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Comparative Aesthetics
seeks to eat. When his desire is satisfied, he willingly accepts and enjoys the feeling of satisfaction. When his desire is frustrated, he willingly accepts his feeling of frustration. If he abhorred his desires and satisfactions, like a Hindu ascetic, or if he aggravated his desires and frustrations, like Western voluntarists and romanticists, he would be artificial and out of harmony with Nature. The aesthetic is to be found. neither in artificial willfulness nor in artificial will-lessness, but in natural willing
ness.
Reason, too, is mistrusted in China, and the ultimate in the way of reality and value (ie., what Nature presents here and now) must be intuited or apprehended directly. Reason takes what is presented and analyzes it. Reason abstracts artificial parts from natural wholes. Reason cuts and subdivides but can never restore the natural wholes it destroys; when it struggles to resynthesize, it does so with partial patterns, and the result is always an artificial whole. Reason not merely cuts by making distinctions but then sharpens them so much that differences come to be idealized as completely different-divided by an excluded middle. Taoism rejects the artificial results of reasoning. When differences are presented, they are accepted as they appear. When similarities are presented, they are accepted as they appear. And when similarities and differences both appear, both are accepted. When both appear, to see only the differences, or to regard the differences as more real than the similarities, as Western minds tend to do, and to admit only the similarities (indifference), or to regard the similarities as more real than the differences, as Hindu minds tend to do, must be regarded as artificial and out of harmony with Nature.
Whereas Western civilization idealizes an "either, or, but not both" logic, based on "the Law of Excluded Middle," and Hindu civilization worships a "neither is, nor is not, nor both is and is not, nor neither is nor is not" logic, ending in the exclusion of all exclusiveness (or negation of all negation), Chinese civilization tends naturally toward a "both-and" (yin-yang) logic,
a
Either, or, but not both Western
Both-and Chinese
о
Neither, nor... Hindu
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The
based on a willingness to accept distinctions which are only partially distinct, and similarities that are only partly similar. idealizes Tao symbol this tendency. Given a circle to embody symbolically ultimacy in the way of logic, the Western mind wants to divide it into two equal halves by a straight line, the Hindu mind wants to keep the circle completely empty of divisions,14 while the Chinese mind divides it by an S-curve in such a way that, although any diameter has an equal amount of white (yang) and black (yin), a circulating radius which begins by including only a little white increases the amount until its length is occupied wholly by white, yet does not finish covering the white until the black also appears and increases. The moments, if any, when such circulating diameter completely excludes the white and black from each other, as is done at all times in the Western ideal, are very few. Comparison of
