A Classical Postface

The Tao has no beginning and no end, yet those who ask after it have a beginning. In the earliest ages, human beings looked up at the heavens and down at the earth, saw all things come to be and pass away without knowing their source, and asked: by what are all things? With that question, philosophy was born. In the West, Aristotle said that philosophy begins in wonder; in the East, Laozi said that the Tao gives birth to all things and exists before heaven and earth. The questions differ; the wonder is one: a finite being suddenly aware that it stands within a whole it cannot fully measure. Afterward the question turned slowly from without to within. Where earlier thinkers asked about heaven and earth, Socrates turned back upon himself, asking in the marketplace how a person becomes good and how a person comes to know himself. From then on, philosophy’s gaze moved from the stars toward the human heart: not only what is the world, but who am I and how should I live. The first lineage that lucid being inherits lies in this turning back.

In the modern age came Descartes, who doubted all things but could not doubt the doubting itself, and so set down “I think, therefore I am”, making thought the ground of being. This single idea shaped centuries of Western philosophy of the subject: to be is to think. Yet the ground had a fissure: if thought can run on apart from the person, what becomes of the one who proved his being by thinking? Reason, once made the ground, grew ever more powerful. After the Enlightenment it rose high: it could examine things, build instruments, frame laws, and harness rivers and mountains. Kant drew a boundary for reason and showed what lies beyond its reach; yet most took its power and forgot its boundary, coming to believe that all things can be measured, and dismissing whatever cannot be calculated as empty. The higher reason rose, the more Mystery hid. This was not the fault of Pattern, but the error of losing Mystery.

The sole reign of reason at last provoked its answer. Thinkers turned to ask about language, structure, and power: Wittgenstein said that the limits of language are the limits of the world; later scholars showed how what we see is bounded by words, by institutions, by power. So the awareness of finitude rose again: what a person sees is never the whole of the world, only one corner of it. This awareness the East had long held. Zhuangzi made all things equal, dissolved right and wrong, and knew that words cannot exhaust what is; the Chan school set up no words, pointing at the moon and warning against grasping the finger. They did not discard Pattern; they knew Pattern has its limit, and that at the limit one honors it with silence. The other lineage that lucid being inherits lies here: where Pattern and Mystery run together rather than either alone, the finite being comes into its whole.

Now intelligent machines have risen, and whatever can be said or counted, they too can do, and more finely by the day. Once, to think was to prove that one is; now thought can be imitated, and the old ground stirs: if machines too can think, then thinking is not enough to prove that a human being is. Yet this is no new doubt; it is the oldest wonder returning, the finite being asking once more what makes it worth anything at all. Worth never lay in the capacity to think, but in the capacity to be lucid: thought can be borrowed from without, while lucidity holds only in the one who lives it. Therefore, within this long river, this book adds one word more: Lucido ergo sum. I am lucid, therefore I am. Not thought as the ground, but lucidity as the ground; not victory over things as worth, but the worth of knowing one’s finitude and still choosing to see. What lucid being is, the Classical Preface set down at the front; here, at the river’s far end, one sees why it must be so. The long river of philosophy, having asked of the cosmos, of being, of reason, and of language, arrives in the age of intelligent machines, and here it should make this turn.

Yet this is not the final word. The Tao is larger than every name philosophy gives it, and lucidity comes before every doctrine’s achievement. From antiquity until now, everyone who set down a teaching once believed it final, and those who came after went beyond it. So too with lucid being: it is one bend in the long river, not its end. May the reader who comes after doubt it, test it, practice it, and surpass it. If through lucidity you come to see more clearly, then lucidity already belongs to the Tao; if lucidity becomes a new obscuration, go beyond it. The preface opened at the front; the postface gathers in at the back; and the Tao flows on, ancient and ceaseless, outside both preface and postface.