Chapter 5

Chapter 5

Heaven and Earth are impartial;
they treat all of creation as straw dogs.
The Master doesn’t take sides;
she treats everyone like a straw dog.

The space between Heaven and Earth is like a bellows;
it is empty, yet has not lost its power.
The more it is used, the more it produces;
the more you talk of it, the less you comprehend.

It is better not to speak of things you do not understand.

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“Heaven and Earth are impartial; they treat all of creation as straw dogs”

As Greene notes in the 50th Law, the universe couldn’t care less about your fate. The world is indeed a brutal place. Even when you are luckily exempted from the brutal violence of natural disasters that strike others, there is still a problem: the creeping boredom. David Foster Wallace once said that one that can take care of boredom can achieve almost anything. Boredom seems to be a sign that you are living in prosperity. Greene writes that the ancient Roman aristocrats were bored, so they amused themselves with morally depraved entertainments. Even when things are going well with us, it is as if our unconscious would create new problems like boredom to make us suffer. The starving or suffering people that are of interest to Laozi, if they suddenly prospered with riches, might have become Letzter Mensch posited by Nietzsche.

It is better not to speak of things you do not understand.

When Wittgenstein proclaimed that there is nothing we can talk about ethics a priori, Karl Popper spoke against the idea and stressed the role of a philosopher. Perhaps Wittgenstein is one of the few thinkers that agree with Laozi on this point. That we can hardly talk about the metaphysical.