own rules.

It is not a blind force like that of the first Greek philosophers who attributed the order of the world to randomness; it is more akin to Aristotle’s conception of “nature” as the principle of a rational order; it is not, but it gives the intelligible element proper to the world. It is the “axis” of the universe. It connects everything together (…). (p. 86)

After such a comparison with the views of the Greek philosophers, she describes the Tao as “the culmination of the indeterminate, all-encompassing, containing all possibilities but unfolding them in the same movement and the same moment” (p. 88). It has a “surplus of meaning” over all that can be said or thought (p. 90).

It is both the One that produces nothing that cannot be known or grasped, but it is also the Mother, the unique source of the birth of the world, as well as the multiple and limitless product of that birth (p. 91).

From a logical point of view, the Tao is neither something nor nothing. It cannot be grasped either by negation — because it is the source of everything —  or by affirmation — because it is not something (p. 92).

There is a wu, an indeterminable absolute, which cannot be compared to the you, to the “there is something determined”, and which exists both as the origin, the foundation and the end of everything within particularized beings, on the one hand; and, on the other hand, a relative wu, the white in the painting, the silence in the word, the empty space that welcomes, the limit of beings that allows them to be, which is nothing other than the image of absolute wu, the negation opposed to the affirmation that disappears during a contrary affirmation. (p. 96)

In this passage, Robinet tries to describe one of the questions I discuss in my philosophical work — even though I do not usually engage in Taoism —, which is the question of the indeterminable absolute, wu (無) — as absolute nothingness, in Japanese zettai-mu (絶対無) —, its relationship to nothing (the relative wu), and to you 有 (the being) — actually my research goes further today, but this is certainly interesting.

She notes the difficulty of talking about the unspeakable, the ineffable, the ungraspable, since it is both indeterminate and undeterminable — since any determination would mean changing absolute nothingness into relative nothingness.

This wu, correlative of the you, constitutes with it one of the two extremes that must be set aside (or held at the same time to neutralize them by each other). The relative wu, or rather several relative wu, white, space, appear in contrast to the you, the lines in the painting, the words, or the things that frame them. The original wu never appears. The manifestations of the Tao show that they cannot make it visible or discernible, that they are incapable of saying everything and of saying nothing in particular. (p. 96)

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