Tai Chi Journal

Knowing contentment vs. taking it to the limit

I said in What is the tao (Part 4) that the Taoist idea of "knowing when to stop" or "knowing contentment" is quite important. In fact, I think it has much in common with certain Christian ideas about chastity. As long as chastity is thought of as meaning "to experience things, all things, respectfully and to drink them in only when we are ready for them," and not just a synonym for sexual abstention, it is a way to the same "contentment" as following the tao.

That definition of chastity comes from Catholic priest Ronald Rolheiser, writing in The Shattered Lantern. I discuss it further in this post I made to another blog of mine.

It occurs to me that we in America today have gone to the opposite extreme. Instead of chastity, we have developed a "take-it-to-the-limit" culture. In somebody's apt phrase, we act as if we want to "live fast, die young, and leave a beautiful corpse."

But, given what I said in earlier posts on the nature of the tao, we, as heirs of Platonic thought, could have done little else.

Take, say, Plato's ideas about an observable quality of certain material objects: roundness. Nothing in this world is absolutely, perfectly round, he said, but there is a Form or Idea of Roundness on a higher metaphysical plane. It (in our parlance) takes the quality of roundness "to the absolute limit."

Ditto, Plato's highest Idea, the Form of the Good. It takes goodness to the limit.

That which doesn't take roundness, or goodness, or whatever-it-is "to the limit," Plato basically said, suffers from a deficit of intelligibility ... or, more than that, a deficit of reality itself.

And we inherit that to-the-limit notion in our culture today. In fact, we've long had a take-it-to-the-limit culture in the West. That explains why we've also favored "thou shalt not" religions. It's why our God has been called the Grand Old Disapprover.

For if we are to take our lives to the limit, we need to be clear on what the limits are.

But now the hold of the Grand Old Disapprover over us has, for many people, been weakened by cultural change. Lots of people don't believe in God, or at least, not all that strongly. The venerable "thou shalt nots" don't much constrain them. They (in the 1960's expression) cheerfully let it all hang out. They act as if they have no shame (see this post in my other blog).

If they had a sort of "inner chastity" — an instinct to "to experience things, all things, respectfully and to drink them in only when ... ready for them" — the missing "thou shalt nots" wouldn't make all that much difference. Taking it to the limit would not be the watchword of their lifestyle.

The Taosim of the Lao-Tzu or Tao Te Ching is a prescription for "inner chastity": knowing contentment, knowing when to stop. It promotes the opposite of taking it to the limit, and it does so without resorting to a bunch of "thou shalt nots." I think we in the West really need something like it just about now.

posted by eric @ 1:16 PM