Sacred Texts in Society Essay (25%): As will likely be the case in your vocational work, we are often tasked with interpreting and wrestling with religious texts from a diversity of religious traditions that are unfamiliar to us. This assignment aims to further develop students’ competency in interpreting a sacred text from multiple historic and religious/philosophical perspectives. It also encourages them to consider the potential impact of this religious text in society by imagining how this text might serve as a resource for a particular population or community (i.e. an interreligious community, sexual abuse survivors, religious nones). [In service of CLOs 2, 3, 4]
Proposals should include: proposed chapter of focus; a 300-350 abstract explaining what approaches you will engage to interpret the passage and what primary questions your analysis seeks to address; the population/community you will reflect on and the text’s potential impact; an annotated bibliography of 4 academic sources you plan to engage in your essay; a list of any additional (unannotated) sources that you may consider using in your research.
Essays should be 5-7 pages (double-spaced) and should include: a summary of the selected passage; an introduction to the religious/philosophical tradition the text is rooted in; a brief overview of the historical and cultural context of the text; an analysis of what key question(s) the text seems to be answering; a brief naming of your own social location as an interpreter and 2 potential interpretations of the passage from two different religious/spiritual or philosophical perspectives; a constructive reflection on how this text might resonate with or serve as a resource for a particular population or community. Students must cite at least 7 scholarly sources in their essay and are encouraged to conduct research beyond course readings with the resources offered by the Spencer Library and the DTL2
I know I want to focus on the concept of action via non action in the Tao Te Ching. I could focus my paper on chapter 37 or 48.
37
The Way is ever without action,
Yet nothing is left undone.
If princes and kings can abide by this,
All things will form themselves.
If they form themselves and desires arise,
I subdue them with nameless simplicity.
Nameless simplicity will indeed free them from desires.
Without desire there is stillness,
And the world settles by itself.
48
Those who seek knowledge,
Collect something every day.
Those who seek the Way,
Let go of something every day.
They let go and let go,
Until reaching no action.
When nothing is done,
Nothing is left undone.
Never take over the world to tamper with it.
Those who want to tamper with it
Are not fit to take over the world.
Proposal:
For my sacred texts in society paper I intend to explore more of the Taoist theme of non-action. There are two main chapters of the Tao Te Ching to explore for this that I am torn between using: chapters 37 and 48. Given how short these chapters are, I would prefer to write my paper using both. If allowed, I am confident that I could get at least a good paragraph for interpretation. To start I would break down the premise of non-action as I understand it, then I would break down the examples provided in the two chapters and explore possible modern equivalencies. This will become important for the last section of my paper.
Given how non-action seems to contradict our capitalist way of thinking in the united states, that is where I will reflect on and how different our society would look if this became a more popular form living philosophy. What does non-action look like in a capitalist society? How would this effect our economy? How would this affect the health of the population? I would use information about the rise of Capitalism in China despite the emphasis on non-action that was predominant in pre-western Chinese society. I would also pull from research about mental and physical health in the United States in relation to economic stress. I would focus more on a microlevel of exploration as my primary lens and then from there build outwards to what it could mean for the population as a whole.
To conclude my paper I will tie it all together referencing the modern examples from my first section and how leadership through non action better fits the actual model of democracy as opposed to oligarchy we currently have in our government. What would elections look like? What would policy making look like through this philosophical lens? I would start with presenting what pure democracy is supposed to be and compare it with how our government is currently run; then will apply the leadership behaviors that Lou Tzu dictated.
Sources:
This is a book from the school library which explores styles of leadership
Guo, Wu. The Sacred and the Secular in Taoism : Theories, Practices, and Communities. 2024. MDPI - Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute. https://directory.doabooks.org/handle/20.500.12854/139268.
Matthews, David. “Mental Illness and Capitalism.” Spectre Journal , September 14, 2023. https://spectrejournal.com/mental-illness-and-capitalism.
This article written by the program leader of the Health and Social degree at Bangor University goes into an overview of the effects of capitalism on mental health. While it does have a section on the biological causes of mental illness, I will be specifically referencing the sections "The Misery of Capitalist Life", "Capitalism and the Social Character", and "Labor and Discontent". This article will be used to back up my argument about the negative effects of Capitalism on our country and how shifting to an eastern influence through the concept of non-action can be a remedy.
Moon, Seungho. “Wuwei(Non-Action) Philosophy and Actions: Rethinking ‘Actions’ in School Reform.” Educational Philosophy and Theory 47, no. 5 (January 28, 2014): 455–73. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2013.879692.
This source is predominantly about reform in schools with inspiration from the concept of Non - action. However given that the concept of non-action is explored as apolitical philosophy I feel this source portrays it in a way that I can use for my essay. I would also argue that school reform could provide examples that I could translate into political reform at the end of my paper. I would be mostly pulling from sections such as "Context of the Tao-Te-Ching and Wuwei (Non-Action)", "Theory of Governance: Wuwei", and "Implications for School Reform: Lessons from Wuwei". I think it is also important to note that this paper is applying the concept of non-action to American schools; in a similar way I want to apply it to American Government.
Mullinax, Marc S. Tao Te Ching: Power for the Peaceful. Augsburg Fortress, 2021. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv17vf4pp.
This is a variation of the Tao Te Ching. Not only does this provide an alternative translation to the textbook which we are using, but it includes annotated notes which include historical, social, and cultural context top help understand the chapters. This will be one of the key sources I use for my essay as I will be drawing from it in the first half. Along with my own interpretation this will primarily be the source of breaking down the two chapters line by line. Where as other sources are applying the concept I am exploring, this will explore the concept itself in depth with me.
Ng, Julia. “The Action of Non-Action: Walter Benjamin, Wu Wei and the Nature of Capitalism.” Theory, Culture & Society 40, no. 4–5 (June 10, 2023): 219–38. https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764231169944.
I will be using this article as one of my key sources for this paper. This article features how Capitalism is treated in China; especially from pre-western influence which seemed to resist capitalist ethics. The article itself focuses on development of Capitalism in China, the accumulation of debt in the community under capitalism as a society, and how capitalism is impossible to fully escape as an individual (which is fair to compare since we also accumulate debt through capitalism). I will be mostly focusing on how the premise of no-action is viewed in context to the rise of capitalism in China and the friction between them. I will primarily be drawing from Sections such as "capitalism as religion" and "No One's Actions".
Pregadio, Fabrizio. 2008. The Routledge Encyclopedia of Taoism. London: Routledge.
Schumpeter, Joseph A., and Joseph E. Stiglitz. 2010. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. Hoboken: Taylor & Francis. https://app.kortext.com/borrow/216.
Shuyu. “Rule Through Non-Action.” Key concepts in Chinese thought and culture, 2022. https://www.chinesethought.cn/EN/shuyu_show.aspx?shuyu_id=4010.
Zeira, Anna. 2021. “Mental Health Challenges Related to Neoliberal Capitalism in the United States.” Community Mental Health Journal 58 (2): 205–12. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10597-021-00840-7.
Thesis: Throughout our reading of the Tao Te Ching I found myself intrigued by its theme of action through non-action and the sharp contrast it has to our western capitalist mindset in the United states; through this essay I will explore what our country could possibly look like if we adopted this eastern philosophy in our daily lives and in government.
Quotes to pull from/cite:
- good governance; wuwei (无为non-action) does not mean doing nothing, but instead not acting in an over-assertive manner, inother words, not imposing one’s will. In Daoist thinking, this expression means the ruler must respect the natural conditions of those governed (the people); he must not interfere unduly in their lives but allow them to follow their own desires and ways to fulfill themselves. Through “non-action” everything will be actually achieved (Shuyu, 1)
- “non-action” means the ruler governs by influencing and motivating his subjects through his moral example and achievements, not through decrees, or coercive punishments, so that they act without being ordered, and social harmony is achieved. (Shuyu, 1)
- Jullien speaks of ‘that which defeats our Greek opposition between the natural and the technical by ‘assisting what comes about all by itself’ which is his partial translation of a line from §64 of the Daodejing that reads, in its entirety, or, in the 1842 translation by Stanislas Julien, ‘he dares not act in order to help all beings follow their nature. (The word that customarily translates ‘nature’, zi ran, is composed of two words denoting ‘self’ and ‘so’ and also bears the meaning of ‘spontaneity’, which Jullien brings to the fore by replacing Julien’s ‘suivre leur nature’ with ‘venir tout seul’ while retaining the ‘aider’.) In Jullien’s account, assisting the coming-about-by-itself of things, or fu zi ran, thus involves precisely not a restoration to a static nature by withdrawing purposive action but, rather, what he calls a ‘strategy’ of ‘maturing the effect’, a harnessing of the potential in things to themselves disaggregate such that there is no longer a need for ‘action’ (wei) as such. For Dufourmantelle, the power of this assistance – what she calls ‘gentleness’ – intensifies the ‘metamorphosis of becoming into acquiescence to that same becoming’ since it ‘contains the seed of its opposite’ and effectuates a ‘change of nature’ in harmony with ‘the capacity of processes for self-deployment’ in the ‘natural’ environment. Gentleness, Dufourmantelle argues, therefore poses a particular threat to neoliberal society because not only does it not ‘offer any possible foothold on authority’ it immerses its practitioner in the negativity, insufficiency and precariousness of all beings, the histories and understanding of which contemporary ideologies of productivism and consumerism set out to devastate. (Ng, 220)
- Yet Jullien himself
never denies that Chinese ‘tradition’ is itself an emergent and conflictual field that participates in modernity and has a contemporaneity of its own, even if he leaves the implications unexplored. The definition of ‘silent transformation’ that Dufourmantelle cites,
‘taking part in the propensities at work over time as well as the capacity of processes for
self-deployment’, is used by Jullien to describe Deng Xiaoping, the ‘“ Little Helmsman”
and “silent transformer” of China: advancing step by step, or “stone by stone”, as he said,
rather than projecting some plan or model, yet without falling back into an empiricism (or
pragmatism) that is the reverse of our idealism’ . For Jullien, ‘silent
transformation’ finds its historical expression in the ‘more efficient than spectacular’
reforms that Deng initiated in the 1980s to foster villagers’ self-governance, rule of law,
and entrepreneurship and marketization, particularly in the rural regions, such that ‘China
was able to completely reverse its social and economic system by continuous transition
while leaving the regime and the Party in place’ (Ng, 221)
- Capitalism, he writes,‘saw’ an ‘unmistakable member of its community’ even in those who are not gainfully
employed. Like religion, which according to Benjamin did not
categorically exclude the individual who was irreligious or of another faith, capitalism
makes no ‘moral’ distinction between those contributing and not contributing to productivity; the bottom line, after all – the Bilanz, which calculates gross products and net
worth according to a ‘balance sheet’ of plusses and minuses – is itself the bottom line
for the way in which religion counts its acolytes, who are redeemed and disposed of by
the same calculus.... In capitalism, therefore, no one is neither productive nor non-productive; no
one falls outside of the calculus of net productivity. As Benjamin writes in an earlier
passage of the fragment, the burden of debt is spread across the community by the various ways in which it reckons (Ng, 223)
- ‘therein lies what is historically unprecedented about
capitalism: religion is no longer the reform of Being but, rather, its shattering’ And, just as there is no ‘reform’ available to ‘Being’, there is ‘no way out’ of
this ‘condition'; not participating in capitalism is just as
much participation in capitalism, and ‘we cannot close the net in which we stand’...Yet, he suggests, we must try to survey this possibility. In his effort to ‘close the net’
of net productivity, Benjamin turns to Weber’s work on the economic ethics of religious
thought. He glosses its main argument as follows: ‘capitalism [is] a religiously conditioned construction’....Confucianism and Daoism, of 1915 in which Weber
sought to establish for the first time what he believed to be unique to the development of
modern industrial capitalism: that it was necessarily facilitated by the religious tradition
that emerged in early modern Europe (Ng, 223)...
- Weber attributes the emergence of rational entrepreneurial capitalism to the presence of a certain kind of religiously conditioned mentality by arguing that the lack of such a mentality in China
prevented the development of a capitalist economy, in spite of the fact that Confucianism shared certain rational traits with Protestantism.5
In characterizing religion as a ‘condition’ of capitalism, Benjamin refers to the argument presented in Weber’s latter work that
an identity can be supposed of religious calling and capitalist ethos and that, moreover,
the ethical qualities that are indispensable for the modern capitalist, which include a
‘radical concentration on God-ordained purposes’ was a prerequisite
for ‘a horror of illegal, political, colonial, booty, and monopoly types of capitalism’ (Ng224)
- Weber, for his part, substantiates his thesis by describing what he sees as China’s two
main religions, Daoism and Confucianism, as essentially derivative of the same mystical-naturalistic impulse: for him, both were expressions of the same ‘uninterruptedness
of magic as such and power of the clan’ (Weber, 1921: 369),6
and both were consistent in
regard to their underlying theories of ‘Nichtstun [doing nothing]’ – one of the translations
of the principle of wu wei that Weber adopts (Weber, 1920: 465) – as well as their sense
of cosmic order and direction of nature, or dao. In both his translations and interpretations of these two principles...., perfection is ‘emptiness (hü)’ and ‘nothingness (wu)’, and it is achieved by suppressing desires and passions, removing knowledge,
striving for nothing through ‘inaction (wu wei)’, ‘quiescence (tsing)’ and ‘taciturnity
(puh yeh)’, and thereby becoming free from ‘cares..., inasmuch as dao is not action that causes any movement, it is therefore
the law of movement itself, of inward spontaneity, and therefore was also interpreted as
a principle of rulership. Abiding by inaction therefore translates into
the spontaneous transformation of myriad beings. (ng, 224)
- For Weber, ‘the religion of China’
lacked a theologically-based despair at the universe and was therefore devoid of the creative impulse to dominate over nature and transform the world, which confirmed for him
– in the language of a Daoist elite seeking to define itself in opposition to the eschatological practices of its popular counterpart – how the Protestant ethic and its facilitation of
impersonal and universal trust alone could have been conducive to the genesis of modern
capitalism’s entrepreneurial spirit and depersonalized credit system. ... capitalism was not only ‘a religiously
conditioned construction’ but ‘an essentially religious phenomenon’ with no need of
‘special dogmatics’ to underpin its meaning (Benjamin, 2021: 90). Capitalism itself has
the features of a religion for Benjamin; its existence is independent of the ‘special’ structures of Christianity as such – and hence as defined by Weber. Whereas Weber argues,
inversely from his analysis of China, that capitalism is conditioned on a salvation religion featuring a supramundane God and tension between earthly conduct and afterworldly compensation that are exclusive to Protestantism, Benjamin maintains that
capitalism shares an ‘essence’ with that which also brought about salvation religion and
that capitalism might thus take root anywhere this essence can be found. (225)
- Gu identified in the imperialaristocratic class the potential to renew the movement and rescue ‘culture’, so Benjamin
paraphrases, from ‘a chaotic time’... Nevertheless, Gu left an important trace in Benjamin’s oeuvre: his conviction that in
both East and West there exist internally divergent tendencies, including the tendency to
decline, suggesting a deeper consensus between the two traditions than can be adequately
explained by the model of a clash of civilizations (Gu, 1911: 6, 22–7).14 In fact, Gu’s
popularity in Europe – and probably his attractiveness to Wyneken and the Free Student
Movement – may have been due in no small part to his idea that Western imperialism and
the ‘westernization’ of China alike could be traced back to the reintroduction of liberal
ideas in the 19th century in both Europe and China after they had been corrupted by utilitarianism and the interests of financial capitalism...For Gu, Confucianism expressed values that were analogous to those that the West had abandoned in the name of modernity,
and which stood in direct contrast to those espoused by classes that were driven by work,
convenience, and unchecked consumption. As an antidote to both the modernized West
and westernizing China, classical Confucianism was presented by Gu as a resource for
restoring values. (ng 227)
- the West is caught
up in an internal struggle against its decline and that ‘a kind of askesis’ might be
retrieved from Chinese thought as an antidote (Ng, 228)
- Caught up in the all-consuming presence of everyday
events, chance occurrences and obligations, the ‘I’ loses the ‘youthful and immortal time
of thousandfold opportunities’ to the serial progression of the days and seconds. Then, in
response to this condition of ‘despair’ in which he finds youth, Benjamin makes a radical
proposal: the one who is in such a condition of despair should look down into the ‘current’
from which they emerged and ‘lose, slowly, finally and redemptively, their comprehension’. It is out of this ‘forgetting’ that the ‘diary’ emerges. In response to the loss of the
time of thousandfold opportunities and the time of maturation to the emptiness of having
and striving, the youth, according to Benjamin, should keep a diary, the act of which, he
writes, will ‘transform’ all that has been inadequately lived into something ‘perfected’ and
‘completed’, in the sense of being ‘brought to an end [Vollendeten]’ (GS 2: 97).
Herein Benjamin can be seen to radically depart from Wilhelm but also Gu, who had
recommended a return to tradition as an antidote to modern, middle-class ‘pseudo-liberalism’. Benjamin, by contrast, finds in the act of diarizing ‘an act of liberation, secret and
limitless in its victory’ because it will have discovered in its ‘perfection’ of life a ‘life that
has never been lived [eines nie gelebten Lebens]’. The diary, the ‘book of life in whose
time everything that we inadequately lived is transformed into the perfected-completed’,
is an ‘abyssal book of a life that has never been lived’ because in its act of recounting all
the ways in which the self consumes itself in its desires, willing, lust for power, idleness,
and however else self-consumption occurs under the regime of ‘calendar time, clock
time, and stock-exchange time’, another ‘I’ emerges altogether to whom none of this has
happened because it is, precisely, the no one who has not consumed itself in ‘calendar
time, clock time, and stock-exchange time (Ng 229)
