Process & Anarchy

David L. Hall Process and anarchy-A Taoist vision of creativity

The Ruler of the Northern Ocean was Shu (Heedless) the Ruler of the Southern

Ocean was Hu (Sudden), and the Ruler of the Center was Chaos. Shu and Hu

were continually meeting in the land of Chaos, who treated them very well.

They consulted together how they might repay his kindness, and said, 'Men

all have seven orifices for the purpose of seeing, hearing, eating, and breathing,

while this (poor) Ruler alone has not one. Let us try and make them for him.'

Accordingly they dug one orifice in him every day; and at the end of seven days

Chaos died.'

This allegory, which succinctly expresses Taoist sentiments concerning the role

of discursive knowledge in human affairs, no doubt strikes the non-Chinese

mind as somewhat odd because of the solicitude shown for Chaos. Indeed,

James Legge, the British sinologist, whose lack of sympathy with much of

Chinese culture often led him to misunderstand the texts he so admirably

translated, comments on this allegory, "But surely it was better that Chaos

should give place to another state. 'Heedless' and 'Sudden' did not do a bad

work."2

In Legge's defense of the organization of the primordial Chaos we may see

reflected an attitude which is both a cause and a consequence of a fundamental

bias of metaphysical speculation in the Anglo-European tradition. An assump-

tion which has undergirded much of our traditional scientific and theological

understandings of the Universe is that from Chaos, construed as formless

nonbeing or as an unordered given, God fashioned the world through the

ordering activity of Creation. We come to understand our world by articulating

the principles of the order or patterning imposed upon Chaos in the initial

Creative Act. First principles (archai, principia) function as determining sources

of order serving to organize an antecedent irrational surd identified in our

principal cosmogonic myths as "chaos."

It is by no means necessary to accept the metaphysical necessity of an initial

creative act as suggested in our cosmogonic myths. Aristotle did not, and yet

it is he who has provided the locus classicus for our understanding of principles

as determining sources of order. A principle (arch2) is: that from which a

thing can be known; that from which a thing first comes to be, or that at whose

will that which is moved is moved and that which changes change^.^ Principles

account for and establish the order of the world. As principles of knowledge,

beginnings are the origins of thought. As principles of being there are the

sources of origination per se. Beginnings in the political or socialsphere are

due to archai or princeps-those who command. In any of its forms a first

principle functions as a determining source of order.

Chaos is nonrational because it is unprincipled. It is, therefore, an-archic,

without an archi, which means it has no determining source of order. It is,

therefore, without a beginning or origin. Chaos is the indefinite in search of

David L. Hall is Professor of'Philosophy at rhe Universiry o f Texas at El Paso, El Paso, Texas.

Philosophy East and West 28. no. 3. July 1978 0by The University Press of Hawaii All rights reserved.

272 Hall

definition, the unlimited requiring limitation. It is lawless, obeying no rules.

The dread of anarchy, which is so much a part of our cultural heritage, is in

large measure related to the primordial fear of chaos which is its presumed

attendant. The political anarchy which Carlyle found "the hatefullest of

things" is but an expression of "the waste wide Anarchy of Chaos" which

Milton saw tyrannized by the "Anarch old." To be without princes to rule is

but an instance of being without principles to guide, or to be without an ordered

and harmonious cosmos within which to find one's place.

The consequences of our attitude toward chaos are significant: to the extent

that our culture has stressed the importance of reason as a primary means of

promoting access to the world, the concept of creativity has been employed

more often as a means of accounting for the rational structure of the world and

less as a topic to be considered in its own right. And the fact that the "effective

outlook" of our culture over the last three centuries has derived from the

cultural interest of science has guaranteed that the metaphysical investigations

of the concept of creativity have stressed its function as the causal ground for

the principle of sufficient reason.

The instrumental employment of the notion of creativity, and the consequent