A friend of mine, Leigh O’Connor, wrote a comment on the old blog a few weeks ago that said:

Any connectedness we had in the past to any thing greater was lost when the monkeys started walking upright. The new monkeys then built roads and towns and invented religion to help them feel that warm united feeling they had when they were mere monkeys throwing feces from the trees. But that feeling never came back. And the rest is history.

Compare this with Heidegger:

The rule of Enframing threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth. Thus, where Enframing reigns, there is a danger in the highest sense. “But where danger is, grows the saving power also…” To “save” is to fetch something home into its essence, in order to bring the essence for the first time into its genuine appearing.

And compare both of those with what Derrida writes about Husserl:

Husserl labors always to restore a primordial sense to these [Greek] terms[: eidos, morphe, etc.], a sense which began to be perverted at the time of its inscription into the tradition.

You’ll notice that each of them, Leigh, Martin, and Edmund, seem to be nostalgic for an origin. Leigh’s comment sentimentalizes a time in our evolutionary past when, as he posits, we were connected to something greater. Martin is being wistful towards the experience of truly being with Being, an experience that can only come from a more original revealing. Edmund blames the loss of truly knowing the true meaning of eidos on Plato and the philosophic tradition that followed him.

Compare this nostalgia with Lao Tzu:

Things grow and grow but each goes back to its root. Going back to the root is stillness. This means returning to what is. Returning to what is means going back to the ordinary. Understanding the ordinary: Enlightenment…. Understand the ordinary: Mind opens. Mind opening leads to…Tao.

Lao Tzu, from a shallow perspective, would seem to share some sense of the nostalgia with the others. He describes a turning back and a returning. Lao Tzu’s returning leads to Tao as Heidegger’s returning leads to Being (remembering always that as does not equal is). He would seem, from this perspective, then, to fall into the same category as the others: a nostalgic philosopher whose critical eye devalues those things that are different from what he imagines are still original.

Seeing it from this perspective, I prepared to write a polemic against the anti-progressive ideology of Taoism. I formulated a fantastic mytho-poetic theory that cast Lao Tzu as a possible progenitor of the vast right wing conspiracy against progressive social-individualism. He performed in the role of the memetarfamilas, fathering the memes that infect the conservative mind. His titanic ideas were in epic battle with the memes that came from the unnamable unimaginable non-source that spawned the democratic principles of rights, justice, and plurality. Seriously, it was a righteous fucking story.

Then I saw something that reminded me of just how shallow this perspective was. From this perspective, Lao Tzu experienced time on a linear scale, and there was nothing to support such a claim, though there was a ton in the Tao Te Ching (not to mention the entire discipline of sinology) to topple it.

In passage 21, Lao Tzu writes, “From the beginning its name not lost, but reappears through multiple origins.” Multiple origins does not allow us an easy reading of time experienced on linear scale. In passage 22, he writes, “The old saying, ‘Crippled becomes whole,’ is not empty words. It becomes whole and returns.” And returns does not allow us an easy reading of time experienced on a linear scale.

But in passage 4, Lao Tzu writes, “Deeply subsistent—I don’t know whose child it [Tao] is. It is older than the Ancestor.” This would seem to suggest that he sees the Tao as descending, as being a child. I thought this could be part of my evidence, but I was thinking of it from within my Judeo-Christian perspective, where an individual being only lives one life, forgetting that all the predominant Asian spiritual traditions promote the understanding of a world in which reincarnation is true. If reincarnation is true, then there is obviously no disconnect between a cyclical view of time and a particular understanding of one’s genesis.

This realization pulled my eyes away from the lines in passage 16 that had originally inspired my mytho-poetic creation. Instead of inciting a polemic against conservative nostalgia, the rest of passage 16 asked me to give up the fear of losing my individuality. In its entirety, it reads:

Attain complete emptiness, hold fast to stillness. The ten thousand things stir about: I only watch for their going back. Things grow and grow, but each goes back its root. Going back to the root is stillness. This means returning to what is. Returning to what is means going back to the ordinary. Understanding the ordinary: Enlightenment. Not understanding the ordinary: Blindness creates evil. Understanding the ordinary: Mind opens. Mind opening leads to compassion, compassion to nobility, nobility to heavenliness, heavenliness to Tao. Tao endures. Your body dies. There is no danger.

The individuality that I have attained is dependent upon a linear conception of time and the Judeo-Christian sense of what it means to possess being. I am only able to be during the time when I am alive and perhaps when Jesus comes back in the future from wherever He is now. If time moves in a linear fashion, I can never return to this time now.

But if times move cyclically, it’s never a matter of “returning” to this time now. No individual moment of time is privileged because all time is cyclical. No moment of time takes originary precedence over any other. So this time now, when I, as one of the ten thousand things, seem to be alive, is not more privileged than that time when, as Tao, “I” will not seem to be “alive.” My I-time is not more comfortable, enjoyable, or understandable than my Tao-time. It is not anything different from that…or to correct my pronouns, it is not anything different from it. The Tao of the ten thousand things is always already Tao.

(Though, of course, “Tao called Tao is not Tao.”)

The process of writing this paper provided me with the experience of understanding how easy it is to limit oneself with cultural blinders, especially when what one is looking for is the Weltanschauung of a foreign philosophy.