Chapter 20

Chapter 20

Renounce knowledge and your problems will end.
What is the difference between yes and no?
What is the difference between good and evil?
Must you fear what others fear?
Nonsense, look how far you have missed the mark!

Other people are joyous,
as though they were at a spring festival.
I alone am unconcerned and expressionless,
like an infant before it has learned to smile.

Other people have more than they need;
I alone seem to possess nothing.
I am lost and drift about with no place to go.
I am like a fool, my mind is in chaos.

Ordinary people are bright;
I alone am dark.
Ordinary people are clever;
I alone am dull.
Ordinary people seem discriminating;
I alone am muddled and confused.
I drift on the waves on the ocean,
blown at the mercy of the wind.
Other people have their goals,
I alone am dull and uncouth.

I am different from ordinary people.
I nurse from the Great Mother’s breasts.

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I infer from the above passage that Lao Tzu might have been a shy person. As occurs with most of the introverts like myself, a shy man tends to feel awkward at a social meeting or party. Lao Tzu was famously known to be a recluse befriending nature, after all? On the other hand, some commentators (Ogangnam, especially) note that this chapter illustrates the existential solitude of a sage. It is well known that “ordinary” people like to depict smarts or geniuses as weirdos. I certainly do not think that Lao Tzu was a math genius because he barely mentions anything about numbers. His insights into nature, human psychology, and leadership were all produced through some type of solitary meditation and observation. His philosophy is far from “calculus of thoughts.” (Of course, whether we can call somebody a genius simply because his ideas or philosophy is based on calculus is disputable. In addition, even though Spinoza wrote the notoriously difficult Ethica based on geometry, I do not have a high appraisal of his books including that one. In my view, Spinoza is merely an old relic of western metaphysics.)

But I do admit the profundity of Lao Tzu’s thoughts. In the times when Lao Tzu wrote these chapters, there was in fact no paper made from trees; there were only some bamboo plates on which to draw some Chinese character strokes with an animal fur brush. His philosophy could not have come about without much thought on the nature of the universe and humans.

OK. Now back to the subject.

Regarding this “existential solitude,” one quote comes to mind.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said:

“A great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

According to Emerson, it is easy to retreat into yourself when you feel that no one understands you (especially when we are teens). It is also easy to try our best to conform to social demands to feel and affirm that we belong in society. These feelings are natural and understandable.

However, according to Emerson, a great man, or a sage, would not resort to either of the two exclusively. He would be able to alternate between the two modes. In addition, ideally, such a person would perfectly meld well with the people around him while remaining at his core a distinct person that he was destined to become, that is, a sole unique person that occupies a humble position in this vastness of the universe. This type of person also coincides with a fearless person depicted by Greene that accepts his unique character as a destiny in the 50th Law.

Maybe Lao Tzu needed some lesson from this great modern thinker, Emerson. However, Emerson’s quote above is actually one of the ideas that I believe can be deduced from the tao te ching.