I hope to make this a weekly ritual, sharing what I’ve been reading (and maybe what I’ve been listening to) and my scattered and unrefined thoughts and musings about them. My reading habits are very different now that I’m out of grad school. I tend to read much more slowly, savoring each page and thinking deeply about everything. Inevitably there are connections to other things I’m reading, other things I have read, or ideas I’ve had, so I like to track those and keep rough notes. This is intended to be a way for me to publicly share those.
Ziran: The Philosophy of Spontaneous Self-Causation by Brian Bruya
The book opens with a couple vignettes of groups of brilliant people unable to solve complex problems until, that is, they look for help from the public or others outside their domain. He writes: “What we see in both of these examples is that some of the smartest people around could not solve very difficult problems on their own. And when they opened the process to a wider range of people, they suddenly made progress. Why? What happened? Why did adding more people yield better results than just having a small group of very smart people?” (2)
His answer? What economist and political scientist Scott Page calls cognitive diversity. “[I]f you have ten of the smartest people in a room working on a difficult problem, but they all come from more or less the same background, they will be less successful in solving the problem than ten less smart people of more diverse backgrounds.” (2)
Cognitive diversity is often connected to identity diversity, but not necessarily so. He argues that cognitive diversity should be emphasized over identity diversity when solving complex problems. For example, enter early Chinese philosophy, which Bruya argues is “a great reservoir of cognitive diversity” (4) that can help with the complex problems of our day.
Part of the problem is the siloing of disciplines in academia. There needs to be more diverse perspectives and methods as each field is cut off from what other domains are doing and how different areas think about problems. Biologists learn to look at the world in one way, physicists look at the world in another, and philosophers in another way — all are useful within their respective fields but are also very limiting. It’s like a monoculture of cognitive patterns.
I’m also reminded of how Andrew Solomon, in Far from the Tree, describes vertical and horizontal identities. Vertical identities are those that are heritable from our parents or those things that are similar to our parents, and horizontal identities are those that are dissimilar to our parents and not heritable.
In chapter 1, Bruya begins with the etymology of the term ziran (自然). It can mean multiple things, but in classical Daoism typically means “having the appearance of or being in a state of.” (8) The first character, Zi (自), also has multiple interpretations, including “action from,” but more relevant is the meaning “to do oneself or to do for oneself.” (9)
Within that last interpretation of to do oneself or to do for oneself, two further distinctions can be made. Using the phrase min zi zheng (民自正) from chapter 57 of the Daodejing, he explains two different ways to interpret that. The first, or typical, interpretation would be: “the people correct themselves.” However, the second, special interpretation would be: “the people of themselves become correct.” (9–10)
In the first, typical interpretation, “the form of the sentence under this interpretation is that there is an action, and one is doing the action to oneself. There is a subject/object dichotomy, intentionality, and a clear path of causality.” (10)
In the second, “there is no directionality to it. There is no intentionality to it. And there is no subject/object dichotomy.” (10) He continues: “What I’m suggesting is that the unique interpretation is the proper understanding of the zi 自 of ziran 自然. There is an emphasis on the impetus over the effect. Thus, it is not that the people are correcting themselves. Rather, the people are becoming correct, and nobody outside does it to them. It’s just happening. There is a softening of causation from a single impetus deliberateness to more vague multivalent causation.” (10)
The last thing I’ll quote before some final thoughts is an excellent summation of what seems, to me at least, to be the dominant interpretation of the concept of ziran in the English-speaking discourse on Daoism.
“What we are talking about in technical terms is self-causation. The best English term for this kind of self-causation is spontaneity. To understand the idea of zi as spontaneous self-causation, I like to think of the example of a seed. If I take a seed and put it on the desk and say, ‘Grow!’ it will not listen to me, even if I threaten it. I cannot force it to grow. But if I put it in its natural environment (moist, warm soil), it will ziran — it will grow of its own accord. It will grow from its own resources. Then it will connect to its environment, and the objective boundaries of the seed — what we might call its self — will blur in that connection. So you don’t have a clear sense of a discrete, enduring individual here.” (11)
There are some things I like about this interpretation, and there are some limitations to it. I like the emphasis on spontaneous action that one cannot force another to do something, especially something that goes against its nature. But, I think even in this short example, there is a slight contradiction: the seed grows of itself, of its own resources, yet he also suggests that it’s only when the seed is in the proper context and has access to the proper resources that it will of itself grow.
The last point about not having a clear, discrete, individual identity or self is spot-on, but this again works against the seed example. Suppose the seed needs the proper environment to grow on its own. In that case, it isn’t growing independently — not of itself — but it’s growing along with everything else in its environment. So it’s as if the whole environment is orchestrating the action — no one individual is doing anything, not the seed or any other actor. Still, the entirety of the network of relations gives rise to a thing called “seed” when it is removed, separated, or abstracted from its environment.
His example (and he isn’t alone here, I’ve seen similar examples) seems to suggest that the seed, when given the proper resources, will, on its own, grow and then dissolve into the environment as it connects to its environment. I agree with his last statement about the boundaries of the self. Still, I think that “of itself” has a very different meaning than the illustration of the seed implies. But I have a feeling he has more to say about this later in the book, so I am very excited to see where he takes this.