The middling scholar, part 1
Or, Alan Greenspan and the constant Way.
The way that can be spoken of
Is not the constant way;
The name that can be named
Is not the constant name.
The nameless was the beginning of heaven and earth;
The named was the mother of the myriad creatures.
Hence always rid yourself of desires in order to observe its secrets;
But always allow yourself to have desires in order to observe its manifestations.
These two are the same
But diverge in name as they issue forth.
Being the same they are called mysteries,
mystery upon mystery-
The gateway of the manifold secrets. (trans. D.C. Lau)
First of all, let me thank D.C. Lau for blowing my mind with his translation of this stanza. Previous translations I had read had always enforced (or I had misread as enforcing) a qualitative preference for emptiness over fullness. I think I got this from Ursula Le Guin, although I hesitate to blame such a superb writer.
So the unwanting soul
sees what’s hidden,
and the ever-wanting soul
sees only what it wants. (Le Guin)
D.C. Lau was the first to really clue me in that the passage from one state to another was actually really valuable, and that perhaps one shouldn’t weigh one state over the other.
The D.C. Lau translation came into my head today, as I was reading about Alan Greenspan’s moment of mea culpa.
And I actually was thinking about his translation of the first line. Our modern society is really a truly impressive one, and I enjoy living it. But we do seem to cultivate a very dangerous idea in our best and brightest that their abilities, intelligence, and foresight are completely unlimited. I think sometimes people need this idea: the idea that literally anything is possible. It’s the core of capitalism and it makes being alive exciting. But it is also fundamentally a delusion. We are ambitious but limited creatures, and even collectively we are capable of only a little of what we might like to be.
Sometimes the failure to see this can lead to greatness. And sometimes it can also lead to disaster, as seen in the out-of-control (but very ambitious) complexity of the shadow financial system. I’ve worked in the financial world, and I don’t see any kind of malevolence in the money lost and trust shattered; just greed and pride, which just about any philosophy is skeptical of.
Of course, my blathering is interrupted by the idea of just letting Chuang Tzu say it:
Life has a limit; knowledge has none. To seek what is limitless through what is limited is perilous. (trans. Hamill/Seaton)
Yes, this was the book I was searching for in my many stacks when I started this blog.
The Tao Te Ching could probably offer an endless font of advice to Mr. Greenspan:
When beings prosper and grow old,
Call them not-Tao.
Not-Tao soon ends. (trans. Addiss/Lombardo)
But let’s stop while we’re ahead.