Harmonizing with the Dao: Sketch of an Evaluative Framework
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.
I enjoyed this. A couple thoughts:
A point that I'd be interested in clarification of or expansion on is your view that harmonizing with the Dao involves participating in, enriching, and enabling others to participate in patterns and processes that lead to the flourishing of the world, while also seeming to state that the Dao isn't inherently tied to one value. In other words, I take it that your view is that harmonizing is a useful conceptual framework that can be applied to various values, and this approach, regardless of its specific value application, is useful. That I agree with. However, I think your definition of harmonizing with the Dao as harmonizing with the processes of the world already implies a specific value that the Dao necessarily moves towards and somewhat constrains its potential application as a broader evaluative framework.
I say this because the idea of harmony is somewhat implicit in Buddhist ethics, but the harmony it aims at is precisely the dismantling and refraining from engaging, participating in, or enabling other to participate in the patterns that lead to the flourishing of the world. This is still, however, a type of harmony, just with a very different music. Canonically, the goal of Buddhist practice (at least as presented by the Early Buddhist texts) is to go against the grain of the world, which could potentially be considered to be the Dao, and to enter the stream of Dhamma. That entering of the stream is something that can be "harmonized" with, in a sense, but the way you've presented the Dao as specifically in line with the world or nature seems to make it incompatible with Buddhist thought, but with a slightly different formulation, it could be a useful way of evaluating actions in even a Buddhist context, giving it wider application. Granted, maybe you specifically wanted to exclude Buddhist, Gnostic, etc. thought. But this was just my reaction upon reading.
One other quick thought: I think that the divide between melody and harmony is somewhat artificial. The melody instrument is an active and necessary participant in the creation of that harmony, even if they are playing to an accompaniment. For example, in the key of C major, if a pianist simultaneously plays C, E, and G, the harmony would be a C major chord, which is the root chord, the most stable of all possible chords in the key. But if the violinist plays a Bb over that, the harmony is now C7, which has a completely different harmonic function, introducing tension that sets us up for a modulation, changing the whole frame of reference. The structure of harmony is interdependent, and I feel like an approach to ethical harmony that takes that interdependence into account would be useful. That can be mixed with improvisation too, as one of the key things that jazz improvisers aim for is finding the right melody notes that will shift or expand upon the harmonic basis that the rest of the band is providing.
Thanks Eric. How should this approach lead us to think about: 1) very "natural" but likely catastrophically bad wild animal suffering and 2) the very "unnatural" exploitation, farming and slaughter of non-human sentient beings by human sentient beings?
(For me, the perspectives and interests of individual sentient beings are the foundation of ethics - not so much human aesthetic preferences for natural patterns we happen to like. Although those aesthetic preferences still matter too - as we're sentient beings!)