Dao (2014) 13:361–377 DOI 10.1007/s11712-014-9384-z Zhuangzi’s Meontological Notion of Time David Chai Published online: 27 June 2014 # Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014 Abstract This article investigates the concept of time as it is laid forth in the Daoist text, the Zhuangzi 莊子. Arguing that authentic time lies with cosmogony and not reality as envisioned by humanity, the Zhuangzi casts off the ontology of the presentnow in favor of the existentially creative negativity of Dao 道. As the pivot of Dao, nothingness not only allows us to side-step the issue of temporal directionality, it reflects the meontological nature of Daoist cosmology in general. Framing time in terms of the motion of nothingness, this paper concludes that the authentic time of Dao reveals itself through the principle of creation qua rest. Experiencing such temporal self-grounding, the sage becomes existentially awakened such that temporal ekstases becomes unfathomable. Keywords Zhuangzi 莊子 . Time . Meontology 1 Introduction When one asks “What time is it?” to what is one referring? Indeed, whenever one makes a claim about the need or lack of time to do something, should we take said claim to be particular or universal? It seems that what drives our familiarity with time is our ability to personalize it—to render the temporality of the world our own. In other words, we are aware of time because it is that which makes us temporally relevant. If not for our ability to sense the presence of time and draw it into our own consciousness, thus allowing it to evolve with our own physical and psychic growth, it would be but a dark unknowable. This article challenges the traditional Western notion of time as beginning with a thing’s birth and ceasing upon its death by employing the language of meontology as used by the Daoist thinker, Zhuangzi 莊子 (375–300 BCE). For Zhuangzi, time is not grounded in the presence of being but in the negative creativity of Dao 道. The primal nothingness (wu 無) 1 in which Dao dwells is hence neither nihilistic nor an absolute 1 Hereafter I refer to primal nothingness as ontological nothingness in order to better differentiate it from the second implicit meaning of wu as ontic nonbeing. David Chai (*) Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto, 170 St. George St., Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: david.chai@utoronto.ca 362 David Chai void; rather, it is the milieu wherein Dao realizes its own potentiality. In other words, nothingness is not something that can be molded or shaped by things but informs the very nature of Dao and the reality of the universe. Hence, if we are to truly experience Dao as ultimate reality we must learn to do so meontologically—from the perspective of nothingness. By examining time from the perspective of Dao’s creative negativity we can avoid any dialectics regarding its directionality and divisibility. Unbinding time from the being of things will hence allow us to frame it as a question of the movement of nothingness embodied in the principle of creation qua rest. Resting in nothingness, Dao remains beyond the grasp of cosmological and human measured time whilst giving rise to that which is temporally rooted.2 This article will not only examine how Dao informs time in its cosmological and human senses but how its own nontemporal tendency arises through its self-grounding in nothingness. The Zhuangzi thus takes the sage as an exemplar of the kind of existential awakening possible when we cease viewing things in terms of temporal ekstases (i.e., past, present, future) and allow them to be as they are so naturally inclined. 2 Cosmogony and Cosmological Time Before entering into a discussion of what cosmological time entails for the Zhuangzi, it would be useful to first clarify how the text links cosmogony and temporality. Daoist cosmogony marks a timeless universe populated by ontological nothingness and Dao. A period of undifferentiated wholeness known as primal chaos (hundun 混沌),3 it bore witness to the formation of the One (yi 一 ), an ontological collectivity of prephenomenological forms, whose virtue mirrored that of Dao. As Dao’s virtue had yet to be despoiled by human cunning or desire, all was harmonious and peaceful. Only after the ontic categories of nonbeing and being arose did measurable time as we think of it today commence. However, the time to which nonbeing and being are subjected does not apply to the cosmological time of the One. This is because ontic beings are conditioned by the complementariness of their own nonbeing, measuring the duration of their existence against it. Since Daoism holds that ontic being is always preceded by 2 I differentiate Dao time, cosmological time, and human measured time as follows: Dao time is the nontime of Dao and ontological nothingness whereas cosmological time pertains to the state of primal chaos also known as the One, and human measured time is the causal or durational time of everyday human experience. Regarding human time, Merleau-Ponty assumed an almost Daoist tone in his attempt to abandon any hint of sequential linearity: “Time is, therefore, not a real process, not an actual succession that I am content to record. It arises from my relation to things. Within things themselves, the future and the past are in a kind of eternal state of pre-existence and survival…. Past and future exist only too unmistakably in the world, they exist in the present, and what being itself lacks in order to be of the temporal order, is the not-being of elsewhere, formerly and tomorrow” (Merleau-Ponty 2006: 478). 3 Primal chaos first appears in the Zhuangzi in an anecdotal tale at the end of Chapter 7: “The ruler of the southern sea is called Shu 儵. The ruler of the northern sea is called Hu 忽. The ruler of the center is called Chaos. Shu and Hu would frequently meet in the land of Chaos, and were always treated well by him. They consulted each other on how to repay Chaos’ kindness, saying: ‘Men all have seven openings, for seeing, hearing, eating, and breathing, but Chaos alone has none. Let us try and give him some.’ Each day they bore one opening into him, and on the seventh day Chaos died” (Guo 1990: 309). All translations are my own unless noted otherwise. Zhuangzi’s Meontological Notion of Time 363 nonbeing, the ontological nature of the One is only measurable against the meontology of Dao. The Zhuangzi described this situation as such: Of that born before heaven and earth, is it a thing? That which treats things as mere things is not a thing. Those things that issue forth cannot precede other things, yet there were things already extant. Furthermore, there were things already extant before then too, and so on without end. (Guo 1990: 763) From the above account it is clear that cosmological time does not commence with ontic things, which would lead to an endless leapfrogging between being and nonbeing; rather, it traces its beginning to the undifferentiated wholeness of the One. Marking the becoming and retraction of Dao, the One symbolizes the holism of a universe in harmony with ontological nothingness. It does not, however, belong to the same temporal realm as Dao. This is because the nothingness associated with Dao is an empty equanimity whose purpose is to facilitate the actualization of its own unknowability, whereas the One renders knowable the becoming of said actualization. Given Zhuangzi’s argument that the universe was originally a state of unity, whose inherent nothingness was unperturbed by anything other than its own self-reckoning, we must thus try to explain the relationship between the nontime of Dao and the cosmological time of the One. Moreover, it would appear that the question is not so much how we ought to characterize the presence of cosmological time in relation to human experience but how we can open ourselves to the possibility that Dao as ultimate reality dwells in the boundless spatiality of nothingness. What this means is that cosmological time is rendered inferior and incomplete when compared to that of Dao in that it is still measurable, regardless of how large that turns out to be, whereas the nontime of Dao is wholly immeasurable. The temporality of the universe is hence derived not from its own presence of being but from its enshroudment in meontological perpetuity: Emerging from what has no root, it [Dao] enters what has no aperture. It has reality but there is nowhere it dwells; it has duration but is without beginning or end. As that which emerges does so from that which has no aperture, this refers to its reality. As it has reality but nowhere to dwell, this refers to its spatiality. Having duration but no beginning or end, this refers to its temporality. There is life and there is death, and there is emerging and there is entering; it may enter and emerge, but one cannot see its form. This is called the Gate of Heaven. (Guo 1990: 800) The Gate of Heaven (tianmen 天門) not only serves to separate the cosmological time of heaven from that of Dao, it explains why Dao itself must lie beyond the realm of time altogether, for to imply otherwise would mean that the timelessness in which it is situated is bound to something other than itself, rendering impossible the idea that being is born of nonbeing and that nonbeing’s becoming and returning are subject to yet a higher source in the form of ontological nothingness. While the Zhuangzi does not deny the existence of human measured time, to have an authentic temporal encounter requires us to trace said time to that lacking temporal ekstases. Owing to the universe having a supposed beginning and end, we can say that the authenticity of Dao’s timeless temporality is due to its own arising and nothing more. In other words, the time of Dao is neither transcendental nor idealistic but meontologically 364 David Chai existential and thus can neither flow toward a future nor come to comprise a series of points whose collectivity results in the present-now. Time in its most authentic state is hence the becoming of nothingness in lieu of the creative potentiality of Dao:4 Things cannot avoid being born before they are born and cannot resist dying when they are already dead. Death and life are close to one another, yet their principle cannot be seen…. I look for its root but it extends back without end; I search for its end but it stretches on without stopping. Without ending or stopping, having no room for words, this is the shared principle of things…. Dao cannot be taken to have being, and if it does, it cannot be taken to not be so. To call it Dao, this is but a temporary measure. (Guo 1990: 917)5 This shared principle of things is traceable to the oneness of their nature partaking in the boundless virtue of Dao. Fundamental events such as death and life occur within cosmological time but the Zhuangzi does not regard such time as a priori or purely intuitive, which would render it absolute and barren.6 Neither absolute nor barren, the timeless spirit of Dao populates cosmological time and from the resultant intermingling, the measurability of human reality comes to fruition. Cosmological time is hence a marker of the One in light of the mysteriousness of Dao. We can thus explain the complementariness of Daoist cosmogony as follows: out of the timeless, empty equanimity of ontological nothingness Dao spontaneously gave birth to itself. What arose from this self-birthing was not the framework for time but merely its potential. This creative negativity underwent a meontological self-transformation that engendered the One. Here, however, Dao qua nothingness has yet to be known as Dao qua the One. Dao qua oneness can only occur with the epistemological act of naming it so. With the One named as such, ontic being and nonbeing arose, filling the universe with their myriad variations.7 In order for the cosmological time of the One to exist unbounded by human intentionality, it must function according to its own self-so-ness (ziran 自然) so as to engage the things it begets in a manner reflective of Dao. Knowing that things emerge from the collective unity of the One, they are at their most primal when temporally 4 We may contrast this unique way of visualizing time with Henry Bergson’s definition of it as the elaboration of intuition such that, “the living being essentially has duration; it has duration precisely because it is continuously elaborating what is new and because there is no elaboration without searching, no searching without groping. Time is this very hesitation, or it is nothing. Time is something … time is what hinders everything from being given at once. It retards, or rather it is retardation. It must therefore, be elaboration” (Bergson 1946: 109–110). 5 The Huainanzi 淮南子 took a different approach, expressing cosmological time in terms of qi 氣: “When heaven and earth were without form, all was colliding vigorously, mingling imperceptibly, and was thus known as the Great Emergence. Dao began in an empty void, the empty void gave birth to the universe, and the universe gave birth to qi” (Zhang 1997: 245). 6 Kant argued this in his Critique of Pure Reason, saying: “Time is not an empirical concept … [and] therefore is given a priori. This a priori necessity also grounds the possibility of apodictic principles of the relations of time…. Time is not a discursive, or what is called a general concept, but a pure form of sensible intuition” (Kant 2007: 67). 7 The Daodejing 道德經 conveyed this principle using the simple formula of: “Dao gives birth to the One, the One gives birth to two, two gives birth to three, and three gives birth to the myriad things” (Lou 1999: 117). The Tianwen 天文 chapter of the Huainanzi also utilized such cosmogony, writing: “Dao begins with one. One [alone], however, does not give birth. Therefore, it divided into yin 陰 and yang 陽. From the harmonious union of yin and yang, the myriad things were produced. Thus it is said one produced two, two produced three, and three produced the myriad things” (Zhang 1997: 341). Zhuangzi’s Meontological Notion of Time 365 indistinct. However, those things whose existence assumes an air of temporality must eventually overcome it if they are to return to Dao: NANBO Zikui 南伯子葵 said, “Can I study Dao?” Nuyu 女偊 replied: “…only when one perceives one’s solitude can one abolish the distinctions of past and present; only when one has abolished the distinctions of past and present can one then enter the realm where there is neither death nor life. That which destroys life does not die, and that which gives birth to life does not live. As it is such a thing, there is nothing it does not support, and nothing it does not welcome; there is nothing it does not destroy, and nothing it does not complete. Its name is known as disturbance within tranquility. In disturbance within tranquility, there must first be disturbance before there can be completion”. (Guo 1990: 252) In the above passage, not only did Nuyu’s response to Zikui expound the process by which one conjoins with Dao, she also explicated Zhuangzi’s theory of cosmic temporality. United with Dao and in harmony with the myriad things of the world, time for the Daoist sage becomes a misnomer—a contrivance of the human mind. Forgetting the distinctions of past and present, the sage enters a realm where life and death blur together. The Gate of Heaven was for Zhuangzi what the wheel hub was for Laozi 老子—an abode where the myriad things can coexist in quiescent equanimity. Though things are said to enter reality and take their leave through it, the gate itself remains unaffected; though the spokes are what give the wheel its motion, the hub is always unperturbed. The gate and wheel hub are thus metaphors for the virtue of Dao, and this virtue, like Dao itself, manifests itself timelessly. In light of this, the traditional Western argument that things move from a coming-to-be to a coming-to-pass is problematic: according to Daoism what is temporally unchanging is the ontological nothingness informing Dao while that which changes is not the duration of one’s existence but said existence itself.8 Cosmological time is thus a measuring of the plenum of Dao’s marvelous possibilities, whose principle is ultimately unknowable. The course of transformation experienced by the myriad things is not due to the action of time but their inborn nature reflecting the virtue of Dao. As they transmogrify from the authentically dark collectivity of Dao to the illusionary brightness of individualization, and back again, the myriad things should not be taken as evidence of a systematic sequence of past-present-future; on the contrary, they symbolize the immeasurable possibilities of Dao’s creativity. To speak of time as the negating principle of motion such that it becomes inseparable from it is to deny nothingness its positive contribution to such advancement.9 Not only 8 For Hegel, this would be inconceivable, which Petry elaborated in his annotation: “The present is, only because the past is not: the being of the now has the determination of not-being, and the not-being of its being is the future; the present is this negative unity. The not-being replaced by now, is the past; the being of notbeing contained in the present, is the future. If one considers time positively one can therefore say that only the present is, before and after is not, but the concrete present is the result of the past, and is pregnant with the future. The true present is therefore eternity” (in Hegel 1970: 235). 9 In saying this I have in mind Charles Sherover’s assessment that, “if change and development are crucial, then the principle of the negative assumes prime importance. For as a thing develops, it changes from its initial stage to a subsequent stage and each stage is, in turn, negated, as the thing progressively moves on from what it was into what it was not…change requires time, and time is, then, ‘the negative element in the sensuous world’ as it is continually negating the present” (Sherover 2001: 159). 366 David Chai does the Zhuangzi forbid such a closed reading of time, the Daodejing does so too: “One can know of the earliest of beginnings and this is called the thread of Dao” (Lou 1999: 32). The universe did not begin with time but the empty and still nebula of nothingness unbeknownst to any but Dao. Given that Dao existed before the appearance of cosmological time, to trace a thing’s root from its now-time back to that of primal chaos is to use the mysteriousness of Dao to join with the darkness of nothingness. In other words, there can be no before or after in a meontologically temporal sense, since before and after has no bearing on the manifestation of Dao’s potential. This is why the Zhuangzi stated: Dao has neither end nor beginning, but things have their death and birth, hence they cannot be relied on for completion. Now empty, now full, they do not adhere to one form. Years past cannot be repeated, and time cannot be stopped. Decay and growth, fullness and emptiness, each ends and begins anew. It is from this that we discuss the method of Great Meaning and debate the principle of the myriad things. As for the life of things, it is similar to a hurriedly galloping horse. With each movement there is change, with each moment of time things alter. What should you do? What should you not do? One should simply allow their self-transformation. (Guo 1990: 584–585) Cosmological time is so far-reaching that it makes human measured time seem relative at best. Humanity has its allotment of years but compared to a thousand-yearold tree, how can we justify imposing our temporal norms onto others? We persistently wish to transcend the chains of our own temporal finitude but to what end? Time in its authentic Dao-sense cannot be transcended because its impermanence lies in a realm that is beyond our capacity to dominate. Only the sage can stand outside of time in the timeless plane of nothingness. What this means, then, is that all things begotten by Dao have a self-sameness that is pervasive without being exclusionary. The act of becoming thus becomes a node of quiescence through which creation is achieved. In this regard, becoming in the form of creation qua rest can avoid being labeled a process insofar as it preserves the spontaneously creative possibilities of Dao on the one hand, while remaining nontemporal on the other. The by-product of Dao’s becoming is of course temporally tinged. However, even after emerging from the One, the mystery of Dao accompanying said things stays intact. In this way, the Zhuangzi’s cosmogony avoids being temporally grounded by rooting itself in dark nothingness. It is hence an unfolding best described as antiprocessional and nonlinear. To limit the cosmology of time to the corporeally real would be to damage the holistic nature of the universe. The possibility to arrest moments of time and designate them as we temporally see fit can only come about because of the perpetuity of nothingness. Past, present, and future are merely placeholders for the false human ordering of the natural world. With Dao as the ultimate reality of things, however, such designations are cast-off. The measured time that is the lived time of humanity is in fact but the whimsical fulfillment of a particular possibility of Dao come to light. Being and nonbeing, beginning and not-yet beginning, are but two variations of the same happenstance. Knowing that Dao is fed by the quiescence of ontological nothingness, whether one moves backward or forward in time, the outcome remains unaffected. The infinite regresses that we often encounter in the Zhuangzi are thus metaphorical Zhuangzi’s Meontological Notion of Time 367 fishhooks intended to grab our attention and show us the error of holding onto time as a being-centric construct. If we wish to attain the kind of holistic freedom the Zhuangzi says is possible by harmonizing with Dao, we must accept the idea that the time of our lived presence is beyond our control; we can no more relive the past than we can advance to the future. The time bestowed upon us, indeed, that given to all things, owes itself to their self-soness. This self-so nature of things is but a sprout from Dao’s root—it bursts forth and dies off without any knowing why it is so. The alternation of the seasons occurs not because they will it upon themselves but because Dao instills in them the temporal acuity to do so, and so forth. Motion reverts to nonmotion and the propagation of becoming is countered by a return to nothingness. Through its nondeliberateness, Dao allows things to be created of their own doing—a feat possible because of rest. Dao’s temporal becoming can thus be regarded as creation qua rest because only when a thing is at ease with itself does it forget its relational-self and revert to a state of authenticity. Having coalesced around their authentic self, things complete their natural years unburdened by the artificial passing of time. Their coming and going and endless cycles of transformation cannot hide the fact that beneath it all, there is the perpetuity of ontological nothingness. To this end, we can conclude that the Zhuangzi’s notion of cosmological time dispels the illusion of a pre-existing future or a re-livable past in favor of the symbolic representation of the creational moment of our coming-to-be. Such becoming is a durational moment whose temporality is not bound to the presentness of our being but to the thread of oneness that ties all things together. In this regard, time is a timeless duration whose perpetuity is intrinsically bound to the mystery of Dao.10 We can no more personalize time than we can attach to it a label of intention. In the next section, we will see how this can pose difficulties for anyone hoping to identify with a particular moment of time. Using Zhuangzian meontology though, we can overcome the inherent dilemma facing human measured time by abandoning the designations of past-present-future, taking the phenomenological embodiment of Dao as the new standard-bearer. 3 The Disillusionment over Human Time Having addressed time in its cosmological guise we can now turn to its everydayness, that is, the measurability of human time. As any discourse pertaining to the causal nature of human time indubitably centers on the role of consciousness and how its use guides our conception of the world, our examination of it commences from the Daoist assumption that the three successive states of ekstasis (past, present, and future) are but imaginary happenstances of one whose unity with the nonworldly no-mindedness of Dao has been disrupted. This stands in stark contrast to the more traditional Western 10 The idea of perpetual time also failed to convince Merleau-Ponty, who argued that “the feeling for eternity is a hypocritical one, for eternity feeds on time … eternity is the time that belongs to dreaming, and the dream refers back to waking life, from which it borrows all its structures…. Time exists for me only because I am situated in it, that is, because I become aware of myself as already committed to it…. It is by coming into the present that a moment of time acquires that indestructible individuality, that ‘once and for all’ quality, which subsequently enables it to make its way through time and produce in us the illusion of eternity” (MerleauPonty 2006: 492). 368 David Chai belief that the past is a retreating of the present while the present progressively fills the future. The tale of Ranxiang (ranxiang shi 冉相氏) does a nice job of demonstrating the Zhuangzi’s unique conceptualization of human time: Mr. Ranxiang grasped the principle on which all things revolved and followed them to their completion. His joining with them was without ending or beginning, attainment or time. Changing with them on a daily basis, he himself remained unchanged…. The sage has yet to begin thinking of heaven, has yet to begin thinking of man, has yet to begin thinking of a beginning, and has yet to begin thinking of things. (Guo 1990: 885) That which has not yet begun has yet to surpass that which has already begun. Given that it has not yet come into being, it has yet to enter the realm of human time. To be within causal time, that is, to be measurable by variables deduced by humanity, however, is to possess both a start and an ending. The variables that pronounce when these two moments take place are also what determine the measurability of our lifetime. To consider our experience of time as one that is static in bearing is thus to be caught in the durational moment of our existence such that we are said to be. In other words, the being of our condition renders us visible to the world and such momentary visibility is what constitutes our temporality. Given that Dao does not have a measurable beginning or end and lacks attainment of being or time, it can only be characterized as that whose spontaneity lies in the realm of unknowability. The same cannot be said of the myriad things of the world however. Therefore, we can only refer to the source of all things as that whose root infiltrates temporal ekstases without being entrapped by it. This is why the Zhuangzi declared that only the sage can harmoniously join with things in Dao and that such conjoining occurs beyond the realm of time known to the common people. Since the sage changes along with things without being changed by them, he darkens himself with Dao’s mystery. His form is thus a forgotten one, whose essence is occupied by the nothingness of the universe. He is mysterious in that he does not make distinctions between substance and nonsubstance, choosing instead to live according to the self-so-ness of Dao. Keeping his inner-virtue pure and dark, his harmony with the oneness of things is unspoiled. By maintaining his place in the hub of still quietude, the sage dwells where there is no temporality whatsoever; all is existent and nonexistent, finite and infinite. It is here, at the Gate of Heaven—the pivot of nothingness—where creation abounds and the true nature of things is freed of the seductive language of time, whose artificial durations are but rationalizations of the human mind.11 The sage, therefore, does not follow the linearity of ekstases but the virtue of heaven. Heaven is an embodiment of the virtue of Dao and symbolizes cyclical patterns such as growth and decay, hardship and abundance, and so forth. By choosing not to resist the natural outcome of such patterning, the sage is able to see things through to their completion. In seeing the true nature of things as stemming from the undifferentiated 11 Sartre, on the other hand, wrote that “psychic time is only the connected bringing together of temporal objects. But its essential difference from original temporality is that it is while original temporality temporalizes itself. As such psychic time can be constituted only with the past, and the future can be only as a past which will come after the present past; that is, the empty form before-after is hypostasized, and it orders the relations between objects equally past” (Sartre 1992: 236). Zhuangzi’s Meontological Notion of Time 369 oneness of Dao, he encounters no futility in his endeavors and so makes it his abode. Changing with things as they themselves change, the sage thus shares in their temporal experiences without being bound to them. This points to yet another key component of the Zhuangzi’s cosmology: one must forget the distinctions between things so as to grasp their true nature. Having grasped the notion that things do not originate in the realm of human measured time, the sage forgets it so as to attend to that pertaining to heaven. In knowing heaven, he sees the myriad transformations of things as but the self-so fulfillment of cosmological time. Having grasped the notion of cosmic temporality, the sage also learns to forget it so as to comprehend that which belongs to the timelessness of Dao. Only when he sees things as Dao sees them can he be said to move with them together yet remain unaffected. This is how the sage is able to experience time meontologically. The common person, however, only sees things on the level of their ontic existence; for him, measured time is both real and inescapable. The world moves in a tandem of before’s and after’s that are immune to the changes of the present-now. That the common person’s faith is placed in the veracity of temporal division is proof of his refusal to learn from heaven, blindly following the hearts of others instead. Each day marks the arrival of the future in the present, which then retreats to the past. The common man’s hopes are put into this yet-to-be future such that the present becomes little more than waiting on egoistic hope. It is mere hope because he constantly looks to transcend the present in order to seek out a more promising future. This, however, is not the way the Zhuangzi wished us to live. The toil of things weaving their way through the presence of lived experience owes the authority of said time not to the fate bestowed on humanity by heaven but to the critical bearing of their empirical selves. The sage, however, is able to succeed where others fail because he adheres to the principle of successively modeling himself on the arts of Dao: Standing beside the sun and moon, embracing the whole universe, he takes everything, blends them into one, ignoring the confusion of distinction, treating those of different rank equally. The common man labors and toils; the sage appears ignorant and unknowing. He blends ten thousand years into one. The myriad things are what they are, pursuing their course in the same manner as the sage. (Guo 1990: 242) In Laozi’s Daodejing such sentiment is phrased along the lines of: “Humans model themselves after earth, earth models itself after heaven, heaven models itself after Dao, and Dao models itself after that which is natural” (Lou 1999: 65). Bearing this dictum in mind, we can return to the story of Ranxiang and examine the commentary of LIN Yidu 林疑獨: Mr. Ranxiang, a sage prior to the three sage emperors, grasped the principle of true emptiness as the limitless evolving proceeding of Dao and followed the myriad things to completion. In joining with the transformation of things the One knew not of ending or beginning, attainment or time. In joining with the transformation of things the One remained unchanged and being unchanged it could thereby spontaneously transform. As his age had such a means, he used it 370 David Chai to return to what is natural thereby attaining his true character. Furthermore, using one’s mind to seek out heaven as a teacher will not succeed. What can be done to reverse such blind following? The sage has yet to think of heaven and human, but heaven and human exist of themselves. The sage has yet to think of a beginning of things, but the beginning of things lies in selfhood. The movement of the ages bends and stretches but does not stop. Complete in motion it remains vigilant without being excessive, joining with the dark principle of things. How can it be any other way but this! (Zhang 2004: 14.429)12 What distinguishes Lin’s reading of this passage from the more popular commentaries of GUO Xiang 郭象 and CHENG Xuanying 成玄英 was his use of the term “selfhood” (ziwo 自我). As we can see, for the Zhuangzi heaven and human appear simultaneously but there is no distinguishing the two ontologically. That which belongs to human also belongs to heaven and the heavenly exists in all things. Thus, while the common person sees himself as being separate from heaven, the sage says nothing of the sort. For the sage, time and being are inextricably and existentially woven together such that the idea of an absolute beginning to things is discredited. Things begin of their own doing insofar as their self-so-ness fails to be linked to any beginning other than their own spontaneous arising from Dao. We must be careful, however, not to confuse the Zhuangzi’s idea of self-so-ness with the reinterpretation of it by GUO Xiang. In the case of the Zhuangzi, self-so-ness is derived directly from Dao whereas GUO Xiang saw it as inherent to things themselves. From this we may conclude that the Zhuangzi’s take on human measured time has a more onto-phenomenological slant than one might at first presume. The result is that the time of the for-itself can no longer be sustained as a duration contained in or moving from one temporal phase to another in that the ontic nature of human measured time is brought about by its ontological bearing, which is itself meontological. The stretching and bending of time can hence be regarded as a pushing and pulling of man’s empirical self in order to establish cohesion with the authentic non-self of Dao. Our argument is thus a challenge to the phenomenological understanding of temporality in place since Husserl and which Merleau-Ponty built upon when he stated that: I do not pass through a series of instances of now, the images of which I preserve and which, placed end to end, make a line. With the arrival of every moment, its predecessor undergoes a change: I still have it in hand and it is still there, but already it is sinking away below the level of presents; in order to retain it, I need to reach through a thin layer of time. It is still the preceding moment, and I have the power to rejoin it as it was just now; I am not cut off from it, but still it would not belong to the past unless something had altered, unless it were beginning to outline itself against, or project itself upon, my present, whereas a moment ago it was my present…. Time is not a line, but a network of intentionalities. (MerleauPonty 2006: 484) 12 LIN Zi 林自, whose pen name was Yidu 疑獨 (Song dynasty, dates unknown) authored the Zhuangzi Zhu 莊 to the Zhuangzi), which survives in CHU Boxiu’s 褚伯秀 Nanhua Zhenjing Yihai Zuanwei 南華真經義海纂微 (Admiring the Profound Sea of Meaning of the Zhuangzi) and JIAO Hong’s 焦竑 (1540–1620 CE) Zhuangzi Yi 莊子翼 (Annotations to the Zhuangzi). 子注 (Commentaries Zhuangzi’s Meontological Notion of Time 371 The Zhuangzi would decry the above account for two reasons: first, although Merleau-Ponty tried to avoid describing time one-dimensionally, his continued use of the markers past, present, and future nevertheless result in a looping linearism in that, although one can reach through time, one is still reaching toward an inescapable past or future; second, the idea that time is not a line, but a network of intentionalities, is difficult to accept because such measureable intentionality traces itself to human consciousness instead of the immeasurable darkness of Dao. If we presume that the above is applicable to human time the world over, what are we to make of the sage, whose relational self (i.e., his authentic self) is wholly beyond the grasp of measurable division? In order to answer such a question we will need to discuss the relationship between memory and forgetting, but that is a diversion we cannot afford here. We can, however, point out that while human time is but a measuring of our existence as a closed span of being, the sage partakes in the ceaseless unfolding of Dao. For him, cosmological time cannot be measured by units of human experience or the events of life and death; rather, he sees time as an indicator of the nonpresence of Dao (i.e., it is intuitive but immeasurable). Before things existed there was the primal chaos of the One, before the One there was Dao, and before Dao there was just tranquil nothingness. For the common man, the age in which he finds himself is but a temporal bending of that which is anterior while stretching toward that which is posterior. This lived time that is a continual measuring forth of the allotted years bestowed on us by Dao ceaselessly sways back and forth between what we perceive as past and future. The point of equilibrium is thus the present, and yet the present that forever accompanies us to the end of our days is not a moving constancy but one at rest. All that precedes and proceeds from the constancy of the now-moment is in motion; it is only by letting-go of such notions as before and after that we are then qualified to stand in the pivot of Dao, resting in the hub of nothingness. In rest things remain pure and dark and in their equanimity they revolve and transform in accordance with heavenly change—the mirror of Dao. This, however, does not account for how we, as conscious beings, experience and engage the temporality of our lives. On the question of the measurability of human time, Heidegger posited the idea that time does not belong to consciousness but serves as the ground for the possibility that self-becoming can be actualized. 13 If we contrast this with what Sartre argued—that time is the medium through which the for-itself supplants or annihilates the in-itself— then we discover that the past is related to the future in a manner no different from how the in-itself is related to the for-itself. In other words, the facticity of so-called past time translates into the possibility of a so-called future, with the present-now acting as an admixture of them both.14 Because being-in-itself is unconscious being and hence lacks the capacity for change, it exists unaware of its own selfhood. Being-for-itself, on the other hand, is not only conscious of its own consciousness, it has the ability to actualize 13 Heidegger claimed that: “As the ground for the possibility of selfhood, time already lies within pure apperception, and so it first makes the mind into a mind…. Time and the ‘I think’ no longer stand incompatibly and incomparably at odds; they are the same” (Heidegger 1997: 134). 14 He said: “The past … is that which is without possibility of any sort; it is that which has consumed its possibilities; the present is a perpetual flight in the face of being … the fundamental meaning of the present: the present is not; the future is the ideal point where the sudden infinite compression of facticity (past), of the for-itself (present), and of its possible (a particular future) will at last cause the self to arise as the existence initself of the for-itself” (Sartre 1992: 170, 179, 184). 372 David Chai its own selfhood. Being-for-itself can thus only complete itself by foraying into the future. Given that the for-itself lacks a predetermined essence, Sartre declared its arrival in the world comes from nothingness. This nothingness, however, is an absolute naught and for all intents and purposes serves no other function than allowing the for-itself to displace the in-itself. 4 Dao the Principle of Creation qua Rest Having seen how nothingness interacts with both cosmological and human measured time, what remains to be clarified is the temporality of Dao. In order to reveal how it factors into the former types of time, we must persist in uncovering the nuances of temporal movement. Normally when one considers the past, one uses expressions such as “my past,” “in the past,” and so forth. There is a sense of finality brought to bear when discussing what previously took place. But herein is the catch: everything can be thought of as having occurred at one time or another before the moment at which it is discussed. If such were true then the present would do little but continually slide from moment to moment, never ceasing or resting. Indeed, the traditional Western notion of time as a continual flow of now-moments lends credence to such an analogy. Add to this a layer of human consciousness and we can see why the past might be taken as having been consumed of any further possibility.15 However, why should this be the case when we can argue that our memory of the past is imprinted on our consciousness, thereby ensuring its survival long after said events have occurred? For the Zhuangzi, instead of transcending the present in order to relive the past, we should forget them both. This purposeful forgetting is quite different from that of which Sartre, for example, spoke insofar as Daoist forgetting is a letting-go of the designator “the past” while for Sartre, forgetting is a symbolic obliteration of the contents of that period rather than its designation.16 The past is what our life has already played out; it is a recollection of memories to be savored or forgotten. Try as we might, we can never forget that which has come to be, not because it has fallen into the abyss of a nihilistic void but because the past marks the beginning of our selfhood. Phenomenologically speaking, the past marks the presence of our physicality in the universe and the commencement of our existentially rooted existence. It is, in other words, the start of our future while symbolizing our gradual return to the One. It is owing to this that the Zhuangzi observed: Moreover, my life is because it is the time for me to come; my death is because it is the time for me to leave. When one quietly obeys his time for birth and quietly obeys his time to die, neither sorrow nor joy can enter his mind. This is what the people of ancient times called “freeing oneself.” Those that cannot free themselves are held fast by their bonds. That the myriad things cannot overcome 15 Sartre elaborated on this point by saying: “Since the past is no more, since it has melted away into nothingness, if the memory continues to exist, it must be by virtue of a present modification of our being” (Sartre 1992: 160). 16 The past, he writes, “exists as the function of a certain being which I am. The past is not nothing, neither is it the present, but at its very source is bound to a certain present and to a certain future, the both of which it belongs” (Sartre 1992: 163). Zhuangzi’s Meontological Notion of Time 373 heaven has been known for a very long time; why should I detest my condition! (Guo 1990: 260) Whenever we encounter the past we do so in the capacity of being present in the time of the present-now. Regardless of the terminology we choose in pursuance of what has already been or will come to be, as members of a holistic cosmology, the duration of our presence of being is not quantifiable using the measurements of past, present, or future but is held against the standard of transformation exemplified by Dao. Thus, the past does not exist in isolation from the present any more than it functions as the semantic foundation that makes conceptualization of the present possible. 17 Indeed, there can be no distinction between past and present for the Daoist sage because the idea of past and present are annulled when he takes Dao as his authentic self. In following the heavenly or natural, past and present become but fleeting moments to which no second thought is afforded. The outcome of this is the complete abolishment of any divide between the temporal and the ontological, leaving only the resting in ontological nothingness. For the Zhuangzi, the past is one shared with no other insofar as it is a trace of the One. Upon the actuation of my corporeal being from the One, I have become one branch among a myriad others emanating from Dao’s root. That my life is a singular manifestation amongst an infinite number of possible manifestations of Dao and that it has managed to fulfill itself in the form of my being is nothing if not marvelous. This marvelousness that results in my existence cannot, therefore, seek another root in the form of the in-itself. The sage is hence a for-itself whose authentic self is a non-self; he is an ungrounded, uprooted spirit whose fluid freedom traces itself to the negative creativity of Dao. He does not bequeath resentment toward his coming-to-be nor does he display angst at the certainty of his demise. However, the common man clings to his past and begrudges the present and so lies in terror at the prospect of the future; he is one condemned to the bonds of epistemic norms and petty virtues and is far removed from the sage. The oneness of things thus serves as protection against the threat of alienation from either their past or future. Rather than be dogmatic by declaring the past inalienably cut-off from the present such that the for-itself must find a means by which to identify with the in-itself that is its past,18 we should instead relish our past, not as something lost only to be rediscovered, 17 Indeed, Heidegger attributed the confusion surrounding the relationship of past and present to the “now” missing its datability and significance: “In the vulgar interpretation of time as a succession of nows, both datability and significance are lacking. The characterization of time as pure sequence does not let these two structures ‘appear.’ The vulgar interpretation covers them over. The ecstatic and horizontal constitution of temporality, in which the datability and significance of the nows are grounded, is leveled down by this covering over. The nows are cut off from these relations, so to speak, and, as thus cutoff, they simply range themselves along after one another so as to constitute the succession” (Heidegger 1996: 387). 18 Sartre phrased it thusly: “From the content of the past as such I can remove nothing, and I can add nothing to it. In other words, the past which I was, is what it is; it is an in-itself like the things in the world” (Sartre 1992: 170). In a similar view, albeit one geared toward the temporality of the everydayness of being, Heidegger put forth the idea of tarrying: “The ‘already there’ in the past, and indeed this ‘already there’ in its vivid multiplicity of forms, is being encountered by the tarrying which sees it in a definite manner and looks toward its contexts of reference in such a way that a pull arises from itself, from the content of the subject matter which has been defined in advance in it—a pull which constantly draws the tarrying which compares anew into the looking-into which becomes involved in and pursues, and it does this in such a manner that the looking-into must of itself hold itself in this pursuing and linger in it” (Heidegger 2008: 42). 374 David Chai but as the gateway through which we can catch a glimpse of our root in ontological nothingness. Doing so will release us from our conception of the past as a solitary event and enlighten us to the truth that there can never be “the past” but only a repetitive loop of pasts and not-yet pasts. Thus, the notion of a past is as much a fallacy as is that of the future. It is not a matter of whether it is or is not; rather, the issue lies in our willingness to accept the cosmological reality that our ontological emerging and return is but one and the same motion. This is why the Zhuangzi advised us to “ride along with things and allow your heart-mind to wander. Entrust yourself to the inevitable and nourish that which lies central within—this is perfection” (Guo 1990: 160). Perfection is entrusting oneself to Dao and when one entrusts oneself to Dao, one does nothing yet nothing is left undone. This is the principle of creation qua rest. As for the future, although it appears infinite, it may still be said to belong to me in that it is a future whose uncertainty is shared by all, even itself. We are thus forced to view the present qua future as a time of becoming and potentiality. It is an unknown whose ominous presence forces us to reconcile our ever-present consciousness of it with platitudes and optimism. Ultimately, the future is the carrier of our own undoing; hence Heidegger opined that it is the ekstases of being.19 To say that the future is not included in the reality of the present is to deny it the freedom of returning to whence it came. What is possible about the future is not the possibility of the possible but rather the unfurling of Dao. The future in light of the mysteriousness of ontological nothingness is none other than the creative wonderment of returning to its unspoiled fullness. By describing the future as a future qua mystery, we thus point out the deficiency of taking durational progress as a series of nihilistic steps wherein the present nihilates the past and the present is nihilated by the future. This is indeed a rigid way of seeing things and it is here that we can offer something new. Time cannot be nihilated by itself any more then each individual moment of time may be said to succeed the one prior to it. Our account of present time must be taken in its entirety as it applies to the duration of my separation from Dao. The concepts of before and after can, therefore, be used to refer to the phases of emergence and return to primal oneness.20 As our emergence from and return to the One are in fact one and the same, we may moreover clarify our temporal presence of being as but one amongst a myriad of such presences, the ordering of which can only be described as the filling and emptying of Dao’s capacity to retain nothingness. To engage in semantic debates over the authenticity and priority of temporal division is to fail to see beyond the world of things and wander carefree in the universe. WANG Bi 王弼 in his “Introductory Remarks” (zhilue 指略) to the Daodejing demonstrated this superbly: 19 Heidegger wrote: “The being of having-been is the past, such that in such a being I am nothing but the future of Dasein and with it its past. The being, in which Dasein can be its wholeness authentically as beingahead-of-itself, is time” (Heidegger 1985: 319). 20 Heidegger’s definition of Dasein also included an emerging and returning to an existential source. The source he spoke of, however, was not nothingness, which he took to be an absolute void, but Dasein’s own present-time: “[Dasein] can be as having been only as long as it exists. And it is precisely when the Dasein no longer is, that it also no longer has been. It has been only so long as it is. This entails that (pastness in the sense of) having-been-ness belongs to the Dasein’s existence … this means that since the Dasein always comports itself more or less explicitly toward a specific capacity-to-be of its own self, since the Dasein always comestoward-itself from out of a possibility of itself, it therewith also always comes-back-to what it has been” (Heidegger 1988: 266). Zhuangzi’s Meontological Notion of Time 375 Given that the past and present are interchangeable, ending and beginning become identical. By grasping the Dao of old one can manage what occurs in the present. By investigating the present one can know of things at the very beginning of time. This is what we refer to as constancy. (Lou 1999: 195) By ascribing a label of irreversibility to time in our insistence that it be a series of successive transitions, we only cause it to become further entrenched in tautological dualisms. The goal of our philosophical reflection here is thus to move beyond viewing temporality as bound to being, or to insist that the three modes of temporal ekstasis are intra-dependent.21 The Zhuangzi viewed time as neither a nihilistic force to be reckoned with nor one subject to the forces of nihilism. The temporality of human measured time has no inherent bearing on the onto-phenomenological nature of reality or the world. Besides being self-serving, time is but the fetishizing of the human mind over the insecurity of its own mortality. Should we accept the idea that human measured time is a fantasy of our own creation and can in no uncertain terms equal cosmological time, not only will we be able to transcend our own static experience of time, we can free ourselves of our dependency on them too. The Zhuangzi justified such discarding in a tale wherein he revealed his state of mind whilst mourning the death of his wife: At the time of her death, how could I not grieve like everyone else! However, at the time of her beginning there was also a time before she was born. As there was a time before she was born, there was also a time before she had a body. As there was a time before she had a body, there was a time before she had qi 氣. In the midst of this vast indistinctness, there occurred a change and there was qi. This qi changed and there was a body. Then the body changed into life. Now there has been another change and she is dead. This is no different from the movement of the four seasons—spring, fall, winter, and summer. (Guo 1990: 614–615) The above story serves as a warning against blindly accepting the various modes of temporal existence, for their presumed self-evidence is never conclusive. Although the sage knows of the self-evident inauthenticity of time, it remains elusive to common people in that they constantly distance themselves from their own temporal existentialism. The desire for distance between one’s actions and the measured duration it takes to complete them leads to the irrational conclusion that the past of human time is in fact one that has come to pass—the past is in the past, having vanished from the realm of the present, resulting in its significance being overlooked. Heidegger spoke of how the significance of the present is overlooked but he said nothing of the sort for the past. The being-toward-death that is the future thus becomes continuously reinforced by the amassing of past time whose ever-growing significance only increases our anxiety over the impending end of our ontic existence. 21 On this point Sartre stated: “The present is not ontologically ‘prior’ to the past and to the future; it is conditioned by them as much as it conditions them, but it is the mold of indispensable non-being for the total synthetic form of temporality. Thus temporality is not a universal time containing all beings and in particular human realities. Neither is it a law of development which is imposed on being from without. Nor is it being. But it is the intra-structure of the being which is its own nihilation—that is the mode of being peculiar to being-for-itself. The for-itself is the being which has to be its being in the diasporatic form of temporality” (Sartre 1992: 202). 376 David Chai What we see in the Zhuangzi is an explication of time and temporality expunged of references to consciousness, no matter if they are made obliquely or otherwise. To describe temporality as “the evolution of a consciousness, in which the past presses against the present and causes the upspringing of a new form of consciousness, incommensurable with its antecedents” (Bergson 1998: 27) would seem unfathomable to a Daoist like Zhuangzi. As the sage and Dao are not disparate entities, the former conceals his darkness to the world in the latter thereby merging past and future into a state of timelessness. What is old becomes new and what is new becomes old; so too, beginning and end are identical. In this way, temporal dualism is avoided and authentic time is acknowledged as only occurring amidst periods of quiescent restfulness when one is fully receptive to the meontological nature of reality. Through Dao’s unbroken extension and interpenetration, the phenomenon of the world unfold according to their self-so-ness and the sage responds to them without influencing them, moving along whilst remaining inwardly at rest. 5 Conclusion Humanity’s deep-seated fear of being overrun by the future is a situation unique unto ourselves. If we have learned anything from the above, it is that Daoism attenuates rather than destroys the dynamic nature and continuity of things, especially when it comes to time. The heavenly movement spoken of in the Zhuangzi is none other than the movement of Dao—a motion that penetrates the myriad things by simultaneously unifying past, present, and future. In this way, the text avoids being labeled nihilistic or monist for its emphasis on the meontological aspect of time shows it to be inseparable from Dao as ultimate reality. Wherein the cosmological time of Daoism ostensibly differs from traditional Western theories is in the latter’s tendency to deconstruct present-time via the temporally socio-historical condition of being in the context of past and future time. The Zhuangzi forgoes these designations so as not to deny the spontaneous arising of things. In other words, the text holds our existence as a realized state of Dao, whose presence marks the span of our phenomenological presence. Thus, the existential and ontological reality of time lies not in a theory of recalling or projecting of past occurrences as future possibilities; rather, it lies in the naked realization that authentic time is a phantom whose reality enfolds any notion of there being distinct and unique temporal moments other than its own timelessness. 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