The Means By Which We Live
Today stands to be full. A literature class is scheduled for the afternoon. Consideration of Lord of the Flies by William Golding. later in the afternoon, I am fortunate to participate in a exploration of Artistotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.
The day begins at Starbucks, by reading the Taoist text composed by Zhuang Zhou, reported to have lived around 370–319 BCE. This classic of Chinese literature is written in the form of a fable, a fantasy. The writer offers a wonderful list of human emotional states. A rapid fire comparison follows of notes issuing from a bamboo flute, of mushrooms emerging from humus, and of the rhythm of day and night… Direct your gaze in any direction, one notices a similar rhythmic succession. Appreciation is called for. Master Zhou advises us to stop, resist the temptation to over-analyze, to assume that one “knows,” that we are able to explain these phenomena. Reposing in our “not knowing” these states-of-being nevertheless depend upon our mindful recognition — in order to exist.
Joy,
anger,
grief,
delight,
worry,
regret,
fickleness,
inflexibility,
modesty,
willfulness,
candor,
insolence
—music from empty holes, mushrooms springing up in
dampness, day and night replacing each other before us, and
no one knows where they sprout from.
Let it be! Let it be!
[It is enough that] morning and evening we have them,
And they are the means by which we live.
Without them, we would not exist;
without us,
they would have nothing to take hold of.
This comes close to the matter.
But I do not know
what makes them
the way they are.
—Zhuangzi, chapt 2, Discussion On Making All Things Equal, trans. by Burton Watson
4 thoughts on “The Means By Which We Live”
“……without us, they would have nothing to take hold of.”
I’m not certain I understand the above line from today’s offering. So if I take its meaning in a certain light, I would disagree with Master Zhou about our importance in the realm of nature. Two things came to mind when reading this line. One is a song sung by Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady:
“There’ll be spring every year without you.
England still will be here without you.
There’ll be fruit on the tree.
And a shore by the sea.
There’ll be crumpets and tea without you.”
And the other is a quote I’ve used from E. O. Wilson
““If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.”
To me, at least, we humans are superfluous at best and nature’s nightmare at worst. When we believe that the world relies on our existence we are only indulging in self-delusion.
In what sense could we say “spring” if no one was around to recognize the cherry blossoms, the sunlight, to appraise the experience as “what is meant by spring?”
Is not “England” the product of human-minds-in-agreement that an island of such a geographical coastline, separated by a channel from a larger body of land, designated “Europe,” inhabited by diverse communities, the ongoing result of past events, some of which we’ve recorded… Is not that, and much more, “England?” And is not “England” a matrix of concepts which are co-dependent upon human minds?
A “earth-world” without language enabled mammals such as homo sapiens would be simply a surd, a data-storm undifferentiated by thought/language. Yes sans humans much would regenerate, but the most dangerous, and the most delightful element would be missing. Language is creation, the potential for good, for evil.
Viewing life from a distance, without the interference of human presence is a bit like envisioning an out of body experience. We may be able to imagine it but it’s only an illusion at best. When I do attempt to build that non-human environment it’s quite lonely. I (as have almost all people) have come to rely on others of our species to help us corroborate our surroundings and to, as you mention, speak to each other using a common language. That is the manifestation of the social animal that inhabits our minds.
The world without us would still be a cruel and painful place, but that description is based on our subjective label of the meaning of cruelty. From our perspective a lion devouring a young zebra is disturbing and yet it is a part of survival. Ultimately it is neither cruel nor is it evil. It just is. Nature in balance as Professor Wilson noted.
I would gladly give up our ability to label the various aspects of what we perceive, as a way of preserving the natural world. Based on the destructiveness of humans we don’t deserve to enjoy the beauties of nature. If there were actually a god of some sort he/she should declare a Mulligan and start over without Adam or Eve.
Meaning is mind-made, a social construction.
Yes, cruelty is the perspective of a human. Nature without judgment just is, period.
I am with you, if the living natural world could be preserved by exclusion of homo sapiens, that is a deal that I would make.