excerpt from "Nature, Man and Woman" by Alan Watts

"Forgoing any rationalist or hedonist form of apology, I propose to speak only of a troth that is observed by virtue of the absurd - that is to say, simply because it has been pledged - and by virtue of being an absolute which will uphold the husband and wife as persons . . . . I maintain that fidelity thus understood is the best means we have of becoming persons. The person is manifested in the making. What is person is manifested in the making. What is person within each of us is an entity built up like a work of art - built up thanks to constructiveness and in the same conditions as we construct things . . . . Neither passion nor the heretical faith of which it sprang could have inspired the belief that the control of Nature should be the aim of our lives."
-Denis de Rougemont, apologist for the ideal of Holy Matrimony

Here in a nutshell is the whole story of the identification of the absolute, the personal, and the divine with artifice in opposition to nature. In its original meaning the persona, the mask, is indeed a construct, a maya in its proper sense. But for this very reason it should have been distinguished form the divine and the absolute. For the divine, the real, is not the construct; it is the natural, non-verbal, and indescribable order (li) from which construction emerges and to which it is subordinate. To set the principle of artifice and construction outside and against nature is to tear the universe apart in such a way that the rift can only be healed upon the terms of the total submission of of nature to the will and its legal violence. Such a view of the divinity of the law and the word issues in a conception of the marriage contract where man is made for the Sabbath, not the Sabbath made for man, for man is held to aquire personality or spiritual dignity by submitting himself irrevocably to an absolute law. Faithfulness is thereby confused with a complete mistrust of oneself, for on these terms the human organism is to be trusted only in so far as it binds itself to a law - a law which it has itself invented, and whose order and structure is far inferior to his own.

It was for this reason that Confucius made jen or "human-heartedness" a far higher virtue than i or "righteousness," and declined to give the former any clear definition. For man cannot define or legalize his own nature. He may attempt to do so only at the cost of identifying himself with an abstract and incomplete image if himself - that is, with a mechanical principle which is qualitatively inferior to a man. Thus Confucius felt that in the long run human passions and feelings were more trustworthy than human principles of right and wrong, that the natural man was more of a man than the conceptual man, the constructed person. Principles were excellent, and indeed necessary, so long as they were tempered with human-heartedness and the sense of proportion or humor that goes with it. War, for example, is less destructive when fought for greed than for the justification of ideological principles, since greed will not destroy what it wishes to possess, whereas the vindication of principle is an abstract goal which is perfectly ruthless in regard to the humane values of life, limb and property.

Zealots and fanatics of all kinds revolt at Confucian reasonableness, with its spirit of compromise and mellow humor, feeling it to be ignoble and tame, lacking the heroism and fire of irrevocable commitment to principle - and this is precisely the attitude of Chinese Communism in its present attempt to destroy the Confucian tradition. But from the Confucian standpoint the zealotry of irrevocable commitment to principle is not only a silly bravado and a striking of heroic attitudes; it is also a total insensitivity to inner feeling and to the subtle intelligence of the natural order. "The superior man," said Confucius in the Analects, "goes through life without any one preconceived course of action or any taboo. He merely decides for the moment what is the right thing to do."

From our standpoint such a precept is the recommendation of caprice and disorder, for we feel that unless the artifice of law is held over our heads like a club we shall revert to our "basic" and "natural" depravity, as if this is what we really are under the "veneer" of civilization. This is not, however, what we are really, naturally, and basically. It is what we are off-scene, which, as we saw, is not more real than what we are on-scene. Unseemly disorderliness is, in fact, the last thing of which anyone would accuse followers of the Confucian and Taoist philosophies, since they have formed the foundations of one of the most stable societies in the world.