Table of Contents
Highlights
Quote
Chinese philosophy offers a radical rethinking of human action, not as an outcome of the self’s conscious deliberation, but as a spontaneous, effortless process, utterly in tune with nature. Daoist texts like the Zhuangzi describe agency without a reflective self—no weighing options, no detached rationalizing. Philosopher of cognitive science Brian Bruya argues that this Chinese vision not only captures how we experience our actions, but also more deeply resonates with breakthroughs in recent cognitive science than the Western ideal of action as the product of reasoned choice, which is rooted in mistakes that go all the way back to Aristotle.
Quote
A tree branch falls on you. You don’t blame the tree. A stranger pushes you over. You sue.
Quote
The classic approach to this difference in attitude is to view nature as determined (and therefore blameless) and humans as free (and therefore accountable for their actions).
Quote
There is clearly something wrong with the freedom/determinism dichotomy, for human beings are fundamentally natural creatures. The principles that apply to motion in nature must also apply to us.
Quote
Zhuangzi viewed human beings as of a piece with nature, and when it came to conceptualizing ideal action, his solution was to look toward nature rather than away from it.
Quote
All of these stories, and more, provide us with a sketch of the basic qualities of skilled, effortless action, which Zhuangzi sums up in one sentence: “With one’s body whole and one’s seminal energy restored, become one with nature.”
Quote
This was meant to describe unrestrained action, which applies, he said, to animals and unreasonable people. In the other, he discussed how we can use rational thinking to determine the best course of action. This ideal action, for Aristotle, involves deliberation.
Quote
Aristotle’s intellectual heirs wrestled with the implications of separating seemingly free humans from seemingly deterministic nature. They split into two camps. One camp said that humans act from free will, and the other said that we are thoroughly determined but can refuse to assent to our inclinations. Interestingly, both described their own version of human action, whether free or determined, using the equivalent of our word “spontaneous,” which comes from the Latin sponte, which means that something arises from the inside, without outside help or interference.
Quote
What we see in Aristotle vs. the Daoists is two distinct approaches to ideal human action. Aristotle, in aiming for ethical action, wants to abstract out of individual situations, to escape the force of circumstance, in order to rationally deliberate, and this results in an inner battle between inclination and reason. Daoists, by contrast, focus within individual domains of activity, where they are drawn into and flow with circumstances, responding quickly, effectively, calmly, and with ease.
Quote
For Aristotle, nature represents unrestrained action, whereas, for the Daoists, it is the ideal model of action. For Aristotle, deliberation leads to the good, but for the Daoists, in the heat of the moment, deliberation can be debilitating. In summary, for Aristotle, spontaneity is a lower form of action, but for the Daoists, it is the highest form of action.
Quote
The Chinese, on the other hand, have struggled to explain how humans can get off-track in the first place—if human beings arise from natural spontaneity, and that’s all there really is, what does it mean to be purposive, intentional, or artificial?
Quote
Rousseau, for example, who superficially resembles the Daoists in his appreciation of the natural inclinations of human reason, instead ended up unifying humans with nature by appeal to what he called the “divine instinct.” Only God could provide that unifying force. Friedrich Schiller, beautifully describing his ideal of graceful action, came to essentially the same conclusion.
Quote
The animal organism must be conceived after the similitude of a well-governed commonwealth. When order is once established in it there is no more need of a separate monarch to preside over each several task. The individuals each play their assigned part as is ordered, and one thing follows another in its accustomed order.
Quote
In this analogy, which comes from On the Motion of Animals, the parts of the whole function together, as a unified self, without a distinct ruler.
Quote
Let’s go back to the “unconscious” athletes, musicians and artists. Surely, we would not wish to take back their awards on the basis that they weren’t really agentially involved in their actions. Perhaps the example of people in flow can provide us with a concrete example of how we can conceive of action without overt agency at the center of our concept.
Quote
A key feature of flow, according to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, is an absence of self-consciousness—that one is not actively executing the action. If our highest achievements in action are essentially non-agential, what does that say about all of our other actions?
Quote
There is much more to say on this topic, but consider words in our ordinary vocabulary, such as self-governance, self-fertilization, and self-organization. These involve the parts of a “self” organizing and acting as one, without the necessity of a ruler or an outside organizing principle or force. Why can the action of an individual not be conceived under a similar rubric? Instead of a single, deliberate self, we get a plural self, which aligns well with the current notion of modal mind in cognitive psychology.
Quote
working in parallel, instead of serially
Quote
Current neurophysiology is pretty clear on this point. Isn’t it about time for our metaphysics of agency to catch up?
Clean Copy
Chinas radical philosophy of action and the self
14th August 2025
| Professor of Philosophy, Eastern Michigan University, and author of Ziran: The Philosophy of Spontaneous Self-Causation.
1,734 words
Chinese philosophy offers a radical rethinking of human action, not as an outcome of the self’s conscious deliberation, but as a spontaneous, effortless process, utterly in tune with nature. Daoist texts like the Zhuangzi describe agency without a reflective self—no weighing options, no detached rationalizing. Philosopher of cognitive science Brian Bruya argues that this Chinese vision not only captures how we experience our actions, but also more deeply resonates with breakthroughs in recent cognitive science than the Western ideal of action as the product of reasoned choice, which is rooted in mistakes that go all the way back to Aristotle.
Human action is part of nature
A tree branch falls on you. You don’t blame the tree. A stranger pushes you over. You sue.
The classic approach to this difference in attitude is to view nature as determined (and therefore blameless) and humans as free (and therefore accountable for their actions).
Consider for a moment two more scenarios. Kenneth Parks was acquitted of beating and stabbing his mother-in-law to death because he was sleepwalking at the time. If Parks was truly unconscious, then his lack of culpability is understandable. But what about athletes, musicians, and artists, who claim that they attain heights of achievement while “unconscious,” in so-called “flow states”? Should we refrain from giving them awards? Of course, they are not asleep, but descriptions of their states of mind are eerily similar: “my body just moved, “there was no me there,” “the piano played itself.” Are these just clumsy descriptions, or is there something to the idea that the “I” of human action is more complicated than it seems?
There is clearly something wrong with the freedom/determinism dichotomy, for human beings are fundamentally natural creatures. The principles that apply to motion in nature must also apply to us. Until now, however, and despite a plethora of so-called compatibilist theories, such a unifying principle has escaped both scientists and philosophers, at least in the Western tradition that descends from Aristotle. But the Daoists of ancient China, in their many discussions of skilled action, may provide a way out of this paradox.
There was once a man who made his living catching cicadas with a pole. After much practice, he said, his body was still and, “despite the expansiveness of the world and the multitudes of things in it, all I see are the cicada wings and nothing else can distract me from them.”
This story comes from the Zhuangzi, a foundational work of Daoism named after its author,and resembles many other stories about advanced skills. The point we can take from this story is an association between ideal action and concentrated attention. In a story about a man who uses wood to make stands for large bronze bells, we learn that in order to find the perfectly shaped wood in the forest, he frees his mind from all competing thoughts, such as reward and reputation. In another story about a swimmer in roiling water, we learn that he is responsive to his immediate environment. In a story about the pilot of a boat, we learn that ease is a key descriptor of his movement.
___
Zhuangzi viewed human beings as of a piece with nature, and when it came to conceptualizing ideal action, his solution was to look toward nature rather than away from it.
___
All of these stories, and more, provide us with a sketch of the basic qualities of skilled, effortless action, which Zhuangzi sums up in one sentence: “With one’s body whole and one’s seminal energy restored, become one with nature.”
Like most philosophers and scientists today, Zhuangzi viewed human beings as of a piece with nature, and when it came to conceptualizing ideal action, his solution was to look toward nature rather than away from it. For all of its flaws, nature is hugely fecund, productive, and quite simply alive! Shouldn’t it be a model for how we humans can be at our best? Isn’t it our distinctively human side that gets us in trouble in the first place?
If this sounds a bit like Rousseau, let’s not jump there too quickly. Instead, let’s first go back to Aristotle.
Aristotle vs. the Daoists
Aristotle described action in two distinct ways. In one, he discussed how when there is a thought or inclination, action immediately follows. This was meant to describe unrestrained action, which applies, he said, to animals and unreasonable people. In the other, he discussed how we can use rational thinking to determine the best course of action. This ideal action, for Aristotle, involves deliberation. It is on account of this distinctively human faculty—apparently absent in non-human nature —that we can attribute responsibility, taking us back to the beginning of this article.
Aristotle’s intellectual heirs wrestled with the implications of separating seemingly free humans from seemingly deterministic nature. They split into two camps. One camp said that humans act from free will, and the other said that we are thoroughly determined but can refuse to assent to our inclinations. Interestingly, both described their own version of human action, whether free or determined, using the equivalent of our word “spontaneous,” which comes from the Latin sponte, which means that something arises from the inside, without outside help or interference.
___
For Aristotle, nature represents unrestrained action, whereas, for the Daoists, it is the ideal model of action.
___
The word “spontaneous” is an excellent description of how the Daoists thought of nature —something that arises from itself. Their word was ziran —which describes something that occurs of its own accord.
What we see in Aristotle vs. the Daoists is two distinct approaches to ideal human action. Aristotle, in aiming for ethical action, wants to abstract out of individual situations, to escape the force of circumstance, in order to rationally deliberate, and this results in an inner battle between inclination and reason. Daoists, by contrast, focus within individual domains of activity, where they are drawn into and flow with circumstances, responding quickly, effectively, calmly, and with ease.
For Aristotle, nature represents unrestrained action, whereas, for the Daoists, it is the ideal model of action. For Aristotle, deliberation leads to the good, but for the Daoists, in the heat of the moment, deliberation can be debilitating. In summary, for Aristotle, spontaneity is a lower form of action, but for the Daoists, it is the highest form of action.
This comparison between Aristotle and Zhuangzi is not intended to produce a winner and a loser. Rather, these are two seminal approaches to human action. It shows us how a specific approach to a topic of concern cascades down through the centuries. Because of Aristotle’s distinctions, Western philosophers have struggled, and continue to struggle, with the freedom/determinism dichotomy, trapped in a conceptual either/or of human action—if human action is determined, then there is no responsibility, but if it is free, then we become inexplicably divorced from our natural roots. The Chinese, on the other hand, have struggled to explain how humans can get off-track in the first place—if human beings arise from natural spontaneity, and that’s all there really is, what does it mean to be purposive, intentional, or artificial?
A plural, natural self
By expanding the scope of our inquiry to ancient China, Western philosophers and scientists can get a new perspective on their own tradition and its long-standing problems. Rousseau, for example, who superficially resembles the Daoists in his appreciation of the natural inclinations of human reason, instead ended up unifying humans with nature by appeal to what he called the “divine instinct.” Only God could provide that unifying force. Friedrich Schiller, beautifully describing his ideal of graceful action, came to essentially the same conclusion. Even the empiricist William James strayed from science when it came to accounting for human freedom and adverted to a special kind of immaterial process to account for free will.
___
Instead of a single, deliberate self, we get a plural self, which aligns well with the current notion of modal mind in cognitive psychology.
___
Certain ideas and ways of thinking tend to get embedded in a tradition from its earliest days and can be difficult to excavate. But similarities across traditions can also be revealing. Take an analogy that is common to Laozi (another early Daoist), Aristotle, and Schiller. I’ll provide Aristotle’s version, but the similarities to the other two versions are fascinating.
The animal organism must be conceived after the similitude of a well-governed commonwealth. When order is once established in it there is no more need of a separate monarch to preside over each several task. The individuals each play their assigned part as is ordered, and one thing follows another in its accustomed order.
In this analogy, which comes from On the Motion of Animals, the parts of the whole function together, as a unified self, without a distinct ruler. What would a theory of human action look like if we were to begin here, instead of beginning with responsibility and the metaphysical leap that divorces us from nature? Can we get responsibility out of self-organized motion?
Let’s go back to the “unconscious” athletes, musicians and artists. Surely, we would not wish to take back their awards on the basis that they weren’t really agentially involved in their actions. Perhaps the example of people in flow can provide us with a concrete example of how we can conceive of action without overt agency at the center of our concept. It is, after all, very similar to what we see in Zhuangzi’s skill stories, and it has been studied with some thoroughness. A key feature of flow, according to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, is an absence of self-consciousness —that one is not actively executing the action. If our highest achievements in action are essentially non-agential, what does that say about all of our other actions? Do we really need metaphysical agency as the defining criterion of responsibility attribution?
There is much more to say on this topic, but consider words in our ordinary vocabulary, such as self-governance, self-fertilization, and self-organization. These involve the parts of a “self” organizing and acting as one, without the necessity of a ruler or an outside organizing principle or force. Why can the action of an individual not be conceived under a similar rubric? Instead of a single, deliberate self, we get a plural self, which aligns well with the current notion of modal mind in cognitive psychology. It took several decades for psychologists to come around to the idea that different parts of the brain can be working in parallel, instead of serially. Current neurophysiology is pretty clear on this point. Isn’t it about time for our metaphysics of agency to catch up?
Annotated Copy
Chinas radical philosophy of action and the self
14th August 2025
| Professor of Philosophy, Eastern Michigan University, and author of Ziran: The Philosophy of Spontaneous Self-Causation.
1,734 words
Chinese philosophy offers a radical rethinking of human action, not as an outcome of the self’s conscious deliberation, but as a spontaneous, effortless process, utterly in tune with nature. Daoist texts like the Zhuangzi describe agency without a reflective self—no weighing options, no detached rationalizing. Philosopher of cognitive science Brian Bruya argues that this Chinese vision not only captures how we experience our actions, but also more deeply resonates with breakthroughs in recent cognitive science than the Western ideal of action as the product of reasoned choice, which is rooted in mistakes that go all the way back to Aristotle.
Human action is part of nature
A tree branch falls on you. You don’t blame the tree. A stranger pushes you over. You sue.
The classic approach to this difference in attitude is to view nature as determined (and therefore blameless) and humans as free (and therefore accountable for their actions).
Consider for a moment two more scenarios. Kenneth Parks was acquitted of beating and stabbing his mother-in-law to death because he was sleepwalking at the time. If Parks was truly unconscious, then his lack of culpability is understandable. But what about athletes, musicians, and artists, who claim that they attain heights of achievement while “unconscious,” in so-called “flow states”? Should we refrain from giving them awards? Of course, they are not asleep, but descriptions of their states of mind are eerily similar: “my body just moved, “there was no me there,” “the piano played itself.” Are these just clumsy descriptions, or is there something to the idea that the “I” of human action is more complicated than it seems?
There is clearly something wrong with the freedom/determinism dichotomy, for human beings are fundamentally natural creatures. The principles that apply to motion in nature must also apply to us. Until now, however, and despite a plethora of so-called compatibilist theories, such a unifying principle has escaped both scientists and philosophers, at least in the Western tradition that descends from Aristotle. But the Daoists of ancient China, in their many discussions of skilled action, may provide a way out of this paradox.
There was once a man who made his living catching cicadas with a pole. After much practice, he said, his body was still and, “despite the expansiveness of the world and the multitudes of things in it, all I see are the cicada wings and nothing else can distract me from them.”
This story comes from the Zhuangzi, a foundational work of Daoism named after its author,and resembles many other stories about advanced skills. The point we can take from this story is an association between ideal action and concentrated attention. In a story about a man who uses wood to make stands for large bronze bells, we learn that in order to find the perfectly shaped wood in the forest, he frees his mind from all competing thoughts, such as reward and reputation. In another story about a swimmer in roiling water, we learn that he is responsive to his immediate environment. In a story about the pilot of a boat, we learn that ease is a key descriptor of his movement.
___
Zhuangzi viewed human beings as of a piece with nature, and when it came to conceptualizing ideal action, his solution was to look toward nature rather than away from it.
___
All of these stories, and more, provide us with a sketch of the basic qualities of skilled, effortless action, which Zhuangzi sums up in one sentence: “With one’s body whole and one’s seminal energy restored, become one with nature.”
Like most philosophers and scientists today, Zhuangzi viewed human beings as of a piece with nature, and when it came to conceptualizing ideal action, his solution was to look toward nature rather than away from it. For all of its flaws, nature is hugely fecund, productive, and quite simply alive! Shouldn’t it be a model for how we humans can be at our best? Isn’t it our distinctively human side that gets us in trouble in the first place?
If this sounds a bit like Rousseau, let’s not jump there too quickly. Instead, let’s first go back to Aristotle.
Aristotle vs. the Daoists
Aristotle described action in two distinct ways. In one, he discussed how when there is a thought or inclination, action immediately follows. This was meant to describe unrestrained action, which applies, he said, to animals and unreasonable people. In the other, he discussed how we can use rational thinking to determine the best course of action. This ideal action, for Aristotle, involves deliberation. It is on account of this distinctively human faculty—apparently absent in non-human nature —that we can attribute responsibility, taking us back to the beginning of this article.
Aristotle’s intellectual heirs wrestled with the implications of separating seemingly free humans from seemingly deterministic nature. They split into two camps. One camp said that humans act from free will, and the other said that we are thoroughly determined but can refuse to assent to our inclinations. Interestingly, both described their own version of human action, whether free or determined, using the equivalent of our word “spontaneous,” which comes from the Latin sponte, which means that something arises from the inside, without outside help or interference.
___
For Aristotle, nature represents unrestrained action, whereas, for the Daoists, it is the ideal model of action.
___
The word “spontaneous” is an excellent description of how the Daoists thought of nature —something that arises from itself. Their word was ziran —which describes something that occurs of its own accord.
What we see in Aristotle vs. the Daoists is two distinct approaches to ideal human action. Aristotle, in aiming for ethical action, wants to abstract out of individual situations, to escape the force of circumstance, in order to rationally deliberate, and this results in an inner battle between inclination and reason. Daoists, by contrast, focus within individual domains of activity, where they are drawn into and flow with circumstances, responding quickly, effectively, calmly, and with ease.
For Aristotle, nature represents unrestrained action, whereas, for the Daoists, it is the ideal model of action. For Aristotle, deliberation leads to the good, but for the Daoists, in the heat of the moment, deliberation can be debilitating. In summary, for Aristotle, spontaneity is a lower form of action, but for the Daoists, it is the highest form of action.
This comparison between Aristotle and Zhuangzi is not intended to produce a winner and a loser. Rather, these are two seminal approaches to human action. It shows us how a specific approach to a topic of concern cascades down through the centuries. Because of Aristotle’s distinctions, Western philosophers have struggled, and continue to struggle, with the freedom/determinism dichotomy, trapped in a conceptual either/or of human action—if human action is determined, then there is no responsibility, but if it is free, then we become inexplicably divorced from our natural roots. The Chinese, on the other hand, have struggled to explain how humans can get off-track in the first place—if human beings arise from natural spontaneity, and that’s all there really is, what does it mean to be purposive, intentional, or artificial?
A plural, natural self
By expanding the scope of our inquiry to ancient China, Western philosophers and scientists can get a new perspective on their own tradition and its long-standing problems. Rousseau, for example, who superficially resembles the Daoists in his appreciation of the natural inclinations of human reason, instead ended up unifying humans with nature by appeal to what he called the “divine instinct.” Only God could provide that unifying force. Friedrich Schiller, beautifully describing his ideal of graceful action, came to essentially the same conclusion. Even the empiricist William James strayed from science when it came to accounting for human freedom and adverted to a special kind of immaterial process to account for free will.
___
Instead of a single, deliberate self, we get a plural self, which aligns well with the current notion of modal mind in cognitive psychology.
___
Certain ideas and ways of thinking tend to get embedded in a tradition from its earliest days and can be difficult to excavate. But similarities across traditions can also be revealing. Take an analogy that is common to Laozi (another early Daoist), Aristotle, and Schiller. I’ll provide Aristotle’s version, but the similarities to the other two versions are fascinating.
The animal organism must be conceived after the similitude of a well-governed commonwealth. When order is once established in it there is no more need of a separate monarch to preside over each several task. The individuals each play their assigned part as is ordered, and one thing follows another in its accustomed order.
In this analogy, which comes from On the Motion of Animals, the parts of the whole function together, as a unified self, without a distinct ruler. What would a theory of human action look like if we were to begin here, instead of beginning with responsibility and the metaphysical leap that divorces us from nature? Can we get responsibility out of self-organized motion?
Let’s go back to the “unconscious” athletes, musicians and artists. Surely, we would not wish to take back their awards on the basis that they weren’t really agentially involved in their actions. Perhaps the example of people in flow can provide us with a concrete example of how we can conceive of action without overt agency at the center of our concept. It is, after all, very similar to what we see in Zhuangzi’s skill stories, and it has been studied with some thoroughness. A key feature of flow, according to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, is an absence of self-consciousness —that one is not actively executing the action. If our highest achievements in action are essentially non-agential, what does that say about all of our other actions? Do we really need metaphysical agency as the defining criterion of responsibility attribution?
There is much more to say on this topic, but consider words in our ordinary vocabulary, such as self-governance, self-fertilization, and self-organization. These involve the parts of a “self” organizing and acting as one, without the necessity of a ruler or an outside organizing principle or force. Why can the action of an individual not be conceived under a similar rubric? Instead of a single, deliberate self, we get a plural self, which aligns well with the current notion of modal mind in cognitive psychology. It took several decades for psychologists to come around to the idea that different parts of the brain can be working in parallel, instead of serially. Current neurophysiology is pretty clear on this point. Isn’t it about time for our metaphysics of agency to catch up?