“the hangover cure” in the late sixties and early seventies. During this period the Los Angeles Times reviewed his books and described Watts as “perhaps the foremost Western interpreter of Eastern thought.” He spoke regularly at colleges, seminar centers, and progressive churches across the country. The Sunday radio programs were by that time recorded in the field instead of at the studios of KPFA, and his early radio style of presentation gave way to a dynamic speaking style that earned him a reputation as a modern philosopher/entertainer. Alan Watts passed away in 1973 in the midst of writing a companion volume to The Way of Zen on Taoism.
Recently, when I began to select original live recordings to re-introduce radio audiences to my father’s spoken works, many of his later talks with generally Taoist themes stood out as excellent examples of his mature philosophy. It was apparent that he felt comfortable with a view of the world which is “of itself so,” and not the construct of a personified ultimate reality. The wisdom of working with the course and current of nature to solve the problems of ecological balance also appealed to his sensibilities, and he spoke of the “organism/environment” as “more nearly us than I.”
The Tao of Philosophy is a literary adaptation of talks selected to introduce the new “Love of Wisdom” series to today’s audiences. The following chapters provide rich examples of the way in which the philosophy of the Tao is as contemporary today as it was when it flourished in China thousands of years ago. Perhaps most significantly, these selections offer modern society a clearer understanding of what it will take for a successful reintegration of humans in nature.
We begin with a foreword written in July of 1953, entitled “On Philosophical Synthesis.” The contrast between the style of this earlier article and the following chapters reveals the transformation Watts underwent as he moved from the academic environment, in which these questions were first raised, to the personal experience, in which they were resolved. For as his close friend, poet Elsa Gidlow, wrote of his growing into the spirit of the Tao:
... it transformed him as he allowed it to permeate his being, so that the reserved, somewhat uptight young Englishman, living overmuch in his head, in his mature years became an outgoing, spontaneously playful, joyous world sage. He believed that a widespread absorption of the profound wisdom of Taoism could similarly transform the West.
—Mark Watts
1995, San Anselmo, California
Foreword
On Philosophical Synthesis
In many respects the formal, academic philosophy of the West has come to a dead end, having confined itself to a method of inquiry which compels it to move in a vicious circle. This is especially true in epistemology, which, because it involves the whole work of self-knowledge, is really the central problem of philosophy. As the West understands it, epistemology is really the task of trying to “think thought”—to construct words about words about words—since philosophical thinking is, for us, not a changing but a verbalization of experience.
The inquiring mind is perennially fascinated with the problem of the mind’s own nature and origins—not only to know just by way of information what knowing is, but also to employ such information for the greater control of the knower, for is it not frequently said that the problem of modern man is to be able to control himself as effectively as he can control his environment?
But there is a basic contradiction in the attempt of reason to transcend itself. To know the knower, to control the controller, and to think thought implies a circular and impossible situation, like the effort to bite one’s own teeth. It is for this reason that modern logical philosophy tends to dismiss such inquiries as “metaphysical and meaningless” and to confine philosophy to the investigation of relatively pedestrian problems of logic and ethics. This situation has arisen in the West because, for us, “to know” really means “to control”; that is, to see how events may be fitted to consistent orders of words and symbols so that we may predict and govern their course. But this mania for control leads ultimately to a barren confusion, because we ourselves are by no means separated from the environment we are trying to control. Western man has been able to pursue this mania only so far because of his acute feeling of individual isolation, of the separation of his “I” from all else. Thus, in philosophy, in technology, and in the whole ordering of our society, we run into the ancient problem of Quis custodiet custodies?—who guards the guard, polices the policeman, plans the planner, and controls the controller? The logical end of all this is the totalitarian state of George Orwell’s 1984, the nightmare of mutual espionage.
On the other hand, such major Oriental philosophies as the Vedanta, Buddhism, and Taoism arise in cultures far less concerned with controlling the world, and in which the whole notion of the dominance of the universe by man (the conscious ego) seems palpably absurd. For all these philosophies it is a first principle that the seeming separateness of the ego from the world, so that it could be its own controller, is an illusion. Individual consciousness did not contrive itself and, not being sui generis (un-born, anutpanna), can never be the directive source of life.
Thus, for Oriental philosophy, knowledge is not control. It is rather the “sensation”—the vivid realization—that “I” am not this individualized consciousness alone, but the matrix from which it arises. This knowledge consists, not in a verbal proposition, but in a psychological change, similar to that which occurs in the cure of a psychosis. One in whom this change has come to pass does not attempt to control the world, or himself, by the efforts of his own will. He learns the art of “letting things happen,” which is no mere passivity but, on the contrary, a creative technique familiar to the activity of many artists, musicians, and inventors in our own culture, whereby skill and insight are found to be the fruits of a certain “dynamic” relaxation.
It is obvious that a philosophy, a wisdom, which offers deliverance from the vicious circle of “controlling the controller” is of immense value to cultures, like our own, which are hopelessly confused by their schemes to organize themselves. However, it will be extraordinarily difficult for a wisdom of this kind to come within the scope of Western philosophy unless the latter can admit that philosophy is more than logic, more than verbalization, to the point where philosophy can include the transformation of the very processes of the mind, and not simply of the words and symbols which the mind employs.
THE TAO OF
PHILOSOPHY
THE EDITED TRANSCRIPTS
Myth of Myself
Chapter One
I believe that if we are honest with ourselves, the most fascinating problem in the world is “Who am I?” What do you mean and what do you feel when you say the word “I”? I do not think there can be a more fascinating preoccupation than that because it is so elusive and hidden. What you are in your inmost being escapes your examination in rather the same way that you can not look directly into your own eyes without using a mirror, and that is why there is always an element of profound mystery in the question of who we are. This problem has fascinated me for many years and so I have asked a number of people, “What do you mean by the word ‘I’?” Now there is a certain agreement about this especially among people who live in Western civilization, and we have what I have called the conception of ourselves as a skin-encapsulated ego.
Most of us feel “I”—my ego, my self, my source of consciousness—to
