I think George Grant is in many respects a Daoist. I don’t think he thought of himself as a Daoist. But key parts of his viewpoint seem very Daoist to me.

For those who don’t know Grant: he was a 20th-century Canadian philosopher best known for his Lament for a Nation, a book which claimed that the idea of Canada was to remain an outpost of the British Empire in North America, and thereby resist the influence of the United States – an idea which he thought had been lost. (In those ideas he was taking cues from John Watson, in the stream of Canadian Hegelianism.) I have little love for that view of Canada, so it’s not my favourite part of Grant’s thought. But there’s a lot more to Grant that I find much more exciting.

Especially, reading Grant’s lesser-known Time as History, I’m struck by the very deep affinities the book has with the Daoism of Laozi and especially Zhuangzi. To my knowledge Grant doesn’t say anything about these affinities himself, and may not even know them. He may have been indirectly influenced by Daoism through Heidegger (who attempted to translate the Daodejing, though he never published it), but he doesn’t say anything about that influence. In Grant’s own assessment he is a Christian Platonist, and I think that assessment is accurate – but it seems a particularly Daoist kind of Christian Platonism.

Specifically: Grant laments the modern emphasis on progress. He quotes Marx’s claim that the philosophers have only interpreted the world but the point is to change it, and contrasts it to an ancient Greek view:

Greek heroes were summoned to be resolute for noble doing, but their deeds were not thought of as changing the very structure of what is, but as done rather for the sake of bringing into immediacy the beauty of a trusted order, always there to be appropriated through whatever perils. (Time as History 24)

Grant sees this contrast reflected within Christian theology: a contrast he draws from Martin Luther, between the “theology of glory” and the “theology of the cross”. According to Robert Sibley, Grant takes the “theology of glory” as a fundamentally modern attitude, one he laments, which “implies that action must be future-directed in that humans have their fulfilment not in the present but in the future.” (Sibley, Northern Spirits 139) The “theology of the cross” rejects that future orientation. In Time as History, Grant laments, “Why was it our destiny to raise up ‘willing’ and ‘orientation to the future’ so that they have become universal ways of men’s existing?” (28) Grant, it turns out, wants to redirect us away from the future to the present moment – just like the Daoist-influenced traditions of modern mindfulness meditation.

The analogy to Daoism goes deeper. Grant tells us that for “the ancients” – from both Athens and Jerusalem – “thought was at its height, not in action, but in what they called a passion… In modern language we may weakly describe this by saying that thought was finally a receptivity.” (Time as History 60-1) The receptivity viewpoint, for Grant, sees art not as creation, but as imitation of the beautiful. (62)

It’s this word receptivity that I think is most deeply evocative of the Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu, on the older Wade-Giles spelling), the difficult and enigmatic early Daoist text. (Although the text probably has multiple authors, it is convenient, traditional and still widespread to refer to the text as having the single author Zhuangzi, so I will do so here.)

A core ethical and psychological concept in Zhuangzi is xū 虛 – which, Chris Fraser notes, can have connotations of emptiness, insubstantiality, indeterminateness… and receptiveness. The kind of receptiveness that Zhuangzi advocates, in a way that Fraser calls radical, seems very much in sympathy with receptivity as Grant approaches it. Consider this key passage in Zhuangzi’s inner chapters:

Do not be the incarnation of a name; do not be a storehouse of plans; do not undertake affairs; do not be a master of knowledge. Identify fully with the limitless and roam in the sign-less. Exhaust what you receive from Heaven without any thought of gain. Just be xū, that’s all. The ultimate person’s use of the heart is like a mirror, neither welcoming nor escorting, responding without storing. So he can overcome things without being harmed. (Zhuangzi 7/31–33)

Here people are praised for being xū in the sense that they let the world act on them, and reflect the world back on itself in response – when they act, it is because they are acted on. Reflecting the world, like a mirror, is the opposite of trying to change it. As Robert Meynell had put it in his thesis on Grant, in the premodern world “the cosmos moved us; we did not move the cosmos.” So likewise Zhuangzi advises: “let your heart wander in plainness, merge your qì 氣 (vital energy) with the vastness, follow along with how things are in themselves, making no room for the personal, and the world will be in order” (7/10–11).

So I think both Grant and Zhuangzi are advising us: let us human beings be moved by nature (tiān 天), rather than trying to move it. Let us be receptive to it, let it act on us, let us reflect it. Let us not try to change the nature of the world, let us not try to make progress, but rather act in conformance with nature to help it realize itself, imitate the beauty that is already there. Let us not orient ourselves to the future, instead seeing eternity in each moment.

Grant doesn’t ever refer to Daoism, as far as I’m aware; I don’t think he ever studied it. There’s some possibility of indirect influence, since Grant was influenced by Martin Heidegger, who did study Daoism in some depth without publishing on it. But more important than the question of influence, here, is the resemblance across these thinkers in very different times and traditions. Grant and Zhuangzi look much more like each other than like modern ideas of progress.