In conjunction with the translation I read of Daodejing, I read an essay by the translator titled The Minimally Discernible Position. I think the essay is longer than the text of Daodejing, but for all his verbosity and manifold explorations, Brook Ziporyn contrives near the essay’s conclusion to succinctly express his titular minimally discernible position:
“I offer here the A/B analysis as the minimally discernible position that can accommodate precisely this lack of consensus. It is a general structure that can apply to whatever referent one might construe to be the subject matter: whether what is at issue is ontological or metaphysical claims, political advice, personal health and hygiene, long life and possible immortality, instructions from a deity, managerial skill, theories of natural process, normative ethics or meta-ethical critique, the A/B structure has its application in that sphere. Thus we can leave unresolved the question of what the “actual” subject matter might be.”
-Brook Ziproyn, Interpreting the Daodejing: “The Minimally Discernible Position” (Supplement to Liveright Edition, 2023)
The A/B structure to which Ziporyn refers is a study in contrast, not dichotomy. This is a core difference between eastern and western philosophy (at risk of horribly overgeneralizing): western philosophy, especially where it touches the Abrahamic faiths, emphasizes contrast and tension between opposites, like the binary of good and evil, while eastern philosophy invokes a gentler version of the binary. Separating into pairs still exists, but it is more like connected ends of a spectrum than polar opposites. The idea does exist in western philosophy, too – it reminds me a bit of Aristotle’s “virtue is the mean between two vices.” However, the eastern approach, or at least Ziporyn’s interpretation of Daodejing’s approach, is subtler. It casts A as some desirable state, and B as the undesirable state contrasted with it; however, Daodejing’s insight is to show that A can arise only through B, and that sometimes B is more desirable in its way than A.
Ziporyn deploys numerous examples, images, and analogies to explain this notion, including some that are somewhat vulgar and disturbing (and repeated like a motif throughout the essay), but the one which makes the most sense to me is that of carving. Imagine you have a desired form – a spoon, perhaps – which is your A, and that you have a block of raw material – wood, in this case – from which to carve the spoon, which is the B. The insight of the inversion present in the Daodejing, and which is captured by the minimally discernible position articulated by Ziporyn, is that the raw material, the B, is more value than the desired form, the A, because the A arises from the B. Furthermore, that the very pursuit of the A can undermine it in its zealotry, hence the connection to Aristotle’s mean between to vices. If I were to establish a minimally discernible position from Daodejing, it would only take me one word, not twenty thousand: moderation. Though that is, of course, hugely reductionist.
Daodejing is a bit of a strange book to read; unlike other books of philosophy I’ve read, it doesn’t present an immediately coherent concept or notion to explore. What it does explore, it explores through allusion, metaphor, and implication more than direct discussion. As we discussed in our review for it, reading it is more like reading a collection of poems from the same time, place, and school of thought, but not necessarily by the same person or about the same thing, which is probably true to how the book was originally assembled. In his essay, Ziporyn repeatedly points out the lack of consensus through over two thousand years of commentary by Chinese and other sources on Daodejing, with an awareness, I think, of the irony of making his own contribution to that body of nonconsensual literature; though he asserts his minimally discernible position in the style of the persuasive essay, without explicitly acknowledging counterarguments, the nature of that position, and of the original text, exposes this to an ironic undercurrent. One of the conclusions of the A/B structure is that the more certain something seems, the less certain it ought to be.
Perhaps, then, the better analogy would be, not to Aristotle’s idea of morality, but to stoic philosophy, for Daodejing expresses ways of being which are open to interpretation, application, and adaptation, rather than prescriptions and assertions. Ziporyn’s final sentence expresses this well: “the claim that there are sometimes some things some people value or attend to less than other things, and that these can often get entrenched into rigid habits of exclusivist attention and valuation—a point that is almost too trivial to state clearly, perhaps even strictly tautological, maybe even an ineluctable condition of possibility of any experience at all.” I do not recommend reading his essay before you’ve read Daodejing, for all he includes extensive excerpts from its key chapters to illustrate his points, but it is an interesting exploration to further your thinking after first exposing yourself to Daodejing’s insights.
IGC Publishing 