The Logos and the Tao

Richard Ostrofsky
(June, 1997)
If one had to point to a single issue marking the watershed between the
Eastern and Western mind-sets and their resulting civilizations, it would
have to be the attitude toward words and language. Until quite recently,
Oriental thought was characterized by a profound skepticism about the
descriptive power of language. Lao Tzu opens with this warning: “The Tao
(roughly, Way of Nature) that can be told is not the true Tao; the names that
can be named are not the right names. The Nameless is the mother of
Heaven and Earth.” Contrast this Taoist focus on the ineffable with the
religious awe of language that has been destiny for the West: “In the
beginning was the Word (Logos), and the Word was with God, and the
Word was God. And the Word became Flesh and came and dwelt among
us.”
This remarkable merger of concept and substance which opens the
Gospel of John harks back to older Greek and Jewish ideas: For Plato,
everything had its correct name; the ideas for which these stood were more
real than the material instances one could actually see and touch. The idea
of Man or Horse pre-existed all actual men or horses in the Creator’s mind
and surpassed these in perfection, just as the idea of a mathematical circle
pre-exists and surpasses any circle that can be drawn. The Jews, for their
part, had the world begin with a speech-act, a Divine command: In the first
book of Genesis, God says, “Let there be...”, and so it came to pass.
As between the Eastern and Western attitudes toward language, who was
right? Unquestionably, as we know today, language cannot bear the burden
of precision and determination that Western thought, from Plato’s time to
Nietzsche’s, had hoped. Our experience and knowledge of the world cannot
be captured in a net of absolutely True and consistent statements. Lao Tzu
has the right end of it: “The Tao that can be told is not the true Tao.” Words
do not stand for eternal, sharply definable categories, but for fuzzy, man-
made abstractions from ambiguous experience: Lao Tzu is right again: “The
names that can be named are not the right names.” By now, this point is a
common-place: For all the silliness that has gone down in the post-
modernist assault on Reason, its serious core has been this recognition that
the Tao of nature cannot be made to fit the Logos of a techno-industrial
civilization except by ignoring aspects of reality that do not fit the
prevailing intellectual structures.
Yet we must also recognize that if the Western attitude toward language
was in error, that error turned out to be remarkably fruitful, and that it
ultimately proved irresistible to the East as well! Knowledge advances
through the progressive refinement of erroneous theories and inadequate
concepts. The West’s commitment to its theories and concepts launched the
new game of science and finally enabled a more detailed and precise
knowledge than could ever have been possible otherwise. Nor is it clear,
even now, how far articulate knowledge can reach, and what its limits are.
We are still learning, painfully, what language can and cannot do, and how
to avoid or compensate for the errors into which it readily misleads us.
What the intellectual world needs today, perhaps more than anything
else, is a synthesis between the Taoist skepticism and the Judaeo-Hellenic
obsession with language and its pat formulations. As individuals and as a
global society, we must learn to exploit the possibilities of articulate thought
without losing the peace, clarity, subtlety and balance that Lao Tzu tried to
emphasize. The trick is to use language without becoming snow-blind in the
blizzard of language – to keep a sense that beneath all possible arguments,
there is a Way of things that must be sensed and respected. For Lao Tzu
(and Hegel) are surely right that pushing any theory too far, accumulates
potential energy that eventually causes either a sharp recoil or breakdown.
Lao Tzu uses the metaphor of stretching a bow: The trick always is in
knowing when to stop.