I feel George Grant is in lots of respects a Daoist. I don’t assume he considered himself as a Daoist. However key components of his viewpoint appear very Daoist to me.
For individuals who don’t know Grant: he was a Twentieth-century Canadian thinker finest recognized for his Lament for a Nation, a e-book which claimed that the thought of Canada was to stay an outpost of the British Empire in North America, and thereby resist the affect of the USA – an concept which he thought had been misplaced. (In these concepts he was taking cues from John Watson, within the stream of Canadian Hegelianism.) I’ve little love for that view of Canada, so it’s not my favorite a part of Grant’s thought. However there’s much more to Grant that I discover far more thrilling.
Particularly, studying Grant’s lesser-known Time as Historical past, I’m struck by the very deep affinities the e-book has with the Daoism of Laozi and particularly Zhuangzi. To my information Grant doesn’t say something about these affinities himself, and should not even know them. He could have been not directly influenced by Daoism by means of Heidegger (who tried to translate the Daodejing, although he by no means revealed it), however he doesn’t say something about that affect. In Grant’s personal evaluation he’s a Christian Platonist, and I feel that evaluation is correct – but it surely appears a very Daoist type of Christian Platonism.
Particularly: Grant laments the fashionable emphasis on progress. He quotes Marx’s declare that the philosophers have solely interpreted the world however the level is to alter it, and contrasts it to an historic Greek view:
Greek heroes have been summoned to be resolute for noble doing, however their deeds weren’t considered altering the very construction of what’s, however as executed moderately for the sake of bringing into immediacy the fantastic thing about a trusted order, at all times there to be appropriated by means of no matter perils. (Time as Historical past 24)
Grant sees this distinction mirrored inside Christian theology: a distinction he attracts from Martin Luther, between the “theology of glory” and the “theology of the cross”. In response to Robert Sibley, Grant takes the “theology of glory” as a essentially trendy angle, one he laments, which “implies that motion should be future-directed in that people have their fulfilment not within the current however sooner or later.” (Sibley, Northern Spirits 139) The “theology of the cross” rejects that future orientation. In Time as Historical past, Grant laments, “Why was it our future to boost up ‘prepared’ and ‘orientation to the long run’ in order that they’ve turn out to be common methods of males’s current?” (28) Grant, it seems, desires to redirect us away from the long run to the current second – identical to the Daoist-influenced traditions of recent mindfulness meditation.
The analogy to Daoism goes deeper. Grant tells us that for “the ancients” – from each Athens and Jerusalem – “thought was at its top, not in motion, however in what they referred to as a ardour… In trendy language we could weakly describe this by saying that thought was lastly a receptivity.” (Time as Historical past 60-1) The receptivity viewpoint, for Grant, sees artwork not as creation, however as imitation of the attractive. (62)
It’s this phrase receptivity that I feel is most deeply evocative of the Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu, on the older Wade-Giles spelling), the troublesome and enigmatic early Daoist textual content. (Though the textual content most likely has a number of authors, it’s handy, conventional and nonetheless widespread to discuss with the textual content as having the one creator Zhuangzi, so I’ll achieve this right here.)
A core moral and psychological idea in Zhuangzi is xū 虛 – which, Chris Fraser notes, can have connotations of vacancy, insubstantiality, indeterminateness… and receptiveness. The type of receptiveness that Zhuangzi advocates, in a means that Fraser calls radical, appears very a lot in sympathy with receptivity as Grant approaches it. Contemplate this key passage in Zhuangzi’s inside chapters:
Don’t be the incarnation of a reputation; don’t be a storehouse of plans; don’t undertake affairs; don’t be a grasp of information. Establish totally with the limitless and roam within the sign-less. Exhaust what you obtain from Heaven with none considered acquire. Simply be xū, that’s all. The last word particular person’s use of the guts is sort of a mirror, neither welcoming nor escorting, responding with out storing. So he can overcome issues with out being harmed. (Zhuangzi 7/31–33)
Right here persons are praised for being xū within the sense that they let the world act on them, and replicate the world again on itself in response – once they act, it’s as a result of they’re acted on. Reflecting the world, like a mirror, is the other of attempting to alter it. As Robert Meynell had put it in his thesis on Grant, within the premodern world “the cosmos moved us; we didn’t transfer the cosmos.” So likewise Zhuangzi advises: “let your coronary heart wander in plainness, merge your qì 氣 (very important power) with the vastness, comply with together with how issues are in themselves, making no room for the non-public, and the world shall be so as” (7/10–11).
So I feel each Grant and Zhuangzi are advising us: allow us to human beings be moved by nature (tiān 天), moderately than attempting to maneuver it. Allow us to be receptive to it, let it act on us, allow us to replicate it. Allow us to not attempt to change the character of the world, allow us to not attempt to make progress, however moderately act in conformance with nature to assist it notice itself, imitate the wonder that’s already there. Allow us to not orient ourselves to the long run, as a substitute seeing eternity in every second.
Grant doesn’t ever discuss with Daoism, so far as I’m conscious; I don’t assume he ever studied it. There’s some chance of oblique affect, since Grant was influenced by Martin Heidegger, who did research Daoism in some depth with out publishing on it. However extra essential than the query of affect, right here, is the resemblance throughout these thinkers in very totally different occasions and traditions. Grant and Zhuangzi look far more like one another than like trendy concepts of progress.
