3. The “Diaphanous Subject” in Daoist Thought
Authors: Stanchina Gabriella 
Published: January 2025

In Critique of the Cognitive Mind, Mou moves toward a comparative approach, establishing a similarity between an ephemeral intuitive mind and Daoist thought. This chapter investigates Mou’s interpretation of Daoist subjectivity. In addition to his treatise on “Neo-Daoist” intellectual developments during the Wei-Jin dynasties entitled Physical Nature and the “Profound Thought”, Mou’s philosophical engagement with Daoism is evident throughout his entire body of work. The model of the Daoist saint, emerging from classics such as Daodejing and Zhuangzi, represents the first step in the elaboration of a practical-performative paradigm of the self. This paradigm has a vertical orientation; it is based on the possibility of ascending to a higher level of spirituality through the practice of self-improvement. In contrast, as argued by Mou, the main currents of Western thought adhere to an epistemological horizontal paradigm pivoting around a progressive increment in theoretical knowledge. I will argue that the key concept in the definition of a performative model of subjectivity is jingjie 境界, which can be translated as “state of mind” or “inner landscape.” By adopting this concept, Mou demonstrates how overcoming the boundary between subject and object, which could not be satisfactorily accomplished in Critique of the Cognitive Mind, can be attained in spiritual practice. The subject is an uninterrupted dynamism, and through the idea of jingjie, it acquires a vertical dimension rooted in practice, thereby becoming the “performative self.” Subjectivity is something that can be molded, reconfigured, nurtured, and perfected through lifelong spiritual practice, and in correlation, reality will manifest itself at different levels of accomplishment, purity, and meaning. If I elevate myself, the entire universe is elevated in me. Conversely, if I plunge into attachment, the entire universe is chained and spoiled in me. What I try to demonstrate through a thorough analysis of the evolution of the concept of jingjie in Chinese literature, art, and philosophy, is that jingjie is an original conceptual model of the interdependence, indissolubility, and mutual self-transformation of mind and world. It goes beyond Husserl’s phenomenological idea of intentionality and the correlativity between noesis and noema—or the relationship between the mind and manifested objects. Husserl’s theory of intentionality is based on a horizontal cognitive model; in contrast, jingjie implies that the subject is not an epistemological, self-defining entity but an active, operating, self-refining performative subject. Here, I introduce a characteristic adopted and modified by Mou throughout his work: the use of spatial metaphors, instead of abstract categories, to interpret mental processes. I suggest understanding jingjie as a hodological space, that is, a place that can be reached, entered, experienced, and vertically elevated through the self-realization praxis.

The ideal of a fluidification of the self, outlined in Critique of the Cognitive Mind, is more suitably embodied by a performative self, which, like in Daoist thought, is always in the act of making or becoming oneself through a progressive self-cultivation. According to Mou, the specific creative practice performed by the Daoist saint is “generating without generating.” This practice requires the subject to renounce every effort to dominate and define the world, instead striving to be void of bias and to reflect on the universe as an ideal mirror. The self molded through this practice is what I call a “diaphanous” or “evanescent” self. Through voiding itself from any attachment, the “diaphanous self” transparently reveals the “nothingness,” that is, the inchoate common root of mind and reality, at its authentic core. Embodying this inchoate origin, the Daoist self ignites the process of manifestation. Letting all names and boundaries go, the Daoist subject allows them to grow autonomously. Retreating quietly into the silent clarity of the beginning, they create a space for the world to emerge and flourish.

The rhythmic movement of self-limitation and self-transcendence, which, in Critique of the Cognitive Mind, punctuated the development of the mind, reappears in this way in Mou’s analysis of the Daoist self as a circular dialectic of backward and forward movements. First, the concept of nothingness, which plays a pivotal role in Daoist works such as Daodejing and Zhuangzi, is interpreted by Mou in verbal form as the action of wu-ing, that is, self-voiding. The performative subject renounces the effort of grasping and attaching itself to the thing, and through this withdrawal, it turns around and moves back to the root. This backward movement can be interpreted as a detachment from a limited and fixed ego and the restoration of a pre-egoic state. Second, the Daoist self, having reached the mental state (jingjie) of nothingness, is now able to become the locus of the manifestation of the universe, letting myriad beings burst forth and effloresce without obstacles. This gushing forth is the forward movement of the mind, called by Mou “directionality.” Directionality is the projection of a mental space of clarity in which myriad beings are welcomed into their spontaneous, unconditioned “being-so.” Finally, one must endlessly repeat this back-and-forth process to avoid the ever-resurgent temptation to make nothingness an object of one’s knowledge. Even if directionality does not coincide with the progressive attempt to increase knowledge and dominance, it bears the risk of the mind plunging again into attachment to the ego, losing its original unbounded openness, and becoming completely absorbed by the thing. If this happens, the mind and thing are ossified in their role as viewer and viewed, and we fall again into the horizontal mode of the epistemological ego. Therefore, the practices of self-detachment and self-transcending should remain uninterrupted.

The philosophical gain in introducing the ideas of jingjie and performative subject lies therefore in a more coherent foundation of the equivalence between subjectivity and activity. What Mou calls the “metaphysics of the state of mind” is the conceptual frame for a new idea of self. Being a self implies the practice of becoming a self, that is, performing an unceasing effort of dynamization, fluidification, and detachment. Self-reflection and self-possession of the cognitive subject are lower-level subordinate processes of attachment. Emancipating from its byproducts—that is, the concretion of the ego and the polarity of the inner realm versus the external world—requires a vertical trajectory of practice and spiritual training. The more we recede from any attachment, the more fluid, metamorphic, and brimming with life the universe unfolding in front of us is.

The Daoist saint does not substantially produce the world; however, at any spiritual level, her mind and the universe are mutually and concurrently revealed. However, according to Mou, the lack of the “metaphysics of being”—that is, an objective foundation—precludes the Daoist subject from realizing itself in the concreteness of the objective world. For the Daoist self, every descent into the level of concrete and multifarious things represents a risk of being entrapped in a world of boundaries and determinations, and therefore requires a constant spiritual practice of transcendence and unfettering. Although the dynamicity of the subject is continuously reaffirmed in this way, what is missing is the second character of the self—its agency. Agency refers to the possibility for the self to positively and objectively actualize itself through involvement in the world of beings. Full autonomy of the self is accomplished only if its intrinsic dynamicity is the simultaneous unfolding and realization of an objective principle. According to Mou, only the Confucian tradition, identifying this principle of actualization with moral consciousness, can restore the agency of the self. Only by finding the trace of its own action in all things does the subject lose its evanescence and realize itself in the concreteness of the objective world. Meanwhile, the object is no longer pure exteriority; it discovers within itself the trace of the acting subject in the form of meaning.