Increasingly, I find myself drawn to an ethics of harmonizing with the Dao. Invoking "the Dao" might sound mystical, non-Western, ancient, religious -- alien to mainstream secular 21st-century Anglophone metaphysics and ethics. But I don't think it needs to be. It just needs some clarification and secularization. As a first approximation, think of harmonizing with the Dao as akin to harmonizing with nature. Then broaden "nature" to include human patterns as well as non-human, and you're close to the ideal. Maybe we could equally call it an ethics of "harmonizing with the world" or simply an "ethics of harmony". But explicit reference to "the Dao" helps locate the idea's origins and its Daoist flavor.
The Metaphysics of Dao
In the intended sense -- inspired by ancient Daoism and Confucianism, but adapted for a 21st century Anglophone context -- the "Dao" the world as a whole. However, it is not the world conceptualized as a collection of objects, but rather as a system of processes and patterns. The Dao is the spinning of Earth; the rise and fall of mountains and species; the rise and fall of cities and nations; human birth, childhood, adulthood, and death; people discovering and losing love; the way strangers greet each other; the growth of your fingernails; the falling of a leaf.
The Axiology of Dao
Some strands in the Daoist tradition hold that all manifestations of the Dao are equally good. But the more dominant strand holds that things can go better or worse. And certainly the Confucians, who also sought harmony with the Dao, held that things could go better or worse.
What constitutes things going better? I favor value pluralism: More than one type of thing has fundamental value. Happiness is valuable, of course. But so also is knowledge (even when it doesn't lead to happiness), beauty, human relationships, and even (I'd argue) the existence of stones.
One way to clarify our thoughts about value is the "distant planet thought experiment". Consider a planet on the far side of the galaxy, forever blocked by the galactic core, with which we will never interact. What would you hope for, for the sake of this planet? Most of us would not hope for a sterile rock, but rather for a planet rich with life -- and not just microbes, not just jungles of plants and animals, but a diverse range of entities capable of forming societies, capable of love and cooperation, art and science, engineering and sports, entities capable of generations-long endeavors and of philosophical wonder as they gaze up at the stars or down through their microscopes.
We might say that a planet, or a region of spacetime, is flourishing when it instantiates, or is on the path toward instantiating, such excellent patterns.
Conceptual Frameworks
Philosophers typically ask two questions when I propose harmonizing with the Dao as an ethical ideal. First, how does it differ from the more familiar (to them) ethics of consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics? Second, what specifically does it recommend?
To the first question: Unlike consequentialism, there is no single good or bundle of goods that you should maximize; unlike deontology, there is no one rule or set of rules you should follow (unless we interpret "harmonize with the Dao" as the rule); unlike virtue ethics, there is no canonical set of virtues the cultivation and instantiation of which is the foremost imperative. Instead, the animating idea is to flow harmoniously along with the Dao and participate in, rather than strain against, its flourishing.
That's vague, of course. What specifically should you do, if your aim is to harmonize with the Dao?
I have some thoughts. But first, notice that consequentialism as a general ethical perspective is compatible with a wide range of possible concrete actions, depending on how it is developed and on the details of your situation. So also can deontological and virtue ethical perspectives be made compatible with a wide range of specific actions. What these broad ethical perspectives offer, primarily, is not specific advice but rather conceptual frameworks for ethical thinking -- in terms of consequences and expectations, or in terms of rules of different types, or in terms of a range of virtues and vices. So let's consider what broad concepts an ethics of harmony might employ, with the specific advice as an illustration of how those concepts might work.
Harmony and Disharmony, Illustrated in a University Context
Harmonizing with the flourishing patterns of the Dao involves participating in those patterns, enriching them, and enabling others to participate in and enrich those patterns. Suppose you think that one of the great processes worth preserving in the world is university education. You can participate in that process by being a good teacher, by being an administrator who helps things run smoothly, by being a custodian who helps keep the grounds clean, and so on. You can enrich it by helping to make it even more awesome than it already is -- for example by being an unusually inspiring teacher or by being not just an ordinary custodian but one who adds a bright smile to a student's day. You can enable others to participate in and enrich those patterns by helping hire a terrific teacher or custodian or by providing the type of environment that brings out the best in others.
We can see the university as a place where many lives converge either briefly or for decades. This convergence is valuable not just for what it yields but in itself. The processes constituting university life also participate in and enable other valuable processes, whether those are individual human lives, or other institutions that partly overlap with or depend on the university, or projects and events that happen within the university, or simply the natural and architectural beauty of an appealing campus.
Compare this way of thinking about the ethics of participation in a university with consequentialism (emphasizing the various goods that university education is expected to deliver), deontology (emphasizing the rules one ought to follow within a university), or virtue ethics (emphasizing the manifestation and cultivation of virtues such as curiosity and compassion). While I don't object to any of those ways of thinking about the ethics of university life, the Daoist perspective is, I hope, a valuable alternative lens.
Disharmony could involve cutting short, or attempting to cut short, an axiologically valuable pattern (rather than letting it come to its natural end), working against that pattern, or preventing others from harmonizing. Continuing the university example, cutting funding for valuable research, firing an excellent teacher, disrupting classes, littering, or flying a noisy helicopter overhead might all count as disharmonious. Other examples can include preventing access or undermining the conditions that allow students, faculty, or staff to flourish in their roles.
Comparisons with Music
You are not the melody-maker. "Harmony" suggests a contrast with "melody". You are not the melody-maker, the director, the first violinist, the lead singer, the lead guitarist -- at least not usually. Your typical role is to support an already-happening good thing.
Diversity and pluralism. There is more than one way to harmonize. A piece is richer when not everyone plays the same note.
Improvisation. Zhuangzi emphasized flowing along with things in an improvisational manner, rather than adhering to fixed rules. Often, the best music has improvisational elements, or at least room to allow one's mood of the moment to influence how one plays the notes. Spontaneous improvisation manifests harmony within the improviser, among the various unarticulated inclinations that arise without explicit cognitive control.
Aesthetic value. The boundary between aesthetic and ethical value (and other types of value) might not be as sharp as philosophers often suppose.
Conflicts of Harmony
A tree is a wondrous thing. Cutting it down cuts short an axiologically valuable pattern, and is normally out of harmony with the tree, the forest, and the lives it supports. But if the tree becomes lumber for a beautiful home, then that act belongs to another axiologically valuable pattern and is in harmony with the Dao of human cultural life.
Your wife wants one thing from you; your mother, another. Harmony with one might involve dissonance with the other. You might consider how sharp the dissonance is in each case. You might consider what patterns are being enacted in these relationships, and which are the more valuable patterns to sustain.
Like any ethical approach, harmonizing with the Dao must allow for conflicts and tradeoffs. The world makes competing demands and offers incompatible opportunities. There needn't be a formula for how to deal with all such cases. In some cases, creative thinking might allow one to support or integrate multiple patterns or integrate them into a whole: Removing a tree is sometimes overall good for a forest; occasional tension with a spouse may sustain a healthier relationship than shallow peace.
Sometimes the conflict is the harmony. Chess masters seek incompatible goals as part of the larger pattern of a competition. Predators consume prey in a healthy ecosystem. Law and politics require adversaries in a (hopefully) well-functioning social system.
My main overall thought is that we can build a fruitful framework for ethical thinking by taking the root project to be one of harmonizing with the awesome patterns and processes of the world.
6 comments:
This is a really neat and fascinating view which shows a lot of intuitive appeal so I'm happy it's getting further development.
Some questions - what will prevent us from falling into a troubling form of relativism? If there are a variety of values with fundamental importance, we seem to be free to choose to harmonize any one of them at the expense of others. If there were a way to compare and evaluate them against each other, we would then have the good and be comparing them against the good because there would need to be sense to be made of one value being more important than another for x or y reasons. Some way of making one more obliging than another would need to be found. But if harmonizing is free, it would appear we would need to say we make no moral mistake if we put family harmony ahead of societal harmony, say, and enrich and support our family ahead of our society. But then we might reply that no, the broader social whole into which we are placed involves an overarching harmony that must not be disturbed on pains of disturbing or diminishing the harmony of those value-oriented-harmony-wholes contained within it, but then this would max out at the level of cosmic harmony, but then how can we conclude that there is a fundamental value pluralism? Is cosmic harmony a kind of overarching overriding value? Is it the good? What role does it play?
I guess it's a long-winded way of asking: how do we square the ideas of cosmic harmony as in some way playing the role of the highest good with the idea of value pluralism? Or, if cosmic harmony does not play such a role, how do we avoid problematic morally relativistic consequences where some particular harmony is given precedence over others in ways we would intuitively find morally problematic?
Anon 5:15 PM: Thanks for the interesting comment! I don't mind a touch of relativism as long as it doesn't get too radical so that we lose all bearing. I do think some things are more valuable than others for various reasons, though there might not always be determinate answers or clear rank orderings. A human life is ordinarily more valuable than a snail's life, for example (though I appreciate snails).
I'm not sure why harmony in larger systems must override harmony in smaller systems; to the extent your comment is suggesting that my view might imply that, I'm inclined to resist. A major break to the harmony of family might be worth disharmony between me and larger society. Society will presumably proceed well enough even if I clash against it, while my family will not.
I have not been reading this blog for very long, but, this post content seems a divergence from what I have read before. It seems to me that harmony, with or without the Dao is, narrowly, metaphysics. There is also a decidedly religious aspect, because harmony suggests serenity which is much of what Eastern thought and teaching are about. More broadly (if we dare wade more deeply into the piranha pond), harmony is connected to physics. A well-tuned guitar is a harmonious one. Each of the six strings vibrates at its'appointed frequency and is in tune with its' brothers---or, partners, if one wishes to be gender-neutral. Metaphysics, then, has connection or relationship with physics.
I don't know if this view fits in any way with your discussion of the Dao. I just wanted to contribute a comment. At the risk of starting a different argument, I consider much, if not most, Eastern thought in this genre, to be metaphysical---just my way of framing this. Thanks!
That we live on a planet in a solar system and galaxy; in chaos, order or in-between with both, is a harmonious influence today...for understanding more about our being here...
I guess it's hard for me not to imagine harmony as something that demands harmony at larger scales in order to have greater harmony overall, and so harmony at smaller scales at the cost of harmony at larger scales would diminish overall harmony. I guess I can see that a system with many harmonized wholes that are themselves not harmoniously organized with respect to each other might still maintain itself as possessing more overall harmony (even if an even -more- harmonized system would still be even better overall), so maybe this is a bit of a metaphysical prejudice - it seemed like an issue worth pointing out for this kind of view that it will have to make decisions on how best to understand harmonies and their relations to each other. How exactly do we measure harmony and compare more or less of it?
That makes sense on basically reasonable value orderings. Can those values themselves come into conflict with the value of harmony? Or are they perhaps themselves analyzed in terms of harmony? I guess that's really the main thrust of what I was wondering about: how to think of harmony in relationship to the good/other goods/other values.
It's really interesting though and it seems like an approach that deserves more airtime in contemporary classroom ethical discussions in Philosophy.
Anon Apr 22: Yes, those are interesting questions about the relationship between harmony at larger and smaller scales, about how to measure and compare harmony, and how to value harmony in relation to other good or values. I don't have a full framework yet -- and may never have one. But as you suggest, it seems worth further development and exploration.
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