Chaos as the Inchoate: The Early Chinese Aesthetic of Spontaneity

Can we conceive of disorder in a positive sense? We organize our desks, we clean up our houses, we cultivate good habits, we discipline our children, we govern our polities all with the aim of reducing disorder, of temporarily reversing the entropy that inevitably asserts itself in our lives. Going all the way back to Hesiod, we see chaos as a cosmogonic state of utter confusion inevitably reigned in by laws of regularity, in a transition from fearful unpredictability to calm stability. Even in modern Chaos Theory, what appears to be random is ultimately reducible to algorithmic constancy. There does not seem to be a place in normal Western, or Westernized, life for chaos. Likewise in early China, disorder (luan) was the antithesis of everything civilized.' States without rulers and minds without cohesion were luan. Familial relationships were defined, honored, and codified in the rites, and extended metaphorically to the loyal bonds of the state. But against this overt imposition of order, a Rousseauian-type counter-current arose in the background. Though not exclusively Daoist, this revolutionary way of thinking was best articulated by two philosophers we now know as the progenitors of Daoism, Laozi and Zhuangzi. In the very first chapter of the Mawangdui Daodejing,2 we find the entire system of imposed order turned on its head: