When Trying Gets Trying

Sometimes the only way is wu wei 無為

Keep trying, and you will succeed! We’ve all been told this—if not by parents, teachers, and coaches, then at least in the flood of advertisements that saturates our lives. If you remember the first time you realised that it’s a sham, the memory is probably tinged with bitterness. Sometimes you don’t succeed, no matter how much you try. Worse still, the ones who do succeed often don’t seem to try at all, or at least they try less hard than those who fail. Cruel privilege and outrageous fortune are always meddling in the outcome, and the old lie of a cosmos ordered to apportion rewards to efforts stinks to high, indifferent Heaven. Why do we continue to tell each other this lie? Without it, it would be hard to call forth any effort at all. And we do need effort.

There is another side of the lie that we discuss much less. In many endeavours, trying is the one thing you must not do if you want to have any hope of succeeding. This is a very obvious point when pointed out, but I don’t find it very well reflected in the philosophical tradition. This is strange. Perhaps we know it too intimately to philosophically reflect on it. After all, we know it when we breathe. Breathing is a prime example of the sort of thing that goes wrong when you try to do it—the sort of thing that has to be done effortlessly if it is to be done well.

Although the philosophical insight might be as close to us as the breath in our lungs, it matters that it isn’t reflected in our explicit philosophising. One place you will find it conspicuously absent is in education theory. Governments are always trying to use education to bring about particular goals, through conscious and deliberate effort on their part as policymakers and on the part of the teachers and students. Everyone is supposed to have an explicit plan for what a student will do in ten or twenty years’ time, as if we have any idea what the world will be like then—as if every successful person in the world envisaged the precise pattern of their success and followed it with ruthless single-mindedness.

Perhaps meditation is so successful as an antidote to the stresses of modern life because it gives us one of very few available reminders of the truth of breathing. Outside of that, the ideology of deliberate effort exerts a tyrannical control over our culture. There are the lilies of the field in the Sermon on the Mount, and there is Paul Lafargue, but in general the connections between lack of effort and success remain philosophically unexplored and the ideology of effort remains unchallenged.

One of the few comments against it is found in an 1893 essay by Tolstoy, “Non-Action”. It is striking that, in making it, Tolstoy is forced to reach beyond the Western canon. He spends much of the essay responding to an address to students by Emile Zola, who had harangued the beleaguered graduates: “Work, young people! […] Work! Remember, gentlemen, that it is the sole law of the world, the regulator bringing organic matter to its unknown goal! Life has no other meaning, no other raison d’être”. Tolstoy replies:

A little-known Chinese philosopher named Lao-Tsze, who founded a religion (the first and best translation of his book, “Of the Way of Virtue”, is that by Stanislaus Julien), takes as the foundation of his doctrine the Tao—a word that is translated as “reason, way, and virtue”. If men follow the law of Tao they will be happy. But the Tao, according to M. Julien’s translation, can only be reached by non-acting.

The ills of humanity arise, according to Lao-Tsze, not because men neglect to do things that are necessary, but because they do things that are unnecessary. If men would, as he says, but practise non-acting, they would be relieved not merely from their personal calamities, but also from those inherent in all forms of government, which is the subject specially dealt with by the Chinese philosopher.

He is referring to the concept of wu wei 無為—”non-action”—now strongly associated with Daoist philosophy. The term is found earlier in Confucian texts, where it refers to ritual activities—activities in which the participant has so internalised ritual forms of behaviour as to no longer be acting as a conscious agent. In Daoist texts, especially the Zhuangzi, the idea is detached from ritual and applied to any sort of non-goal-oriented action. Richard John Lynn translates it as “unselfconscious action”. Brook Ziporyn has pointed out to me that wei 為, the thing negated in wuwei (wu 無 refers to absence), can also mean “identify”. The sense often conveyed is that of wandering, acting without any identified purpose.

One passage on the “Heavenly man” in the Zhuangzi reads (in Lynn’s translation):

if he appears to act but does not act [wuwei], such action comes from where no thought to act exists [wuwei] (23.38.6).

This idea is prominent in the traditions influenced by texts like the Zhuangzi, but I don’t find it very much in Western thought. And I think the absence shows in our culture—in our relentless activism, our incessant trying, our irrational commitment to the faith that effort is always the key to success and non-effort always guarantees failure. “I failed this time, but I’ll keep not trying” makes no sense to us, but I think it would make perfect sense to Laozi or Zhuangzi. Try deliberately breathing for the next minute or so, and you’ll see that it’s a truth we could do well to acknowledge now and then. Where is all this endless effort getting us? Plans, targets, strategic initiatives—all the votive incantations to a god we don’t believe in but sacrifice to all the same. The ideology of effort is delivering much more in the way of exhaustion than in the way of success. All this trying is trying.