I M What I M

Trey Smith

We find many recurrent themes throughout the Tao Te Ching and all of the Taoist classics. This evening I thought I would focus on one of these: the concept of impartiality. When Lao Tzu writes that Tao is impartial, what exactly is he implying?

In order to understand the word impartiality or impartial, we need to look at the word from which it is derived. According to The Free Dictionary, partial is defined as

1. Of, relating to, being, or affecting only a part; not total; incomplete: The plan calls for partial deployment of missiles. The police have only a partial description of the suspect.
2. Favoring one person or side over another or others; biased or prejudiced: a decision that was partial to the plaintiff.
3. Having a particular liking or fondness for something or someone: partial to spicy food.

In my view, the first definition leads into the other two. When we favor and are fond of only one side of an equation, we interact with it incompletely. Our biases and prejudices don't allow us to see the whole with equal merit.

To be impartial means to strip away those prejudices and biases to view an equation or situation whereby we see the whole and its subsequent parts with equal merit.

But how is it possible really to strip these things away? While some of our prejudices and biases exist near the surface of consciousness, many are buried deep within our subconscious. If asked, we often will claim sincerely that they don't exist and are sometimes shocked when they seep to the surface.

Like most of the principles advanced by philosophical Taoism, impartiality is an ideal. It is something that few, if anyone, ever attains. I don't write this as a ready-made excuse that we can toss out whenever it is convenient. Just because most of us can't pretend to have the capabilities ever to reach an ideal, that does not mean that we shouldn't TRY to reach it.

The famed German Marxist Eduard Bernstein once wrote, and this is a paraphrase, The goal means nothing. The movement, everything. Personally, I don't think that Bernstein believed that goals (i.e., ideals) are meaningless. The point I think he was trying to drive home is that ideals are theoretical formulations, ones often divorced from the experiential realities of life.

We set ourselves up for abject frustration and failure when the only thing that matters is the act of arriving at the final [theoretical] destination -- it's a place that doesn't actually exist, except in our minds. What matters most is the journey because that is the part we truly experience.

So, while the ideal may serve as a guide, how we choose to live our lives in this imperfect here-and-now world is where we will find bona fide meaning. While we may never be absolutely impartial, it would serve each of us well to learn to temper our prejudices and biases as much as possible in order to see the whole as opposed to its fragmented pieces.