A Brief Note on Tao and Soul: East and West on Self-Identity and Individuality

Taoism and Western philosophy have historically diverged in their understandings of human nature and individuality. In particular, volition, spontaneity, and selfhood – perhaps the linchpins of any theory of human nature – are strongly conceptually dissonant in these traditions. Taoism emphasizes becoming one with the way things are—that is, aligning oneself with how the world naturally flows or exists. This transformation is usually accomplished through non-action rather than concerted activity in opposition to nature. In contrast, Western philosophy tends to emphasize human mutability and responsibility so that every theory of human nature is consequently a theory of individual moral growth and regress. The polis – composed of fallible people, sages, and morally imperfect renegades – is imperfect because the individuals in its compass are deficient in some set of fundamental virtues.

Beginning with the Greeks, the West’s canon of political theory cannot fail to be at once moral and social-anthropological. Consider, for instance, such diverse authors as Aristotle, Lenin, and de Beauvoir: Each of these, despite their irreconcilable differences with respect to personhood and ethical theory, maintain that the virtue of the collective is possible only through the additive virtues of individuals. Western philosophy demands something distinctly rational and theoretical from us — it requires our willful, reasoned participation in self-construction. Aristotle recognized that eudaimonia (human flourishing) isn’t passive: it requires each of us to shape our own lives by developing the virtues with which we wish to be associated in the polis.

The perfection of the city and the perfection of the soul are parts of the same active process of the soul’s betterment. Aristotle’s On the Soul demands that the self as a metaphysical entity is constant, self-identical, and grounded in the immaterial (rational) soul. The goal (or telos) of each individual life is the habitual development of virtues like courage, wisdom, and justice. According to Aristotle, the highest fulfillment of selfhood is attained via active participation in collective rational thought and dialogue. Aristotle argues that ethical living is unnatural, messy, and difficult — a battle for personal and civic virtue against unduly strong individual and political desires for power, status, pleasure, and authority. The only antidote to this constant enmity is collective rational inquiry into the metaphysics of the passions and the divisions they engender.

For the Taoist, individuals manifest virtue by living in a noncognitive ethical state: realizing, in a word, that the so-called self is impermanent, and that Tao demands submission to the natural and spiritual forces sculpting existence. Wu-wei (loosely translated as non-action) and spontaneity are two of the central principles unifying early Chinese philosophies of philosophical individualism. Per Taoism, moral actions come about naturally and without substantive cognitive effort once one is in alignment with the Tao (the natural order of the universe). Alignment with the Tao arises from the continual negation of individual endeavor in accordance with the pre-established harmonies of the world-process: The individual becomes harmonious with collective consciousness when the self-identity is molded continually via nature, experience, and lived wisdom.

Indeed, for the Taoist as well as the Buddhist, the self is a mere psychological illusion. In The Questions of King Menander, the protagonist Nāgasena also presents the theme of a changing self in his arguments against the Greeks. Like Heraclitus, Nāgasena determines that the self is constantly in flux, non-self-identical, and inherently fictional. Human suffering arises from being fixed fast to an immutable false identity. Nāgasena proposes abandoning our attachment to a permanent self and accepting life as a continuous state of flux in which all things are subject to disappearance, mutation, and perpetual evolution.

One of the key differences between Taoism and Aristotle’s Eudaimonism is their respective views of the value and purpose of human spontaneity and ambition. The early Chinese philosophically identify spontaneity (wu-wei) as a state in which individual actions flow congruently as they belong to the totality of the universe and its regulative forces. Effortless action, sometimes referred to in the philosophy of Taoism (and subsequently woven into Western new-age culture) is the only natural life: Indeed, Taoists propound that trying too hard to realize unnatural ends or seeking preconceived categories for our lives merely creates disharmony, suffering, and psychological anguish. A similarly nominalist strain of thought runs through existentialists like de Beauvoir all the way to Judith Butler’s revolutionary theory of identity, the latter of which reverberates in contemporary debates concerning race, class, and gender.

The modern nominalist must create themselves for their own purposes in accordance with compassion and mutual understanding, defying the impulse to accept a socially necessary telos or a canonical means of attaining it. The Western nominalist may be said to accept the Taoist notion of self-mutability while replacing Aristotle’s rational telos with an ethic of radical acceptance and empathy toward the Other. It would be quite interesting to inquire of Butler if they draw inspiration from Taoism, or if they perhaps adduced their philosophical system from within the dominant Western paradigms and categories.