Walking the path

Nigel Warburton: From outside Chinese philosophy it seems that balance, and particularly within Daoism, is a crucial concept – it’s the balance of forces, that’s an idea that filters through to the West. Is that accurate, that balance does play a large part in Chinese philosophy?

Michael Puett: It does indeed. And one of the key reasons it’s such a key part of Chinese philosophy is that one of the opening assumptions in China is: Imagine the world as a very messy world of constantly flowing energies, often very different energies and different modalities of energies. And therefore, in this world of constant energies things are endlessly bumping against each other, often in poor ways. And this is particularly bad when you get to, for example, humans, who are also these messy things with tons of different energies going on, interplaying with other messy things with tons of energies (other human beings) and we tend to play off against each other very, very badly.

So, the background to a concern with balance is a sense that in a world where humans are interacting within it, is a world that’s always in danger of conflict – where the messiness is always playing off with other messiness in bad ways, and if that’s your opening concern then one of the things you want to do is to learn to work with these competing forces. You’re not trying to even things out, you’re not trying to marginalise things, you want to work with all of these different forces and connect them in ways that leads to some kind of flourishing. And there, and finally to get to the key term, the notion is that one of the goals you are seeking is to balance these different forces so no one of them is, for any lengthy amount of time, predominant over the others.

That’s really interesting because one model of a balance is two pans with a pivot, and there are only two things to find a point of equilibrium between, but the way you have described that, it sounds like there are many other aspects to this ‘balance’ thing.

Yes! Yes! Many. And this is one of the aspects that I think is often not well understood from the West, because it’s understood – and this part is true – that two of the big divisions that energies can be categorised into is yin and yang. So think of yin as the female