The Semantics of Taoist Paradox: Part 2

When we last left off (here's part 1), I’d just explained that Taoist paradoxes flout the Gricean maxim of Manner by being deliberately obscure. In this segment I’ll talk about how we process that and what the point of it all is. Let’s start with another example from the Tao:

2) The master travels all day without leaving home.

While this statement at first seems paradoxical, we can make some sense of it if we think about it. This requires us to discard stereotypical word meanings and create a new semantic associations between two concepts. In 2), the paradox is based on the standard interpretation of “travel” in conjunction with the standard interpretation of “home.” “Home” is generally a fixed physical location, while “travel” describes the action of moving from one fixed location to another, generally on a large scale. If you interpret the sentence literally, those two typical interpretations bump up against one another. However, our Gricean Maxims tell us that the statement is meaningful… Great. So if we want to figure out what they actually meant, we’re going to have to shift the meaning of one of our contradictory definitions. While our original definitions of “travel” and “home” are the most stereotypical, they are by no means the only way in which they can be interpreted. We could redefine the scope of “travel” to make it more local, and decide that if the master has a large enough house, he travels all day by puttering from room to room. Or he could be “traveling” on the internet or in his memories. Or we could reinterpret the word “home” and think something like “mobile home” and picture him driving around all day in his bathrobe. But given the context of the text, these resolutions to the paradox fail different Gricean Maxims. The Maxim of relation tells us that the statement should be relevant, which in this case means that the statement should impart some form of philosophical wisdom, and none of the aforementioned resolutions appear to do so (not that I have anything against RV’s). A reinterpretation that may lie more in line with a Taoist thought relies on defining “home” as a state of mind. So we could reinterpret (2) to mean something like “The master feels at home wherever he travels,” i.e., “The master is at home within himself.”

3) He who defines himself does not know himself.

By applying the same maxims we used in 2) to 3), we are forced to reinterpret the meaning of “knowledge” to resolve the apparent paradox. Definitions are often considered to be an adequate basis for knowledge: if the statement refutes this, then we have to conclude we are talking about a different type of knowledge, “self-knowledge,” perhaps. If we take this interpretation, then we can conclude something like relying on labels doesn’t really tell you anything about who you are. That doesn’t sound so bad, but if this was what Long-ears wanted to say, why complicate things? What is the point in concealing meaning in a paradox that has to be unpacked? Why clothe all your messages in maxim violations?

One reason why this is a useful teaching method is that whenever we come across a maxim violation, our language processor focuses on it and raises our awareness of the entire discourse. We need to put more cognitive effort into processing it, and are forced to create our own meaning out of apparent nonsense. I’m sure you came up with your own interpretations to the last couple of examples that were nothing like mine. This internal process out to be a very effective teaching method; a student who comes to their own understanding of material values and understands it more than a student who is given facts to memorize in a lecture hall. If they’re willing to put the work in, that is, and not just give it up as a bunch of ancient nonsense. Intentionally using paradox is a way to give readers of the Tao Te Ching direct role in creating meaning from the text.

Another reason Taoist texts use paradox as a teaching tool is because it naturally emphasizes fluidity, one of the underlying tenets of the philosophy. The Tao Te Ching consciously attempts to get its readers to abandon rigidly held beliefs, and reading its contents constantly forces readers to discard stereotypical word definitions in their search for coherency. Apparent paradoxes are still paradoxical at face value, which illustrates meaning is itself fluid, and that rigid beliefs, like stereotypical definitions, only lead to further contradiction.

The fact that Taoist paradoxes can be resolved at all relies on the fluid interpretation of what linguists call open-class words (nouns, most verbs, adjectives, and adverbs). These are words that are added to the language freely, and whose meaning can change more easily over the time. The words that make up the remainder of the language are members of the closed-class (prepositions, determiners, auxilaries, and the like), which are resistant to change and are less open to free interpretation. Paradoxes based on these words are not so easily resolvable. Compare the resolvable paradox presented in 4) to the logical contradiction in 5):

4) The master stays behind; that is why she is ahead.
5) The tall man is not the tall man.

In 4), the paradox is based on the definitions of “behind” and “ahead.” We can redefine “ahead” to mean “better off,” and “behind” to mean, “not in front,” to get a meaning like, “The master is better off for not striving to be in front all the time.” In 5), however, the paradox is based on the closed-class words “is” and “not,” which are much harder to reinterpret.

So to summarize, Taoist teachings manipulate Gricean Maxims to get readers to resolve apparent paradox by reinterpreting the definitions of open-class words. By intentionally ignoring the Maxims of Manner, they force the readers to become more cognitively involved by generating their own meaning, which in turn reminds them of the fluid nature of words. This whole approach is itself a paradox, in that teaching with contradictions and obfuscation actually creates a clearer understanding of Taoist principles than stating them in a straightforward manner would. As they say in the Tao Te Ching:

We work with being, but non-being is what we use.

On a final note, the irony of pinning down a fluid philosophy using linguistic analysis is not lost on me. However, if I’ve done it in the right spirit, I think Old Long-ears would approve.