The Metaphysics of Creation in the Daodejing

1.1. Presence and Absence of Phenomenal Forms

For an entity to have phenomenal form is for it to have some perceivable properties that identify it in contrast to other entities. These properties do not have to be perceivable by any particular agent at any particular time, but they have to be, in principle, perceivable by some agent. One of the ways in which the Daodejing sets the distinction between Dao and the myriad things is in terms of phenomenal forms: the myriad things have it, and Dao does not. Consider Daodejing 14:

One looks for it but does not see it, so we name it “invisible.” One listens for it but does not hear it, so we name it “inaudible.” One grasps for it but does not get it, so we name it “intangible.” These three are impossible to probe; therefore, it is amorphous and a single unity. Its rising does not shine, and its setting does not bring obscurity. Unnamable proceeds, returning to and restarting from no-thing. This is what we call the form of the formless, the image of no-thing. This is what we call the hazy murk.

視之不見，名曰夷。聽之不聞，名曰希。搏之不得，名曰微。此三者不可致詰，故混而為一。其上不皦，其下不昧。繩繩不可名，復歸於無物。是謂無狀之狀，無物之象。是謂惚恍。

Dao is described as beyond the reach of our perceptual faculties: it is invisible (yi 夷), inaudible (xi 希), and intangible (wei 微). The most philosophically coherent way of understanding these claims is as implying that Dao is completely beyond perception: Dao is not just impossible to see with the eyes, hear with the ears, or touch with the hands—it altogether transcends the capacities of the senses.⁸ In fact, there is no cogent reason to take these claims as focusing on the human senses specifically: were we to use a bat’s sonar or some other possible alien perceptual faculty, in trying to access Dao they would not do either. In sum, the claim is that Dao does not have a phenomenal form (see also Hong 2019: §3.1).

Daodejing 14 does not explicitly contrast Dao’s lack of phenomenal form with the phenomenal forms of created things. However, we can reconstruct the contrast with a bit of careful reasoning. The passage says that Dao is a single unity. It seems then reasonable to contrast the unity of Dao with the multiplicity of the myriad things, and we can see the appropriateness of this contrast by reflecting on the implications of Dao’s lack of phenomenal form. Daodejing 14 takes the oneness of Dao to follow from the fact that it does not have phenomenal form, for it claims that “these three are impossible to probe” and, “therefore (gu 故), it remains a single unity.” Why so?

The oneness of Dao is not entailed by its lack of phenomenal form alone. Therefore, the question is what hidden premise the authors of the Daodejing are assuming that allows them to make the inference. I propose that the Daodejing authors are implicitly assuming a version of the principle of the identity of the indiscernibles: if x and y have the same phenomenal form, then x is identical to y (cf. Forrest 2020). This principle allows us to see why the inference from Dao’s lack of phenomenal form to its oneness works: since for any x and y to be distinct, they must have different phenomenal forms, Dao, lacking phenomenal form, cannot possess any multiplicity. Conversely, the myriad things—being multiple and so distinct from one another—must have phenomenal form. We can thus conclude that the distinction between Dao and the myriad things is mapped onto the distinction between the presence and absence of phenomenal form.

As it happens, things get more complicated. At the end of the passage, the metaphysical condition of Dao is described as the form (zhuang 狀) of the formless (wuzhuang 無狀) and as the image (xiang 象) of the no-thing (wuwu 無物). In other words, the authors of the Daodejing seem to claim that Dao at once does and does not possess a phenomenal form. How can we make sense of these claims? This is an instance of a rather widespread strategy consisting of describing ultimate reality as an oxymoronic “vacuum-plenum” (see Roth 2021: 280; Stace 1987: §3.5). The question is what is the point of advancing such a seemingly contradictory description, and this is an issue that we will discuss extensively in the second section. Before getting there, there is another claim made in Daodejing 14 that merits our attention: the remark that Dao is not a thing.

1.2. Existence and Nothingness

As the world is made of the myriad things (wanwu 萬物), the implication of referring to Dao as “no-thing” (wuwu 無物) is that Dao stands on a different metaphysical level than the entities constituting the world, like tables and chairs, or for that matter planets and stars. Consider Daodejing 40:

The myriad things in the world are generated in existence. Existence is generated in nothingness.⁹

天下萬物生於有。有生於無。

Edward Slingerland (2003: 85) notices that facing the claims that the myriad things come from Dao, like the ones considered above, side-by-side the claim that the myriad things come from nothingness in Daodejing 40, we should conclude that nothingness and Dao are the same. I endorse a more moderate claim and follow the direction of other interpreters who see nothingness not as strictly speaking identical to Dao but as one of its attributes (e.g., Chai 2014a: 663; Zheng 2021: 12).¹⁰

What does it mean to say that Dao is nothingness? One might be tempted to read the claim as saying that Dao simply does not exist. According to this reading, in claiming that existence, and in turn the myriad things, come from nothingness, the authors of the Daodejing would be rejecting the principle that from nothing, nothing comes, which in the Western tradition can be traced back at least to Parmenides. Is this what is happening here? I don’t think so.

Pang Pu (2009) distinguishes between three senses of the term “wu” (i.e., “nothingness”) in classical Chinese thought: (A) wu as the absence of something; (B) wu as absolute nothing; (C) wu as the presence of the invisible. (A) is the sense of “nothing” that we use when we say that there is no beer in the fridge. What we mean is that some specific entity or group of entities is absent. (B) is the nothing of the philosophers—the absence of all entities. Imagine having a big book containing a list of all existing entities and to eliminate them one by one: Absolute nothing is the state that one gets when all entities have been eliminated.¹¹

If what we mean by “nothingness” is either (A) or (B), it seems correct to say that from nothing, nothing comes. In fact, (B) is the sense of “nothingness” employed in the Parmenidean principle. It is impossible for something to originate from the mere absence of something else, let alone from the absence of everything. The same reasoning, however, does not apply to (C). If we use “nothingness” to refer not to some kind of mere absence but to a presence that, for reasons that need to be specified, conceals itself, we have a sense of the term that is perfectly compatible with the claim that existing entities come from it, for the mere fact that such a presence is not accessible does not force us to conclude that it cannot be productive.

Pang thinks that the nothingness discussed in the Daodejing is precisely (C), and as the next question naturally arises—the question being what in the world might be meant by the “presence of the invisible”—we already have the answer: the invisible is Dao as lacking phenomenal form. The invisibility that Pang finds to be contained in the Daodejing’s notion of wu lies simply in the fact that Dao, unlike the myriad things, does not have a phenomenal form (see Chai 2014a; 2014b; Hong 2019: §5; Kong 1979: 52; Wagner 2003b: ch. 2; Zheng 2021: 14).¹²

One might then be tempted to think that the distinction between nothingness (wu 無) and existence (you 有) is a mere repetition of the point that Dao, in contrast to the myriad things, lacks phenomenal form. This seems to be the move that, for instance, Hong Hao makes in saying that “relating Dao to wu is just another way to express Dao’s featurelessness” (2019: 232). My view is that such a reading does not take the Daodejing’s view radically enough. Instead, I propose that a rather strong claim is being made here: that to exist is to have a phenomenal form (see Gu 2009: 160). This reading does imply the non-existence of Dao, but such non-existence is not equal to absolute nothing in the sense described above because non-existence is here the complement of existence as possessing phenomenal form.

This point can be interpreted by appealing to the ontological difference, which Martin Heidegger introduced in his 1927 lectures The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (Heidegger 1988). The ontological difference is the distinction between entities as particulars and Being as the condition of possibility of the manifestation of all entities.¹³ According to Yao Zhihua (2010)—who in his interpretation draws from the work of Pang Pu—the notion of nothingness that we find in the Daodejing can be interpreted as Being in Heidegger’s sense.¹⁴ Since Dao lacks a phenomenal form, it cannot have any multiplicity, and since the multiplicity of phenomenal forms is a necessary condition for there to be things, Dao is not a thing; it is nothingness. At the same time, Dao is metaphysically responsible for the existence of all things—Dao, while not itself a particular, is that by which all particulars are what they are, which is Being.¹⁵ In fact, the philosophical literature abounds with works analyzing the similarities between Daoist and Heideggerian thought, interpreting either through the lens of the other (e.g., Chai 2022; Chang 2013; Ma 2006; Nelson 2023; Parkes 1987; Wang 2016).

Going a step further, we can elaborate this distinction with the tools of contemporary analytic metaphysics. In those terms, the distinction between nothingness (that is, Being) and particular entities can be characterized as a meta-ontological distinction. While ontology is concerned with answering the question “What exists?” (Quine 1948), meta-ontology is the enterprise of specifying and articulating the very terms of ontological discourse (Berto & Plebani 2015), and the distinction between nothingness and particular entities amounts precisely to such a specification. In particular, it amounts to a rejection of one of the central claims of Quinean meta-ontology, according to which there is no distinction between being and existence (van Inwagen 1998). The Quinean metaphysician wants to say that the two terms should be treated as equivalent. Instead, the meta-ontology of the Daodejing understands existence as pertaining to the level of particular entities and conceives of nothingness, which is Dao, as the ultimate ground of all particulars that is metaphysically prior to them.¹⁶

A piece of regimentation will make the point more precise. Kris McDaniel (2017) makes the case that if a meta-ontology distinguishes between ways of being, the language that we use to articulate this meta-ontology should contain restricted quantifiers that capture these distinctions. Since the distinction between different ways of being will plausibly be understood as perfectly natural—that is, such that it captures fundamental and theorizer-independent distinctions in the way of reality—we will say that the quantifiers restricted to capture these distinctions are joint-carving (see Sider 2011).

The Daoist distinction between Dao and particular entities can also be captured by introducing a restricted quantifier. Since the claim is that to exist (i.e., you 有) is to have phenomenal form, the restricted quantifier contains in its range everything that has phenomenal form and only that. Let “∃_有” be such a quantifier and “∀_有” be the corresponding universal quantifier. This does not prevent us from using the unrestricted quantifier “∃,” which might be taken to include Dao in its domain of quantification. However, given the metaphysics of the Daodejing, “∃_有” is perfectly natural while “∃” is not. Notice also that it is a different and independent question which quantifier correctly captures the meaning of the English “to exist,” and the answer might be that it is the unrestricted one. However, since I am here interpreting the metaphysics of the Daodejing, I will use the English “to exist” as synonymous with “∃_有.” This leads us to:

Wu-You Creationism (WYC): ∀_有x Dao creates x.

WYC is a concise formulation of the claim that Dao creates the myriad things that remains faithful to the meta-ontology of the Daodejing. Notice that this formulation highlights a contrast between the doctrine of the Daodejing and accounts of creatio ex nihilo proposed by personalistic theists. According to them, God creates everything apart from himself—i.e., ∀x ∼God(x) → God creates x (e.g., Copan & Craig 2004: 25; Swinburne 1993: 129). In other words, the mainstream theist seems to be fine using a quantifier that keeps both God and created beings in its range. This contrast stems from an important difference between the two metaphysical views: while personalistic theists see God as a being (which, of course, is greater than all others), the Daodejing’s view of Dao is to be classified as a “ground of being” metaphysics (see Hart 2013; Neville 2012; Tillich 2000).

Accordingly, in what follows, the question of how creation happens will not be a question of how a maximally powerful being creates all other entities in the cosmos but rather the question of how an ultimate reality that is metaphysically orthogonal to particular beings generates those. Keeping this in mind, our goal in the next section will be to explain how WYC can be satisfied—that is, to explain how Dao can be the creator of all existing things.

2.1. From Things to the Essence and from the Essence to Things

We noticed in the first section that the Daodejing describes Dao in an oxymoronic way by characterizing it as the form (zhuang 狀) of the formless (wuzhuang 無狀) and as the image (xiang 象) of the no-thing (wuwu 無物). The idea seems that while there is a sense in which Dao does not have a phenomenal form, there is also a sense in which Dao does possess phenomenality. Consider Daodejing 21:

Dao in its becoming things is murk, is haze. Murk! Haze! Within it there are images. Haze! Murk! Within it there are things. Obscure! Tenebrous! Within it is the essence.

道之為物，唯恍唯惚。忽兮恍兮，其中有象。恍兮忽兮，其中有物。窈兮冥兮，其中有精。

This brief passage contains various interesting points for us. The expression “Dao in its becoming things” shows that Daodejing 21 is concerned with the process of creation and also highlights a crucial feature of the doctrine of creation contained in the text: creation here is seen as a process through which ultimate reality becomes its creation. This claim not only sets the Daodejing’s doctrine further apart from creatio ex nihilo but also highlights an important difference with Neoplatonic emanation. It is true that the doctrine of emanation comes with a stronger ontological continuity between the creator and the created than creatio ex nihilo. In this sense, Yonghua Ge is correct in pointing out that emanation is closer to the picture of the Daodejing, which definitely stresses such continuity (see Tu 1984). However, emanation is still understood as a process through which the creator generates external things—that is, other than itself (see Kalligas 2024: §5)—rather than becoming its creation.¹⁷

In addition, Daodejing 21 points to an important requirement that the operation through which Dao creates the cosmos has to satisfy: given that Dao in itself has no multiplicity, that the myriad things are multiple, and that Dao creates them by transforming itself into the myriad things, creation has to be an operation that explains how can the one turn into the many.¹⁸ In other words, such an operation needs to go together with an explanation of how the one relates to the many, and if there is an explanation of how the one relates to the many, there is also an explanation of how the many relate to the one. Beginning with an analysis of the latter will help to get to a formulation of the former.

Like Daodejing 14, Daodejing 21 also makes the twofold claim that Dao cannot be perceived—which seems to be the point of the attributes “haze” (hu 惚) and “murk” (huang 恍) and implies the lack of phenomenal form—and that Dao contains things (wu 物) and images (xiang 象)—which in turn seems to imply the presence of phenomenal forms in Dao. Putting the two together, the claim becomes that Dao contains phenomenal forms while not itself having phenomenal form. If that is correct, we should expect that the way in which Dao contains phenomenal forms is different from the way in which created objects possess it, for the latter comes with perceivability. How do we spell out this distinction?

The notion of essence (jing 精) mentioned at the end of the passage can do some work here. “Essence” is a standard way of translating “jing 精” into English. However, the sense of “essence” employed here is not that of essence as a definitory or necessary property of something (e.g., my essence is to be a human). Rather, essence is to be pre-theoretically understood as a state of utmost purity, intensity, and concentration. I propose to read the claim that Dao contains the essence as saying that Dao contains phenomenal forms in a maximally intense and concentrated state and that such a state is different from that in which phenomenal forms are possessed by the myriad things.

What does it mean to say that Dao contains phenomenal forms in a maximally intense state? To see that, consider another of the terms used in the Daodejing to describe Dao: “hun 混.” This term occurs three times in the text:

… therefore, it is amorphous and a single unity 故混而為一。 (Daodejing 14)

… amorphous! It is like blurred 混兮其若濁。 (Daodejing 15)

There is something amorphous and complete … 有物混成。 (Daodejing 25)

“Hun 混” can be rendered in English as “amorphous,” but it could also be translated as “merged” or “mixed together.” I propose that what it means for phenomenal forms to be present in Dao in a maximally concentrated state is for all phenomenal forms (i.e., xiang 象; zhuang 狀) to be present in Dao in a mixed or merged way.¹⁹ Given that here we are talking about how phenomenal things relate to that which does not have phenomenal form, we cannot fully explain this relation by appealing to our ordinary experiences because those only tell us what happens at the level of phenomenal forms. However, our experience can still serve an analogical explanatory role.²⁰

One helpful analogy appeals to colors. Purple can be thought of as a combination of other colors: blue and red. We can think about the process of putting together two colors to create a third one to be a merging of those. The result of merging them will have a couple of interesting characteristics: (1) it fully contains in itself the initial two colors, and (2) it does not display any of them (i.e., purple is neither blue nor red). A second useful analogy can be drawn from imagining a beam of white light refracting into a prism and generating a multiplicity of colored lights. Again, white light can be thought of as containing all the colored lights in itself, but it does not display any of them.

Let metaphysical merging be an operation that applies to sets of phenomenal properties. For any given set of phenomenal properties, the result of merging them will be a property that, as the analogies just expounded suggest, has two characteristics: (1) it fully contains in itself all the properties in the original set—call this condition “plenitude” —and (2) it is qualitatively simple so as not to exhibit the multiplicity of the original set of properties—call this condition “simplicity.”²¹ We can make the formulation of the principle more precise with a piece of formal notation. Let “⊗” stand for metaphysical merging. Given a set of phenomenal properties {F₁, F₂, …, F_n} we will write “⊗{F₁, F₂, …, F_n} = G,” where G is a property that satisfies plenitude and simplicity with respect to the set {F₁, F₂, …, F_n}.

Now, let “wanxiang 萬象” (i.e., “the myriad images”) be a term standing for all phenomenal properties. This term does not occur in the Daodejing, so using it to name the set of all phenomenal properties is somewhat a matter of preference. However, in light of all the considerations we have been making, it is clear that the term is faithful to the content of the text. We can now define the notion of essence as follows:

Dao’s Essence (DE): ⊗{wanxiang 萬象} = Jing 精

DE spells out the sense in which Dao can be said to contain phenomenality. According to this reading, phenomenal properties are present in Dao. However, they are present in a state in which their multiplicity is not retained because they have been merged into a single state of maximal concentration. We can now use DE to spell out the Daodejing’s metaphysics of creation. Consider again Daodejing 41:

Dao generates one, one generates two, two generate three, three generate the myriad things.

道生一，一生二，二生三，三生萬物。

As noticed above, this chapter offers a picture of the Daodejing’s account of creation. In particular, the passage suggests that the operation of creation consists of a progressive generation of multiplicity from an initial state of oneness (see also Chen 1973). The foregoing discussion naturally leads us to identify this oneness with the essence and, consequently, the myriad things as being created from a process of differentiation of the essence. Notice that Daodejing 41 presents Dao as more fundamental than the oneness of essence: Dao does not start by generating the two but by generating the one itself. In other words, there is more to Dao than the essence, and I take this idea to be a positive feature of my interpretation. Given that the essence is defined as the merging of all phenomenal properties and that ultimate reality plausibly lies, at least partially, beyond our understanding, it would be odd if that definition fully captured the nature of Dao.²²

The idea that creation consists of a process of generation of multiplicity from the unity of essence leads to the claim that the process we are considering here is the opposite operation of metaphysical merging: metaphysical de-merging. The notion of metaphysical de-merging can be understood quite straightforwardly as the converse of metaphysical merging: by metaphysically de-merging a property G, we obtain a set of properties {F₁, F₂, …, F_n} that were present in G in a merged state. Let us use “⊘” as a symbol for the operation of metaphysical de-merging, so that an operation of metaphysical de-merging will be written as “⊘G = {F₁, F₂, …, F_n},” where G is the de-merged property and {F₁, F₂, …, F_n} the set of properties that result from de-merging G. This leads to:

Dao’s Creation (DC): ⊘ jing 精 = {wanxiang 萬象}

Since the essence is defined as the result of merging all phenomenal properties, by de-merging the essence, Dao can create all phenomenal forms. Crucially, creating all phenomenal forms is everything Dao needs to do to create the myriad things. Remember that our talk about properties should always be understood in terms of property-instances. According to the Daodejing’s metaphysics, there is no further operation that needs to be done for properties to be instantiated—Dao’s creation of all phenomenal properties is ipso facto the creation of their instances. Moreover, since for the Daodejing there cannot be two distinct objects with the same phenomenal form—because that would make them the same object—the phenomenal form of an object is all there is to it. In other words, by creating all phenomenal forms (waxiang 萬象) Dao creates all existing entities (wanwu 萬物). Therefore, DC satisfies WYC.

2.2. Is Dao Really Without Phenomenal Form?

The account of creation just offered leaves us with the need to explain how Dao can still be said not to have phenomenal form. In fact, DE defines the essence of Dao as containing all phenomenal properties, which seems to indicate a state that is the exact opposite of the lack of phenomenal form. How do we make sense of this?

First, if Dao were not to contain phenomenality at all, then it would be impossible for it to generate the myriad things. In a famous paper on the hard problem of consciousness, Galen Strawson (2006) argues that emergence cannot be brute. We can say that the emergence of F-properties from G-properties is brute if and only if there is nothing in G-properties to which the existence of F-properties can be fully traced back. As Strawson points out, brute emergence is by definition a miracle (2006: 18) and—I add—in the negative sense of the term since, by hypothesis, in the brute emergence of F-properties from G-properties there is nothing about G-properties in virtue of which F-properties can emerge. We can thus formulate the following principle:

Strawson’s Principle: For F-properties to emerge from G-properties, the full potential of F-properties must be contained in G-properties.

There is no reason why Strawson’s Principle should not apply to creation, and that means that if ultimate reality—in this case, Dao—creates the world of phenomenal forms, then the full potential of everything in the world of phenomenal forms must already be contained in ultimate reality. Accordingly, any viable account of the Daodejing’s metaphysics of creation needs to make sense of the fact that Dao contains the full potential to generate phenomenal forms, and if one claims that there is no sense in which phenomenal forms are present in Dao, it is hard to see how that would be possible.

At the same time, Dao cannot be phenomenal in the same sense in which the myriad things are. This is something that emerges in the interpretation of the Daodejing by Wang Bi 王弼. Consider two passages from his commentary on Daodejing 35 and Daodejing 41 respectively:²³

The great image is the mother of the images of heaven. It is not hot, cold, warm, or chill, and therefore it has the ability to embrace and permeate the myriad things.

大象，天象之母也，不炎不寒不溫不凉，故能包通萬物 。

There being a form implies there being distinctions. There being distinction means that if something is not warm it is chill—that it is cold if it is not hot. Therefore, an image that has form is not the great image.

有形則亦有分，有分者不溫則凉，不炎則寒。故象而形者，非大象。

First, Wang Bi claims that if Dao had a particular phenomenal form, then it would lack the potential to create all phenomenal forms that constitute the created world. The reason for this is that phenomenal forms imply distinctions—that is, having any phenomenal form implies the exclusion of all phenomenal forms that are incompatible with it (see Neville 2012; Zappulli 2024). Using Wang Bi’s example, if Dao were warm, then its phenomenal form would come to the exclusion of coldness, and so Dao would lack the potential to generate the latter property. Accordingly, Dao must be neither cold nor warm. Generalizing, this means that for any n-tuple of mutually exclusive phenomenal properties, Dao cannot instantiate any of them. Therefore, Dao cannot possess a phenomenal form. At the same time, the claim that Dao does not have any form cannot be metaphysically cashed out in a merely subtractive way because that would deprive Dao of the potential to generate phenomenality.

On the basis of this reasoning, my interpretative proposal is that Wang Bi draws a crucial distinction between two terms: image (xiang 象) and form (xing 形). In his reading, the first term does not imply distinctions, and so it can be applied both to Dao and the myriad things. Instead, xing does imply distinctions, and therefore it only applies to the myriad things. Going back to the philosophical terminology that we have been using throughout this paper, we can say that Wang Bi is drawing a distinction between phenomenality and phenomenal forms. The myriad things have phenomenal forms (xing 形), and since phenomenal form comes with distinctions, Dao does not have it. However, Dao still needs the potential to create phenomenal forms, and therefore it must have phenomenality.

The operations of metaphysical merging and de-merging allow us to make perfect sense of the notion of phenomenality without distinctions. The de-merging operation introduces a partial order over phenomenal properties such that R(F_i, F_j) if and only if ⊘{F_i} = {Ψ, F_j}, where “Ψ” represents any phenomenal property or properties resulting from the de-merging of F_i apart from F_j. Notice that the order is partial because it is not the case that, for any pair of phenomenal properties F_i and F_j, either R(F_i, F_j) or R(F_j, F_i)—for instance, neither the property of sweetness results from de-merging redness nor the property of redness from de-merging sweetness. Accordingly, we can say that a phenomenal property F_j comes with distinctions if and only if there is a phenomenal property F_i such that R(F_i, F_j). In other words, F_j comes with distinctions if and only if there is some phenomenal property from which F_j can be de-merged. However, there is no property F_i such that R(F_i, jing精) because the essence is at the beginning of the order. Therefore, essence has phenomenality without having distinctions. In Wang Bi’s terms, “form” (i.e., xing 形) refers only to phenomenal properties that come with distinctions, while “image” (i.e., xiang 象) can refer to everything that is phenomenal, whether it comes with distinctions or not. Moreover, the image that is not also a form is what he calls the “great image” (i.e., daxiang 大象), which in the terms of the Daodejing is nothing but the essence itself. Once more, Dao has phenomenality, but it does not have a phenomenal form.