“Our self-perception,” remarked the primatologist, Frans de Waal, “is never animal-free.” Attitudes to animals not only reflect, but afford insight into, perceptions of the human condition. Contrasts in these attitudes, moreover, may crystallise differences in rival conceptions of the good life. This is true, I suggest, in the case of the rival and most abiding moral traditions of China, Confucianism and Daoism, whose classic texts date from the Period of the Warring States (ca. 475 – 221 BCE). Modern discussions of people’s treatment of animals rarely invoke Chinese philosophy or religion, but they might surely benefit from attention to debates between those ancient, but still living traditions.
Struck by the sight of pickled dogs, wriggling frogs and dishes like shredded cat and braised python, visitors to markets or restaurants in today’s China might conclude that concern for the plight of animals is not a priority. If they are familiar with Chinese history, these visitors might construe this lack of concern as a legacy of Confucian tradition. Confucius himself was certainly no animal lover. He scolds a disciple for caring more about a sheep than the propriety of sacrificing it, and when his stables burned down, it’s said that he didn’t ask after the fate of the horses. People distressed by the sight of animal suffering, advises Confucius’ fourth-century BCE follower, Mencius, should simply stay away from the kitchen.
In some contexts, it is true, the etiquette that should govern human relationships will apply to animals too, as when Confucius salutes a hen-pheasant that he passes on a bridge. And Mencius states that, while there can be no love of animals, they should not be treated unkindly. His exclusion of love reflects Confucius’ insistence that there can be no affective, personal engagement with animals. In response to a hermit who advised him to drop out of society, Confucius testily remarked that “We cannot run with the birds and beasts”. Only with other human beings can a person “associate”. This is because genuine association is possible only among beings that recognise themselves as reciprocally related through a shared system of rites and principles.
The contrast between Confucius’ remarks and the tone adopted in the classic Daoist texts is direct and sharp. In the book attributed to the sage, Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu, fl. ca. 300 BCE), nostalgia is expressed for an earlier, more virtuous age when “people lived together with the birds and beasts”. The principles that, for Confucians, determine how people should live, are regarded by Daoists as symptoms of a “fall” from this better age, one in which people were not distracted by an obsession with ritual propriety from attending to “self-cultivation”. Moreover, as a wise old fisherman, unimpressed by Confucius’ emphasis on rites and rules, puts it, these are but “the customs of the times”. Of very bad times, too. For they are times in which life, especially in the towns, has become too complex and frenzied, too much in the grip of the pursuit of material goods, selfish ambitions, and artificial learning. People these days, observes Zhuangzi, are always “scurrying around”, their lives “rushing on like a galloping horse”.
It is only in a fallen society like this that there is any need for the principles and norms of propriety admired by Confucius. That is why they are a symptom of a loss on the part of human beings. The Daodejing (Tao Te Ching, “The Book of the Way and Virtue”) explains what has been lost: only “after the Dao (Way) is lost” does there emerge this anxious concern with “righteousness and ritual propriety”. What has been lost, in effect, is an intuitive and implicit sense for the natural patterns and movement of the cosmos with which the lives of men and women were once in effortless harmony.
A salient product and sign of this loss of the Dao is the practices and attitudes towards animals that, the Daoist texts complain, have become all too familiar in the kind of modern, sophisticated society that had already developed in their own times. Zhuangzi decries the use of “cunning”, technologically advanced methods for trapping and killing animals. These are not simply cruel but, because they are used by people ignorant of animal life, they also cause “disorder” in the natural environment, perhaps disturbing its balance through an excessive hunting of predators. He criticises, too, the way in which trainers of horses force these animals – by bridling, penning, clipping and fettering them – into behaviour that is a perversion of their “inborn nature”. In the book of sayings attributed to another Daoist sage, Liezi (Lieh Tzu), a sparky young boy takes to task the guest of honour at a feast who thanks Heaven for providing, “for the sake of man”, the animals whose flesh they are about to dine on. Practices and attitudes like these, prevalent in the kind of society that Daoists lament, attest in their view to a wider alienation from the natural world. Implicit in them, complains Zhuangzi, is an “arrogant separation of man from [other] creatures of the world”, and a failure any longer “to connect up with the world around [him]”.
Despite what has been called the “primitivist” tone of some of these Daoist remarks, the nostalgia typically expressed in the texts is not one for “a state of nature”, for some Mowgli-like existence in a jungle or wilderness that is so far free from the intrusions and constraints of civilisation. The ideal human community described in the penultimate chapter of the Daodejing is not a primitive one, but a small, simple and self-sufficient agrarian society in which people rear animals, adopt customs, and have the means to write and make “beautiful clothing”. Crucially, however, it is a community not yet subject to the imperatives of technology and economic growth. That’s a main reason why it is not yet a society in which animals have been – in the words of a great admirer of Daoism, Martin Heidegger – reduced to objects for our “use, embellishment and entertainment”.
It would be wrong, as well, to interpret Daoist talk of an “arrogant separation” from other creatures to mean that humankind is just one more species of animal, no different in essence from other species with which, as modern environmentalists like to remind us, we share so much of our DNA. True, human beings are, for Daoists, subject to the same natural processes – to the rhythms of Yin and Yang – as other creatures, many of which, moreover, have an intelligence and desires comparable to our own. That’s why we may sometimes learn from animals – from, for example, the fish that live together in a crowded pond, but without friction and conflict. But it is equally important to emphasise differences. Ignorance of these, Zhuangzi points out, is often responsible for people’s clumsy or cruel treatment of animals – like that of the king who, blind to a captured bird’s own nature and needs, pampered it to death. At a deeper level, human beings are unique in their abilities not only to have an understanding of the Way, but to “lose the Way”, to fracture that natural harmony with the cosmos in which other species live – unless, of course, they are prevented from doing so by human interference. Crucially, as we’ll see in a moment, human beings also have a distinctive mission within the cosmos that sets them apart from other species.
The nostalgia expressed in Daoist texts is for an age when people were more “spontaneous” or “natural” than they have since become, when their “inborn nature” was allowed to develop and flourish. The Chinese term often rendered as “spontaneity” is ziran, which more literally translates as something like “self-so-ness”. It evokes the idea of a person whose actions, thoughts and feelings are “flowing, unforced, uncontrived”, and not determined from outside. The idea is epitomised by the effortless swimmer, described in the Zhuangzi, who “goes with the flow”, without forcing a “course of his own” on the water. The life of a “spontaneous” man or woman is not governed by rigid purposes or idées fixes: instead, it is a life of supple responsiveness to a surrounding world that is perceived calmly and lucidly. In being spontaneous, the Daodejing explains, a person is following the Dao, since the Dao is held to “model itself on what is natural” or “self-so”. This is why spontaneity is a virtue, for the paramount Daoist imperative is to calibrate one’s own life with the Dao.
A mark of the spontaneous person is a fellow-feeling for, and a desire to relate to, young children and birds and beasts – beings whose natural existence is innocent of contrivance, fixed ideas and the shackles of ambition. Liezi, it is reported, “served food to his pigs as if they were human and treated all beings as equally his kin”. He hoped, as well, that the birds and animals he welcomed into his garden would “regard him as one of themselves”. The association with animals that, as we heard, Confucius ruled out is, for the Daoist sages, a significant dimension of an authentically human life.
There is a further dimension of this life that has important implications for our relationship to animals. Daoists shared with Confucians, and other schools of ancient Chinese thought, the conviction that human beings have a special role in maintaining harmony in the cosmos. This was one of the functions of performing rites, playing music, magic and many other human activities. In the case of Daoism, this conviction takes the form of arguing that the moral mission of human beings is to respect and cultivate the “self-so-ness” of all beings, animals included. Just as the “mother” or well-spring of the world – the Dao – gives to each being its nature, so it is the task of the virtuous person, in the words of the Daodejing, “to support the myriad creatures in their natural condition (ziran)”. In this way, the sage assists the Dao in the promotion and maintenance of harmony.
It is this thinking that informs Zhuangzi’s denunciation of the horse-trainer. By distorting the animal’s “true inborn nature”, the man is betraying his own humanity, his distinctive responsibility or mission as a human being. A similar point is being made, as well, in Liezi’s tale of the boy who chided the visiting dignitary. By pretending that animals exist for the sake of human satisfaction, the man was failing to recognise – let alone to honour – the fact that animals have “a nature and purpose of their own, not one engineered for our benefit”. The task in which the dignitary failed was that of being properly human.
In some Daoist texts, this type of failure is not confined to people’s attitudes to sentient beings. Some of the craftsmen admired by Zhuangzi are praised precisely because of the way in which they honour the intrinsic, “self-so” nature of the materials, like wood, with which they work. If the “inborn heavenly nature” of a tree makes it unsuitable for his work, explains a maker of bell-stands, he will leave it alone. In the later, third-century CE, writings of the Celestial Masters school, a concern for the integrity of animals is extended to the wider natural world, constituting one of the earliest statements of an “environmental ethic”. It is hard to avoid a comparison, here, with Heidegger’s notion of Gelassenheit – “releasement” – as our appropriate stance towards the world: for what this notion enjoins is that we “let things be” what they are, instead of experiencing them in terms of their function within our purposive schemes.
In a line quoted on a thousand animal rights websites, the Czech author Milan Kundera remarked that “humanity’s true moral test, its fundamental test … consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals”. It is a test, he quickly adds, that humanity has comprehensively failed. These are words that would have resonated with the Daoist sage. In our treatment of animals – caging them, turning them into circus performers, force-feeding them, rearing them in factories, experimenting on them, “genetically sculpting” them – we clearly and criminally fail this “fundamental test”.
For Daoists, the crime does not consist in a violation of “rights” or “principles”. The obsessive rhetoric of rights and principles – like the Confucian one of ritual propriety – is, as we saw, a sure sign in their view that we are no longer “on the Way”. What has been failed, rather, is a test of de (te), of human virtue, of the qualities that make for a good and authentically human life. The circus animal trainer, the goose liver paste producer, the broiler factory owner, the genetic engineer of new species, the technician who blinds rabbits in a cosmetics laboratory – these are people, as indeed are the rest of us who are complicit in their work, whose relationship to animals contradicts the Daoist understanding of human virtue. For it is not a relationship that could be embraced and engaged in by someone who has a lucid appreciation of the lives of animals, who responds spontaneously to this perception of their needs and natures, and who accepts the Dao-given role of honouring and protecting the integrity of the other creatures with whom he or she shares the world. It is a very different relationship, certainly, from the one enjoyed by Liezi and Zhuangzi in their communion with pigs, fish, and the birds and beasts that visit the garden.
Mencius, recall, advised those who are squeamish about animal suffering to stay away from the kitchen. The Daoist response to this advice would, I’m confident, have anticipated a remark by another eloquent modern spokesman for animals – J M Coetzee. He imagines how very disturbing the sight and smell of the kitchen must be to someone from a culture where meat-eating is unknown, for this person would surely be struck by the similarity between the flesh being prepared for the pot and his or her own flesh, human flesh. It is important, Coetzee continues, that “not everyone should lose this way of seeing the kitchen”. His aim is not, I think, to make a plea for vegetarianism, though someone able to see the kitchen in the way that Coetzee urges may indeed feel compelled to avoid meat. His purpose, rather – one that extends well beyond the kitchen – is to encourage us to recall, retrieve and respect an older, more innocent way of relating to animals, to creatures that share with us much more than the flesh they and we are made of. Like a human being, an animal has a nature, a “self-so-ness”, and in ignoring, suppressing or perverting this we betray our own nature. Animals have their own goods. These may be very different from the human good but, if the Daoist is right, recognition and regard for them is an aspect of the virtuous human life, of being “on the Way”.