Watts on the way

I wrote this essay for Mika.

Who is the philosopher with the largest footprint in Western consciousness? There can be no doubt that it is Aristotle of Stageira. Aristotle suffered a partial death when Galileo, Newton, and Darwin eviscerated teleology, the idea that things happen for a reason (where reason refers to a goal in the future, not to a cause in the past). Those who are pronounced dead, live longer. When it comes to categorization, Aristotle remains as strong as ever in Western science, theology, and folklore. We love our categories. In personality science, there are ("Big") five kinds of people; in theology, there are two (the saved and the rest of us); in folklore, there are three (the good, the bad, and the ugly).

Six days a week, I am an Aristotelian. I need categories to study social cognition and to learn more about how people reason inductively. Even William James, who talked about the "stream" of consciousness for crying out loud, was an Aristotelian. He felt that categorization is "for some unknown reason, a great aesthetic delight for the mind [and] the first step in most of the sciences is purely classificatory."

On the seventh day, I have doubts. I read Wittgenstein, Rosch, and Heraclitus of Ephesus, all of whom held categories in contempt. On the seventh day, the Aristotelian squabbles between lumpers, who want a few large categories, and splitters, who want many small categories, seem petty. Turning East, I see a third group (darn it, I just used Aristotelian categories!): the floaters. Actually, I think the greatest floater of all time was Heraclitus. Come on, he said "Ta panta rei," (everything flows) and he knew that you can't step into the same river twice. Sadly, his legacy was trampled by the Aristotelians who wanted order (and law), purpose, and causality. In the east, however, there was Lao Tzu ("The old fellow"), who remained untrampled.

Lao Tzu is difficult to understand for a mind configured the Aristotelian way. Plus, I flunked Mandarin. This brings me to Alan Watts (see picture). Alan Watts was an Englishman, who lived on a boat in Sausalito and wrote beautiful little books on Eastern philosophy (yikes! Another Aristotelian category. Lao Tzu did not do philosophy. He just did ___.). I have four Watts books on my shelf: "What is Tao?" "What is Zen?" "This is it," and "The book: On the taboo against knowing who you are." They kind of blend into one another. They do not represent the crisp distinctions that an Aristotelian would expect. One might say they flow into one another.

Now, what about the Tao? Tao means something like the road or the way. The idiograph (see picture) is composed of symbols representing movement and progress. As best as I can render it, Tao refers to the underlying way in which things work themselves out, the underlying logic (or logos, as Heraclitus would day) of our universe.

Watts explains that the Tao is about trust. "The natural world in which we live, and human nature itself, must be trusted" (p. 27). Sounds good, but why? Watts offers a derivation: "If you cannot trust your own nature, how can you trust your own mistrusting of it?" Notice that to an Aristotelian, this "proof" is circular and thus logically invalid. But as a Taoist, you needn't worry. You are free to enjoy the paradox. To Watts, this paradox expresses the inexpressibility [ah, sweet contradiction] of the Tao. "We cannot have any system of thought-whether it be philosophical, or logical, or mathematical, or physical-which defines its own basis" (p. 31; Gödel lässt grüssen).

Once you trust yourself, you can live, act, and behave freely, without controlling yourself Aristotle-style. Following the Tao, you "allow all living things to look after themselves" (p. 31). The Tao "is the living of human life in such a fashion as not to get in its own way" (p. 48). If you don't believe it, Watts recommends watching a dancing child, who does what it pleases happily and without self-consciousness.

At the end of the seventh day, after havdalah, I bid Watts farewell and return to my Aristotelian world. I wish I could have met him back in the day; but I was just a little lad when he cooked up his stir-fry for the Western palate. Much as I enjoy his philosophical essays, I cannot bring myself to share his belief in ESP. If I could, and if it worked, I might hang with him, Lao Tzu, and Heraclitus. But alas, Aristotelian science has put the kybosh on ESP.

Here is the reference for the edition I used.

Watts, A. (2000). What is Tao? Novato, CA: New World Library.