David L. Hall Process and Anarchy - a Taoist Vision of Creativity
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David L. Hall Process and Anarchy - a Taoist Vision of Creativity
David L. Hall Process and anarchy-A Taoist vision of creativity
The Ruler of the Northern Ocean was Shu (Heedless) the Ruler of the Southern
Ocean was Hu (Sudden), and the Ruler of the Center was Chaos. Shu and Hu
were continually meeting in the land of Chaos, who treated them very well.
They consulted together how they might repay his kindness, and said, 'Men
all have seven orifices for the purpose of seeing, hearing, eating, and breathing,
while this (poor) Ruler alone has not one. Let us try and make them for him.'
Accordingly they dug one orifice in him every day; and at the end of seven days
Chaos died.'
This allegory, which succinctly expresses Taoist sentiments concerning the role
of discursive knowledge in human affairs, no doubt strikes the non-Chinese
mind as somewhat odd because of the solicitude shown for Chaos. Indeed,
James Legge, the British sinologist, whose lack of sympathy with much of
Chinese culture often led him to misunderstand the texts he so admirably
translated, comments on this allegory, "But surely it was better that Chaos
should give place to another state. 'Heedless' and 'Sudden' did not do a bad
work."2
In Legge's defense of the organization of the primordial Chaos we may see
reflected an attitude which is both a cause and a consequence of a fundamental
bias of metaphysical speculation in the Anglo-European tradition. An assump-
tion which has undergirded much of our traditional scientific and theological
understandings of the Universe is that from Chaos, construed as formless
nonbeing or as an unordered given, God fashioned the world through the
ordering activity of Creation. We come to understand our world by articulating
the principles of the order or patterning imposed upon Chaos in the initial
Creative Act. First principles (archai, principia) function as determining sources
of order serving to organize an antecedent irrational surd identified in our
principal cosmogonic myths as "chaos."
It is by no means necessary to accept the metaphysical necessity of an initial
creative act as suggested in our cosmogonic myths. Aristotle did not, and yet
it is he who has provided the locus classicus for our understanding of principles
as determining sources of order. A principle (arch2) is: that from which a
thing can be known; that from which a thing first comes to be, or that at whose
will that which is moved is moved and that which changes change^.^ Principles
account for and establish the order of the world. As principles of knowledge,
beginnings are the origins of thought. As principles of being there are the
sources of origination per se. Beginnings in the political or socialsphere are
due to archai or princeps-those who command. In any of its forms a first
principle functions as a determining source of order.
Chaos is nonrational because it is unprincipled. It is, therefore, an-archic,
without an archi, which means it has no determining source of order. It is,
therefore, without a beginning or origin. Chaos is the indefinite in search of
David L. Hall is Professor of'Philosophy at rhe Universiry o f Texas at El Paso, El Paso, Texas.
Philosophy East and West 28. no. 3. July 1978 0by The University Press of Hawaii All rights reserved.
272 Hall
definition,