It’s been a great week in my ancient Chinese philosophy tutorial, sitting around with students talking about Chuang Tzu: what he might have meant in the Inner Chapters and what those chapters might mean in our times.  Since they tend toward a sort of pragmatism, most of the students found the going difficult.  And it is difficult to imagine what a Taoist approach to modern life might be.  Should we just disengage completely, hermit-like?  I don’t think so.  I don’t think that is what either Chuang Tzu or the Tao Te Ching really suggests.  How, then, do we go about detaching ourselves from desires and expectations, the things that get in the way of our opening ourselves to Tao?   How doe we keep oursevles from getting "caught up in things?"

     Generally, I take the sensibility of these books in a cautionary manner.  They are not providing guidebooks for what to do or not to do; rather, they offer more diffuse suggestions for the kinds of questions we might ask ourselves as we move through life.  It is like a voice in the back of the mind asking: is that taking you away from Way?  The famous notion of wu-wei might best be understood as a call to "do less," not literally to "do nothing."

     In any event, it was with these kinds of ideas running through my head that I read an article in the April 16 edition of the New Yorker: John Colapinto, "The Interpreter."  (unfortunately the story is not online, but some pictures are available here)

     It is about a linguist, Dan Everett, who studies a remote tribe in the Amazon, th Piraha.  These people are rather primitive, existing with few of the material goods that many of us take for granted.  In them, Everett finds reason to challenge the Chomskian notion of language, the idea that language is an innate capacity that all humans have and that a kind of Universal Grammar underlies all the world’s languages.  Everett believes that the Piraha, and their language, point to something else: that cultural practices, as well as innate capacities, can fundamentally shape language.  What we do, in other words, can determine how we speak.  This may seem like a fairly uncontroversial point, but it is the stuff of academic warfare.

 I was especially struck with this description of the Piraha:

…the tribe embodies a living-in-the-present ethos so powerful that it has affected every aspect of the people’s lives.  Committed to an existence in which only observable experience is real, the Piraha do not think, or speak, in abstractions – and thus do not use color terms, quantifiers, numbers, or myths.  Everett pointed to the word xibipio as a clue to how the Piraha perceive reality solely according to what exits within the boundaries of their direct experience – which Everett defined as anything that they can see and hear, or that someone living has seen and heard.  "When someone walks around a bend in the river, the Piraha say that the person has not simply gone away but xibipio – ‘gone out of experience,’" Everett said.  "They use the same phrase when a candle flame flickers.  The light ‘goes in and out of experience.’" (pp. 127-130)

     "Living in the moment," of course, is a fairly common cliche associated with Taoism.  "Dwell in the ordinary" Chuang Tzu tells us.  But the Piraha take this to unusual extremes.  And in doing so, they seem to achieve much of what Chuang Tzu seems to be striving for in his critique of epistemology and his skepticism toward language.  The article goes on:

To Everett, the Piraha’s unswerving dedication to empirical reality – he called it the "immediacy-of-experience principle – explained their resistance to Christianity, since the Piraha had always reacted to stories about Christ by asking, "Have you met this man?"  Told that Christ died two thousand years ago, the Piraha would react with much as they did to my using bug repellent [which made no sense to them].  It explained their failure to build up food stocks, since this required planning for a future that did not yet exist…It explained the Piraha’s lack of original stories about how they came into being, since this was a conundrum buried in a past outside the experience of parents and grandparents (p. 130).

     Such a radical living-in-the-present culture frees them from historical controversies and existential anxieties.  But could we do the same, in a modern context?  If the Piraha are closer to a Taoist ideal (and that is debatable), does that just show how far that ideal is from our modern life?