Official experimental science tends by its nature to be interfering, intrusive, actively arranging, even meddling and disrupting. But it is supposed to be cool, neutral, noninterfering, not changing the nature of what it studies. We know, however, that this is often not so. For one thing, classical science with its unconscious bias toward atomism has most often assumed that it has to dissect in order to know. This is coming to be less true, but it is still a powerful bias. More subtly, the technique of controlled experimentation is just that - control; that is to say, it is active manipulating, designing, arranging, and prearranging.
There is no implication here that this is necessarily bad or unnecessary. I attempt merely to show that interfering science is not synonymous with science itself; other strategies are also possible. The scientist has other methods available to him, and there are other approaches to knowledge. The one that I want to describe here is the Taoistic approach to learning about the nature of things, not , I must stress again, as an exclusive method or as a panacea or as a rival to active science. A good scientist with two methods available to him, either of which he can use as he sees fit, is more powerful that a good scientist with only one method at his disposal.
It may be a little inexact to call Taoistic receptivity a technique, for it consists essentially in being able to keep your hands off and your mouth shut, to be patient, to suspend action and be receptive and passive. It stresses careful observation of a noninterfering sort. It is therefore an attitude to nature rather than a technique in the ordinary sense (42). Perhaps even it should be called an antitechnique. When I have described this attitude to my scientific friends, they have usually sniffed and said, "Oh yes, simple descriptive science". But often I am not at all sure they have got my meaning.
Real receptivity of the Taoistic sort is a difficult achievement. To be able to listen - really, wholly, passively, self-effacingly listen - without presupposing, classifying, improving, controverting, evaluating, approving or disapproving, without dueling with what is being said, without rehearsing the rebuttal in advance, without free-associating to portions of what is being said so that succeeding portions are not heard at all - such listening is rare. Children are abler than their parents to look and to listen in an absorbed and selfless way. Kurt Wolff has called it "surrender" in his articles (82), which are difficult and complex enough to knock out of anyone's head the notion that surrender is easy.
To order a person to be receptive, or Taoistic, or to "surrender", is like telling the tense person that he must relax. He's willing to, but he just doesn't know how. Serenity, composure, calmness, repose, peacefulness, relaxation - perhaps such words as these will better convey my meaning, although they are not quite right either. In any case they do carry the implication that fear, tension, anger, and impatience are the enemies of receptiveness and noninterference, that one must be able to respect what one is examining or learning about. One must be able to let it be itself, to defer to it, even to approve of its being itself, and to feel reward and even joy in watching it be itself, i.e., unfolding its own inner nature, undisturbed and unchanged by the nature of the observer, unintruded upon. Much of the world may be said to be shy in the sense implied here that an animal or a child is shy and in the sense that only the self - effacing observer will be permitted to see the secrets.
Eastern writers have stressed more the concept of the observer's harmony with the nature that he studies. Here the stress is a little different, for it is implied that the observer is himself part of the nature he observes. He fits in, he belongs, he is at home. He is part of the scene rather than a spectator of a diorama. In a sense he studies his mother while he is in his mother's arms. Destroying, changing, manipulating, and controlling are then clearly arrogant and out of place. Mastery of nature is not the only possible relation to it for a scientist.
We in the West often accept a receptive, noninterfering attitude in certain areas of life, so at least we can understand what is meant here, what it feels like simply to observe and to absorb receptively. The examples I first think of are looking at art and listening to music. In these areas we do not intrude or interfere. We simply enjoy by being receptive, by surrendering to and fusing with the music, for example, to which we "give in" and which we let be itself. We are also able to absorb warmth from the sun or in a tub of warm water without doing anything about it. Some of us are good patients and are able to regress nicely with doctors and nurses. Women are supposed to be yielding and surrendering in sex, in childbirth, in mothering, in being led in dancing. Most of us can be happily passive before a good fire or a beautiful river or forest. And obviously a masterful attitude is not the way to endear yourself to a strange society or to a therapeutic patient.
For some reason, however, the receptive strategy of knowing is not much talked about in the textbooks and is not highly esteemed as a scientific technique. This is peculiar because there are many areas of knowledge for which such an attitude is essential. I think particularly of the ethnologist, the clinical psychologist, the ethologist, the ecologist, but the receptive strategy is useful in principle in all areas.
Of course, making the distinction between suchness and abstractness and then integrating them with each other confronts us again with the old problem of the reality of universals and laws. Are they entirely manmade, invented by him for his own convenience? Or are they discovered rather than created? Are they a perception, however dim, of something out there which existed before men did? Without attempting any definitive answer here, it is yet possible to contribute something to the clarification of the question.
First of all, the dichotomous, either-or phrasing of the question should automatically arouse our suspicions. Can this not be a matter of degree? The distinction between suchness and abstraction suggests that it is. It is true that the perception of suchness is far more Taoistic, receptive, and passive than is the achievement of integration and abstractions. But this does not necessarily mean, as many have thought, that the perception of universals is only an active task, a creation by fiat. It can also be a receptive openness, a noninterfering willingness for things to be themselves, an ability to wait patiently for the inner structure of percepts to reveal themselves to us, a finding of order rather than an ordering.
The best known operation of this kind is Freud's discovery of (and recommendation of) "free-floating attention". In trying to understand a therapeutic patient - or, for that matter, any person - it turns out to be most efficient in the long run to give up active concentration and striving to understand quickly. The danger here is of a premature explanation or theory, which, furthermore, is likely to be too much one's own construction or creation. Striving, concentration, and focusing of attention are not the best ways to perceive at the preconscious or unconscious level, in terms of primary process. These are secondary processes and may actually conceal or push out primary-process data. The psychoanalyst's injunction is, "Let the unconscious speak to (and listen to) the unconscious."
Something similar is true for the ethnologist trying to understand a culture in all its intricacy. Here, too, the premature theory is dangerous, for it may make it impossible to perceive thereafter anything that contradicts the premature construct. Better to be patient, to be receptive, to "surrender" to the data, to let them fall into place in their own way. So also for ethology, for ecology, and for the field naturalist. So also in principle for anyone dealing with large masses of data of any kind. One learns to be not only active but also passive. One arranges and rearranges and fiddles with data, looking at the tables idly, playfully, in a daydreaming way, unhurriedly, again and again. One "sleeps on it", referring the whole business to the unconscious. And the history of scientific discoveries shows that often enough this works well.
In a word, the construction of theories and laws is often rather like a discovery of them. There seems to be an interplay and a joining of activity and receptivity, and it seems best for any knower, lay or professional, to be able to be both active and receptive as the situation demands.
In any case, what can you do with the "way things are", with the sheer suchness of the world and of the things in it - granting, of course, that you are not frightened by it all (as many people are)? About the only thing you can do when you are passively receptive and accepting is to wonder at it all, contemplate it, savor it, marvel at it, be fascinated with it - hopefully, enjoy it. That is, the thing to do is to do nothing. This is about the way children experience the concrete world, intently, absorbed, spellbound, popeyed, enchanted. In peak experiences and in desolation experiences, too, some version of this gluing to the world can happen. So also as we contemplate death or are reprieved from it, or when love opens us up to the world and it to us, or when the psychedelic drugs have their best effects, or when a poet or a painter can manage to refreshen the world for us - these are all roads to the perception of the suchness and realness of things. And all of them join in teaching us that it need not be only frightening, as so many assume, but also can be profoundly beautiful and lovable.
For the moment, at least, we don't have to do anything about multiplicity; we can just experience it receptively, Taoistically, contemplatively. It doesn't at once have to be ex-plained, classified, theorized about, or even understood (except in its own terms).
Some people claim, we should remember, that in such moments we are closest to reality. If we want to witness reality most nakedly, this is the way to do it, they tell us. They warn that as we begin to organize, to classify, to simplify, to abstract, and to conceptualize, so do we begin to move away from reality as it is, perceiving instead our own constructions and inventions, our own preconceptions. These are our own housekeeping arrangements by which we impose order on a chaotic and disorderly world for our own convenience.
Such an attitude is the direct opposite of the customary scientific position in which, for instance, the table that Eddington saw and touched was less real to him than the table that the physicists conceptualized. Most physicists think of themselves as getting closer and closer to reality as they leave the world of sensory qualities further and further behind them. But there is no question about it: they certainly are involved with a reality different from the one in which their wives and children live. Going simpleward does dissolve this reality.
We needn't arbitrate this disagreement, since we have already agreed that science has the two poles of experiencing and comprehending concreteness and also of organizing the welter of concreteness into graspable abstractions. There is however, the fact that the former goal needs stressing today and the latter does not. Scientists usually do not think of themselves as receptive contemplators, but they should, or else they risk losing their footing in the experiential reality with which all knowledge and all science begins.
The word and the concept "contemplation" can, then, be understood as a form of nonactive, noninterfering witnessing and savoring. That is, it can be assimilated to Taoistic, nonintruding, receptivity to the experience. In such a moment the experience happens instead of being made to happen. Since this permits it to be itself, minimally distorted by the observer, it is in certain instances a path to more reliable and more veridical cognition.