Philosophical Daoism is sometimes said to imply a position wherein dào is ineffable (from the Latin ineffābilis)—that it is not expressible or describable in words. What this means is actually ambiguous. And this is leaving aside the complex philosophical issues to do with the very concept of ineffability itself. I’ll focus on the possibilities that I mentioned in class.

First, the position may be that dào—taken to mean that which is responsible for the overall, underlying pattern of the universe (see the Glossary in Readings), or maybe more grandiosely, ultimate reality—is ineffable. It is impossible to give a proper representation of it using words. That this is a possible way in which the term is used in, say, the Daodejing, is not controversial (see e.g., Chapter 25; the same chapter expresses a reservation with calling it “dào”). But while this reading surely captures something of Philosophical Daoism, it doesn’t quite do sufficient justice to the passages about dào in the more usual sense as referring to the proper way for individuals to live their lives and communities to organize their affairs, which, as I have urged as a larger interpretive assumption about the early Chinese philosophical debates, was supposed to be the main issue of contention (see A. C. Graham, Disputers of the Tao, 25).

But could it be that for the Philosophical Daoists, dào in the more usual sense of the proper way to live is (also) ineffable? If the answer is yes, then what we are saying is that there is something ineffable about the proper way to live. Thinking of the Daoist position this way explains their rejection of the Mohist emphasis on doctrine or guiding discourse (yán), and by implication, their skepticism regarding the status of discursive reason as such is applied to the question regarding the proper way to live. So the Mohists, and to an extent, the Confucians as well, thought that living well, following dào is a matter of knowing and applying the right guiding discourse, i.e., knowing and applying the shì/fēi distinctions encoded by the ‘names’ (míng) that make up the discourse. The Philosophical Daoists now counter that the well lived life is no such thing. There no guiding discourse the knowing and application of which issues in living well. But there is a more radical and a more modest way to understand what’s going on here.

The modest way to understand what’s going on is that dào (in the usual sense of the proper way to live) is pragmatically ineffable. Attempting to live well by knowing and applying a guiding discourse is self practically defeating; living well requires that we do other than attempt to know and apply a discourse. Note that if dào is pragmatically ineffable, then it might still be possible to give a proper description of what it means for someone to live well, perhaps even down to a series of rules that, had someone actually followed them, would have resulting in his living well. It’s just that practically speaking, you can’t actually ‘follow’ them by consciously follow them. This is less mysterious than it might appear at first sight. We might be able to give an accurate description of what it means for someone to be spontaneous such that someone whose behavior fits that description is spontaneous. But you can’t actually be spontaneous by consciously following a series of steps derived from that description.

The more radical way, in contrast, posits that the ineffability of dào (in the usual sense of the proper way to live) is not just a practical or pragmatic matter. One way this might go is if it turns out the Philosophical Daoists, Zhuangzi included, thought that the proper way to live involves doing something or other (contemplating, experiencing, being merged into, whatever) with respect to the ineffable dào (that which is responsible for the the overall, underlying pattern of the universe, ultimate reality, etc.). Alternatively (and relatedly), it might be that living well involves coming to be in a state that has an effable phenomenology. It’s not that we simply can’t talk about it—we can say stuff about the experience, but ultimately, there is an element that eludes further description. The example suggested in class was the experience of seeing a particular color. We can say that we are in such an experience (seeing red), but the experience cannot be had or approximated by understanding true description. The only qualification is that we might be able to describe the conditions under which we will reliably have that experience—I can’t describe what the experience of seeing red is like to you in a way that will allow you to replicate that experience, but I can tell you how, if you put yourself in a certain set of conditions, you will have the experience of seeing red. So even on this account, the ineffability of dào might well go together with the pragmatic usefulness of words.