Cook Ding and Technology

Technological progress can also mean doing less

In Chapter 3 of Zhuangzi we find the story of Cook Ding, admired by King Hui of Liang for his expert butchery. Impressed, the King asks: “Wow! Terrific! How could skill ever go so far as this?” Typically, the example is grotesque but full of symbolism. Cook Ding’s reply to the King is:

臣之所好者道也，進乎技矣。始臣之解牛之時，所見无非牛者。三年之後，未嘗見全牛也。方今之時，臣以神遇，而不以目視，官知止而神欲行。依乎天理，批大郤，導大窾，因其固然。技經肯綮之未嘗，而況大軱乎！良庖歲更刀，割也；族庖月更刀，折也。今臣之刀十九年矣，所解數千牛矣，而刀刃若新發於硎。彼節者有間，而刀刃者无厚，以无厚入有間，恢恢乎其於遊刃必有餘地矣，是以十九年而刀刃若新發於硎。雖然，每至於族，吾見其難為，怵然為戒，視為止，行為遲。動刀甚微，謋然已解，如土委地。提刀而立，為之四顧，為之躊躇滿志，善刀而藏之。

What I am good at is the Dao, for I have advanced beyond skill. When I first began to cut up oxen, what I saw was nothing but the whole ox as such, but, after three years, I no longer saw the whole ox as such. And now, I encounter it with my spirit and don’t see it with my eyes. When sense and knowledge stop, the divine is ready to act. In accord with the natural principle [configuration], I strike at the gaps. Following the large openings, I abide where inherent certainty leads me. It never happens that my plying encounters the joints, So how much the less likely am I to encounter a big bone! A good cook has to change his knife once a year, this because he cuts through [the meat]. The ordinary cook has to change his knife once a month, this because he hacks. Now, my knife has lasted nineteen years, and the oxen I have cut up number in the thousands, yet the edge of my knife is as if it had just left the whetstone. The joints have spaces in them, but the knife edge has no thickness. To insert what has no thickness into what has a space means that it will be so spacious that there will be more than enough room to ply the knife. This is why even after nineteen years my knife edge is as if it had just left the whetstone. However, whenever I come to a grouping, I note that it presents difficulties, fearfully take warning, my look stopped, my action slowed, I just have to move my knife the slightest amount, and, with a sharp rending sound, it’s already come apart, as if it had been dirt clumped into earth. Raising my knife and standing there, as a result I look all around and linger awhile filled with satisfaction because of what I have done. I set my knife right and put it away. [Richard John Lynn translation, pp.69-70]

A lot has been written on this, but I wonder if anyone has linked it to the physical definition of work, which is defined as force x distance. In terms of electricity, work is voltage x charge. By Ohm’s Law, voltage equals current x resistance. Since current is charge/time, more work in a given interval of time can be done with less force—less voltage—if resistance is lower.

When Cook Ding says “What I am good at is the Dao, for I have advanced beyond skill”, it is notable that dao 道, originally meaning “road”, could stand for something like distance. We might think of skill here—ji 技—as meaning the application of force to overcome resistance. What Cook Ding has discovered, in that case, is a way of escaping the need for this by instead finding a way around resistances. Work then consists of travelling a distance—dao 道—without the need to exert much force. The King was asking the wrong question—”How could skill ever go so far as this?”. The Cook has gone so far without skill—without the need for applying force or effort.

Ji 技 is a term often used to translate the Greek techne τέχνη, the root of “technology”, which is sometimes rendered in modern Chinese as keji 科技—the science (ke 科, from kexue 科學) of techne. In The Question Concerning Technology in China, Yuk Hui resists translating “techne” as ji 技, since “readers should be aware of the linguistic constraints, and must be prepared to open themselves to a different cosmological and metaphysical system” (54).

At least since Heidegger, I think there has been a strong tendency in the West to think of technology as consisting of techne in the sense of means of overcoming obstacles by the application of force. As far as I understand his “Question Concerning Technology”, which is not very far (the work of understanding it involves a lot of effort multiplied by a very short distance), techne stands for a way of being in which objects in the world are presented as standing reserves of energy. Energy is needed to apply force, to do by work by moving objects a certain distance against strong resistance.

But alongside techne in this sense, there is dao 道 in Cook Ding’s sense, which amounts to finding ways of working by moving objects along less resistant pathways—following the “natural principle” (tianli 天理). Plato, who was big on techne, spoke of “carving the beast of nature at the joints”, but here in Zhuangzi have a reference to placing the knife in the gaps—that is to say, not needing to carve at all.

Gregory Lee relates this to Jacques Ellul’s notion of “non-potence”:

Jacques Ellul, lui, parle de la « non-puissance », non pas de l’impuissance, mais plutôt d’une décision consciente de ne pas utiliser notre pouvoir, de nous limiter, comme jusqu’ici ceux qui nous gouvernent ont réussi à le faire avec les armes nucléaires. Zhuangzi a également parlé du non-exercice du pouvoir qui passe par la maîtrise de la volonté, du vouloir.

Jacques Ellul, on his part, speaks of “non-potence”—not impotence, but rather a conscious decision to not utilise our power, to limit ourselves, as those who govern us have refused to use nuclear weapons. Zhuangzi has equally spoken of the non-exercise of power that counts as mastery of the will, of desire.

Sometimes, I think, technology can provide us with “non-potence”. We have much more power than we did in the nineteenth century to hunt whales, extract their oil, transport it, put it into lamps, and burn it to light our homes. We have the power to burn the coal, drive a turbine to generate a charge, and then step it up to 200,000 volts to drive it through low-resisting wires to power electric lights. Technology allows us to not exercise even this power. A solar panel and a good battery can bring about the same result at the point of use, effectively redirecting the daylight into the dark moments—a way of following tianli 天理. Once the apparatus is set up, much less force is required to traverse the distance between darkness and light.

Taking a wilder punt, utility fog would allow us to change the colour of walls without the effort of producing and spreading paint.

I don’t associate this vision for technology with the typical techno-utopias driven by AI and robots doing all the work. In that case, there would still be lots of force exerted and efforts made—just by robots rather than humans. Rather, I am talking about technology that makes it possible to get the same result without as much force: to make distance rather than force the dominant factor in the work equation. This goes, I think, in the direction of the celebrated wuwei 無為—non-acting—in Zhuangzi.

The lesson here might be that technology is not always techne or ji 技. Sometimes it can be dao 道: consisting of ways to go further by doing less, for example by redirecting energy rather than extracting it in order to exert more force. Yuk Hui might be right that looking to sources outside the Western canon can help us to rethink technology, as long as we can look beyond mere term-for-term translation.