ASEBL Journal – Volume 10 Issue 1, January 2014
production of things” (CN: 129), and does not imply a “blanket condemnation of
intervention” (CN: 128). Indeed, Cooper recognises, such intervention is not only
consistent with Daoism but a fundamental part of it, by virtue of the importance of
gardens to that tradition. Gardens, he notes, “suggest that a simplistic opposition of
nature and culture needs replacing by more nuanced distinctions” and “symbolise a
wider co-dependence of human creative activity and the natural world” (CN: 138).
Yet while Cooper claims not to be championing “an existence that pre-dated human
settlement and agriculture,” he does desire “to preserve an untroubled form of peasant
life” (CN: 120) – and this is surely drawing an arbitrary line too far back in time. In
addition to the questionable suitability of the descriptor “untroubled,” it is imprecise
to claim that “Daoist interventions in nature – patient, reflective, modest, responsive
to the materials ‘stolen’ – bear little resemblance to the interventions of modern
industrial technology” (CN: 129); the real dividing line is not at all clean, at least not
if the Daoist interventions are exemplified by agrarianism. As Jared Diamond has
recounted in his book Collapse (2005), plenty of agrarian societies – Easter Islanders,
Mayans, Greenland Norse – destroyed themselves by decimating available resources,
often in the course of immodest vanity projects, while some modern businesses –
including oil and mining companies – display a laudably sustainable comportment
towards the environment. Cooper insists that “the Daoist concern is not to pass
judgement on human history, but to decide which kinds of intervention by a person
are consonant with being ‘on the Way’” (CN: 128) – but it is more accurate to
conclude that he has done the former rather than the latter.
6. Two idealisms.
At the root of Cooper’s idealism about agrarian life is an idealism – or
“perspectivism” – of the philosophical kind. “For the Daoist,” he explains, “there is
nothing privileged about a scientific account of the world” (CN: 88), rather “the sage’s
attitude towards people, beliefs and aims . . . is one of irony,” such that “even when
the belief or aim is the sage’s own, he recognizes it for what it is – a component in a
perspective of the world that should not pretend to objective correctness” (CN: 77-78)
or to “capture things as they objectively are” (CN: 87).
Cooper caveats this claim in two ways, both of which are Kantian in spirit and neither
of which is very mitigating. First, he claims that the world is real even though it
doesn’t exist beyond a person’s interpretations.1 This definitional manoeuvre is
unconvincing – it is like describing sparkling wine as champagne, to use an analogy of
Cooper’s own from an earlier work (2002: 124). Second, Cooper claims that the world
is real in the sense that subjective experience arises from a transcendently mysterious
source, and that this source is the Dao (CN: 24). This manoeuvre is unconvincing
because it undermines Cooper’s attempt to write about his chosen topic: if the Dao is
transcendently mysterious, it is ineffable. Granted, Cooper has tried to address this
problem elsewhere (2002: 286-96), but seemingly it still weighs on him; at the start of
the book he wonders whether, when it comes to convergence, “writing about nature is
the last form such a relationship should take” (CN: 8) (and we might add that
publishing books is surely an activity heavily insinuated into the fabric of modernity
which Cooper claims to reject).
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