Dao De Jing (Tao Te Ching), Ames & Hall
In initiating a close reading of the Daoist (Taoist) classic the Dao De Jing (Tao Te Ching) on the part of my discussion group the Washington Philosophy Circle, I discovered this new translation by Roger T. Ames and David L. Hall, who, as it turns out, are major peddlers of ancient Chinese philosophy retooled for obfuscatory ideological aims of the present. I wrote the commentary reproduced below on 11 May 2005. How I found the time and wherewithal to do this at this time I can’t recall or imagine, given that I was undergoing one of the worst tragedies of my life.
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Dao De Jing: Making This Life Significant: A Philosophical Translation / Roger T. Ames and David L. Hall. New York: Ballantine Books, 2003.
I think I am avoiding a prejudicial attitude against the work and even against the translation, in spite of my contempt for the translators. My guess is that they took care to be philologically responsible at least. It is in their role as commentators that I do not trust them.
Ames is a scholar of Confucius and Sun Tzu (The Art of War). Yuk. But what’s worse is that Hall comes from Whitehead and American pragmatism, including Rorty. The commentators pull an interesting sleight of hand in their philosophical introduction. They begin with a criticism of western projections of previous translators onto the Chinese text, distorting its originary orientation, either from the perspective of Judaeo-Christian theism or Western ontology, with its preoccupations such as the One and the Many. But in the process of explaining the background cosmology of the text, they project their own agenda, inspired mostly by Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy, with occasional references throughout the book to William James, Rorty, Dewey. The paradox of their introduction is that while they contrast the Chinese orientation of Taoism with western metaphysics, they end up providing an ontology of sorts for Taoism as well, but it ends up, from my perspective, hurting rather than helping the text.
Why? Because the Dao De Jing works for us best without the supplementary apologetics. Existentially, certain concepts make basic sense in abstraction from other commitments about the world. This is not enough of course to understand what the work is about, but the problem is that the “contextualization” is only contextualizing in a very limited and ultimately deceptive way; in the main it is itself an abstract structure interpolated into the commentary from outside (purportedly interpreting from inside), making things much worse. It is not surprising that all westerners who glom onto eastern philosophy in an uncritical fashion have their own agenda–always a questionable agenda–but these characters presume to posit that they do not, their pragmatism and process philosophy notwithstanding. And what’s worse, their own ontologizing wafts into the reader’s eyeballs via airy-fairy abstract prose seeded with dubious comfort language: pluralism, contextualizing, processual. I’ll give samples later, but the upshot is that reading this prose makes me want to puke my guts out.
There’s something deeply dissimulating, or self-deceptive about this vaporous analysis. When one weds it to the real social context, what happens? Well, we get a cursory introduction to the Warring States period, and we get an admission that the ruler-ruled paradigm is a constant of the background social context, and that what generates Chinese cosmology is the model of familial relations. This should send up red flags, but the translators/commentators sanitize this world view with more comfort language.
Similarly sanitized is the Confucian world view, which, while in competition with Taoism as is well known, is faulted only for the stifling effect of its social formalisms (but not for their inherently ideological and repressive character).
Summed up, the airy-fairy approach makes a critical assessment of what all this means impossible. Any serious philosophy claiming to portray in abstract terms an ideal order attempts to project itself beyond its own social circumstances even while betraying its origins. (There is, for example, a utopian dimension to Plato’s pernicious philosophy, as it was designed not only to legitimate aristocratic concepts but to escape from the ravages of the society in which he lived.) We need not summarily dismiss Taoism’s attempt to slip out of the social straightjacket in which its originators were confined, but we cannot critically analyze and evaluate it without a more solid referential context and evaluative perspective. But the whitewash of Confucianism is unacceptable. If the Maoist gangsters did nothing else worthwhile, they rendered China an inestimable service for their attempt to exterminate Confucianism.
The commentary is really and truly disgusting, and the translation would read better if the commentary didn’t break up the continuous flow of the 81 chapters of the text. However, I think I learned to see the Dao De Jing in a way I had not before, both in terms of its productive functions and of its severe limitations. I don’t buy the apologetics for it using Greek metaphysics as a foil, because I think it is very limited, but it does have something to say, something which becomes quixotic when we analyze the nature of the feudalism from which there was no escape.
