As I think it over, it seems to me that the high civilizations of the world have produced exactly three different views of the constitution of nature, of the physical universe. And to enumerate them I would call them respectively: nature as a construct, nature as a drama, and nature as an organism. The first view, nature as a construct, has until very recently been characteristic of the Western world. The view of nature as a drama has been largely characteristic of India. And finally, of nature as an organism, has been characteristic of the Far East. I’d like to compare these three views and point out certain of their advantages, disadvantages, and the ways in which they complement each other.

And I think part of the interest of this is that our thinking—more and more I’ve been fascinated by this—that our thinking about the world is strongly influenced by analogies; by, sometimes, analogies that are almost hidden. They are so far back in the history of the thought of any given civilization or culture that they are taken as something more than analogies. They are taken almost, you could say, as logical patterns. And they are basic to our grammar, to our common sense, and to our attitudes in ways that often go unsuspected.

Why don’t we start with the Western view of the world as a construct. By this I mean the physical world has historically, in the West, been looked upon as a created or manufactured article; the world of a creator external to the world. And this view has continued in many ways even after the rise of deism in the eighteenth century and the general tendency of the scientist to dispense with the hypothesis of the creator. The idea still remains that the world is a construct, analogous to a machine, and indeed obeying laws or plans in the same way as a machine obeys a blueprint, even though the law-giver and the planner himself seems to have disappeared.

The basic metaphor, though, underlying—this is not so much the machine as the work of clay: the pot or the modeled figure. For, as you know, it is said in the Book of Genesis that the lord god created Adam out of the dust of the ground, and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils. And so our language, our poetry, is full of allusions to the fact that we are really, after all, clay.

Imperial Caesar, dead and turned to clay,

Might stop a hold to keep the wind away.

And because of this figure, it is (as I have often said) fundamental to our common sense that the world is formed matter—the form being the shape of the pot, the matter being the clay. And thus we think of life as being basically something done to a medium. The medium is stuff: a kind of formless and of itself inert and unintelligent goo, which requires an external agency to give it form and intelligence and life.

And naturally, because we have thought this way for so long, it’s a terribly difficult idea to abandon—to get out of our heads the notion that, in the same way that tables are made of wood and houses of stone, so we tend to think that trees are made of wood and mountains of stone and people of flesh, and all of it eventually reducing itself to the primordial goo, the universal clay, the primal matter, the formless original water over which the spirit of god is said to have moved in the beginning of all time.

Now, beyond the idea of the world as a work of pottery lies the more sophisticated idea of the world as a mechanism in this Western view of the world as a construct. As soon as men began to understand mechanical principles, it became extraordinarily convenient to make analogies between various types of machinery and things to be found in the world. And it is really upon this analogy that the great achievements of Western technology have hitherto been based. And it’s really very difficult to think that we could have devised our technology, and that our practical sciences could have made such progress, without the idea of the analogy between the world and a constructed machine.

You see, one of the most fundamental things about a machine is that it is an assemblage of parts. And the successful measurement and description of nature depends upon the calculus, upon reducing it to parts. You know, the word “calculus” originally meant “pebbles,” and pebbles were one of the oldest methods of calculating: counting pebbles. In a funny kind of association of words, calculus is also calculating in the sense of having a calculating attitude; scheming. And scheming is associated with turning things to calculae, or stones. It is a sort of killing the world, reducing it from the living to the dead, from the organism to the machine—but nevertheless it has had the most marvelous consequences so far as we’re concerned. And the cultures which thought of nature by analogy with drama and by analogy with an organism did not produce the technology that we in the West produced.

Let me just for a moment contrast the other attitudes: the Indian attitude of the world as a drama. In Hindu thought, the world is not thought of as being made or constructed by god, but as being actually god himself playing a game. The idea of one single divine actor who is playing all the parts of all the creatures in the world, imagining himself to be them—assuming, as it were, myriads of masks, behind which there is simply one wearer of the mask. In a forthcoming book, the second volume of The Masks of God—it’s not published yet, but I’ve seen a copy—Joseph Campbell contrasts the way in which the myth of the one who became two, the one that became many, has gone in two quite different directions. Beginning in ancient Sumeria (which constitutes, as it were, a sort of cultural watershed), it has flowed eastwards in one way and westwards in another. To the east, the idea that the one (the godhead, in other words) split itself and dismembered itself into many parts quite voluntarily, and thus became the world as a play. To the west, the theme of the one who became many is different, because (as he points out in the Book of Genesis) it is not the divine who becomes male and female, it is the creature. In the Upanishads—say the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad—the divine self is described as saying in the beginning of time, “Let me become two,” and he splits into male and female, and thus generates the world. But in the Book of Genesis it is not the godhead who splits, it is man, the creature, who is split into Adam and then into Eve.

But thus, in the Eastern world, we have the dramatic view—in India in particular. And although it’s interesting to note that in, say, the writings of the great philosopher Shankara and others, you very often encounter the analogy of the potter or of pots as representing the world. The roles are reversed. Clay is used as the symbol for the divine reality. Just as pots are all made of clay, or as jewels are all made of gold, so all things in the world are of one divine substance, which is of the nature of the godhead, or Brahman. It’s interesting, the different use of the simile.

And so, from the standpoint of the dramatic view of the universe, all the divisions and distinctions of the world are looked upon as being a kind of as-if. They are in play. They are not quite serious. And this contrasts very sharply with what has been the characteristic Western view: that the distinctions in the world are the most important things about it, that they are deeply serious. The distinction of good and evil is an eternal distinction, as is the distinction between the creator and the creature. The world in this view is not a drama. It is played not by actors, but by what we call real individuals, even real persons—although, funnily enough, as I suppose you know, the word “person” is originally persona: the megaphone mask worn by actors in classical Greek drama.

Then, thirdly, there is the organic view characteristic of China. In this, there is no real thought of there being a divine creator or a divine actor behind the world, but rather the world is thought of as being self-moving and self-creating. The word for nature in Chinese means “what is of itself so.” When, in the West, a child asks its mother, “Who made me?” and she replies, “Darling, god made you,” and the child asks, “But who made god?” she has to say, “Nobody made god.” And that is a great puzzle to the child who thinks of the world as a construct. And it may be explained to the child, if you like, that god makes himself; he exists of himself, because he is existence. To put it in more theological language: he has the attribute called aseity—from the Latin āsē: “by himself.”

Perhaps some enfant terrible would ask the question, “Well, if that’s true of god, why couldn’t it be true of the world in the first place? Why did you have to make that additional step?” If he did so, he would be thinking more or less in the Chinese way, which does not think of the world either as an artifact of some maker or as a mask or appearance worn by some sort of deeper reality. He doesn’t, in other words, have a two-level view of nature as an appearance, underneath which there is something else to explain it. He sees it all rather as self-evident, as being something which regulates itself, and indeed orders itself.

There is a certain sense, you see, in which the Chinese view is fundamentally… oh, you could almost call it anarchical—or, if you don’t like that word, you could call it democratic. A world which is self-governing—not even through a president, but self-governing in every way. A great and colossal anarchism which moves itself in the same way as you and I move our fingers without directing them in the sense that we know exactly what we’re doing and how we move them (we don’t).

Now, I’ve said that the Western view is probably what made it possible for us to develop our highly advanced technology by thinking about the world as a construct. We could think about the laws or principles or plans or regularities upon which it was based. We could think, for example, of the calculus, of number, as the basic characteristic of the law upon which nature is based. By doing that, we caught on to the idea of thinking of all things as reducible to atoms, to parts, to bits. And then, by thinking of bits, we found that we could measure the world very accurately, describe its regularities very accurately. And that gave us an astonishing degree of control over it.

But this is a point of view which is successful to a certain degree. It goes well up to a certain level, after which it begins to develop complications. One thing, you could say: it has complications which are psychological on the one hand, and practical and technical on another. From the psychological point of view, its complication is that, when it becomes commonsensical to us to look at the world as a mechanism, we begin (as humans, as people capable of feeling and love) to feel the external world rather alien to us. Yes, it’s a machine. It’s a great big automatic mechanical arrangement which, in essence, is simply stupid energy.

We thereupon feel that it has nothing in common with ourselves, and perhaps even though we try to give the same sort of account of ourselves, and try to reduce our brains and emotions to some kind of neurological computer mechanism, that makes us in a way hate ourselves, for as soon as we start thinking of ourselves as automata, we begin ethically and psychologically treating ourselves as automata. We lose respect for ourselves., and thereupon feel that what is central to us—the feeling center, the person—is trapped in a cosmos that is a mechanical nightmare, foreign and strange. We can see ourselves as a kind of ghastly accident. And I don’t wonder that this engenders certain kinds of suicidal tendencies in our culture.

So much for the psychological point of view. From the technical point of view, the analogy of nature with mechanism develops its own disadvantages after a certain point. That is to say: the disadvantage of trying to manage the physical universe as if it were indeed an assemblage of separate parts, or separable parts. The first sort of person to notice this mistake would be the extreme surgical or medical specialist, who knows, for example, all about hearts or about stomachs, but very little about brains or lungs or glands, and who treats one organ at a time and becomes unaware of the imbalances inflicted upon other organs by what he’s done to the organ in which he specializes. Or so, in the same way, the specialist always tends to see the units of nature, and to be unaware of their connections or relationships—which are, after all, inseparable relationships with all the other parts.

There is, you might say also, another technical disadvantage—again, which develops only in the course of time to this particular mechanical analogy. And that is that, when you begin to rely more and more upon minute and careful description of the world for dealing with it—and that, of course, involves the reduction of the world to describable units—the world then becomes terribly complicated, and it becomes increasingly difficult to keep track of all the minute units that you’ve described. Hence the difficulty of specialists in the various sciences communicating with each other, and the difficulty of the scientific specialist in communicating with the layman. The whole thing becomes much too complicated to manage.

And this, then, means that the more we know, the greater our skill, in managing the world as a mechanical construct, the more difficult it becomes to control, because it becomes increasingly complex. We talk endlessly about the increasing complexity of political, social, and economic affairs, which makes the problems of the world increasingly unintelligible to even the average well-educated citizen.

Now, it has been suggested that the Western view (nature as a construct) has in some ways done its job, and that from here on we need to explore to a greater degree other views—perhaps the organic view of the Chinese, wherein we get a peculiar harmony of points of view with our own sciences (biology, ecology, and so forth) as if, somehow, this view had been tucked away in a store cupboard, waiting for us to be available at just the time when we needed it. The problem here is an entirely new one, because we are so used to thinking of our problems of controlling and understanding the world in terms of the methods of mechanical science.

Not so long ago, I was talking to Lynn White, who used to be president of Mills College, and he was saying that our academic world values only three kinds of intelligence. Whereas he said there are many more—there are at least seven. I don’t remember what all the seven were, but he said that the kinds of intelligence that we value are, first of all, mnemonic (which is the ability to remember), computational intelligence (the ability to figure), and verbal intelligence (the ability to read, write, and talk). But he said there is also social intelligence, and there is also kinesthetic intelligence: the kind of intelligence (kinesthetic) in which we learn, as children, to walk, to run, to throw and catch balls, and to do all kinds of extremely complex and very subtle actions without being able to describe or count what we’re doing.

Perhaps, in handling far more complex matters than catching balls, or skiing, or riding bicycles, we may have unknown resources of kinesthetic intelligence for dealing with some of the problems that now face us. Here is the germ of an idea which Chinese culture and Far Eastern culture in general suggests to us. Perhaps they themselves have only dimly begun to explore these things. But I think that it’s in that direction that the future of practical philosophy and government of the world may lie.