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The ancient Masters
didn’t try to educate the people,
but kindly taught them to not-know.

When they think that they know the answers,
people are difficult to guide.
When they know that they don’t know,
people can find their own way.

If you want to learn how to govern,
avoid being clever or rich.
The simplest pattern is the clearest.
Content with an ordinary life,
you can show all people the way
back to their own true nature.

Tao Te Ching by Lao-tsu, trans. by Stephen Mitchell

Yesterday a good friend Tobin posted his weekly essay that treated the Tao Te Ching in his blog The Cage. Tobin offered that the approach of Lao-tsu is a tempered acknowledgement of how language distorts our experience.

Consider being gob-smacked by the sublimity of a wild sunflower worked by a bee, that you witnessed growing at creek-side in August. 

Compare to “knowing” the blossom is “beautiful” as the mind remembers the blossoms you saw in Monet’s garden at Giverney, which you contrast with a stalk of blackened, withered, drought-dessicated blossoms that you saw somewhere, etc., etc…. It isn’t difficult to find examples of how language, though necessary, distorts as it labels, projecting an “objective” standard. Beauty as the obverse of ugly.

Lao-tsu is invariably blunt in his skepticism about language. We are language enabled mammals. Humans evolved – becoming distinctive as a consequence of the depth and breadth of collective skills due to what language makes possible for us. Nevertheless we are seduced to believe that “we know” by words, and the welcome-mat of curiosity is removed, we no longer feel that thirst to know more…

Lao-tsu says that maturity amounts to unlearning. Thinking that “I know” is equivalent to sliding off the path into a ditch. I am stuck. Moreover to be stuck with a static concept is equivalent to losing one’s way. Life moves on and I, – I am entangled with conclusions that are alien to what I might have become…

For many years a “good” education in these United States, an Ivy league experience is supposed to teach one to be clever (to know the right people), to grant a leg-up on becoming rich. Lao-tsu counters, if you desire to be true to yourself refuse to be clever, or to become rich.

This view is reminiscent of Rousseau’s thoughts on education.

Who wouldn’t desire to find his or her own way in life?