Neither Design nor Favor

Nothing seems more natural than to ask what a thing is for. The sun to light our way, rain for our crops, animals for our table: the mind finds no rest until it has lodged every being in some use. And behind that use, it senses an intention—someone, somewhere, must have arranged all this for us.

Spinoza names this reflex and traces its source. He does not treat it as a fault; he sees it as a condition. He posits as a principle “that all men are born ignorant of the causes of things, and that all have an appetite for seeking what is useful to them.” Ignorant of causes yet hungry for the useful, we read means into everything—and step by step, the whole world becomes a storehouse of provisions.

Moreover, since they find within themselves and outside themselves many means that greatly contribute to the attainment of what is useful—eyes for seeing, teeth for chewing, plants and animals for food, the sun for light, the sea for fish—they come to regard all things in Nature as means for their use.

The next step is inevitable: if everything is a means, then some author must have arranged these means. Thus arises the belief that “God has made all things for man.” Spinoza follows this to its conclusion, where a falling roof tile that kills a passerby becomes a deliberate blow, and where, pressed for an explanation, one invariably takes refuge in “the will of God, that asylum of ignorance.” Finality explained everything; it explained nothing—it merely draped our ignorance in a name.

The remedy is purely intellectual. It lies in a single sentence: “Nature has no end prescribed for itself,” and “all final causes are nothing but human fictions.” That eternal Being Spinoza calls God or Nature does not act toward any goal: it acts solely by the necessity of what it is, as a theorem follows from its premises. To understand this is to remove from the world the arrow we had planted there—its point turned toward us.

Another voice, born far from any geometry, reaches the same threshold by an entirely different path. It does not argue against any error; it simply observes, with a disconcerting calm, the way of heaven and earth.

Chinese

天地不仁，以萬物為芻狗。

English

Heaven and earth are without partiality. They regard all creatures as the straw dog (of sacrifice).

Everything rests in two characters: 不仁, bù-rén, “non-rén.” Heaven is without rén—without that “humaneness,” that preferential kindness Confucius placed at the summit of virtues. Julien renders it as “are without partiality,” and his note clarifies the word’s meaning: “to love with a partial and particular affection.” This is not coldness or cruelty. The commentary he records insists: neither tyranny nor hatred—“they let all beings follow their natural impulse.” Heaven prefers no one, and that is why it bears all equally.

The straw dog says the rest. It is woven for sacrifice, adorned for the duration of the rite, then discarded and trampled by passersby—no love at the outset, no contempt at the end. So it is with the ten thousand beings under a sky that leans toward none. And the sage, Laozi suggests, aligns himself with this: “The sage is without partiality.” Not dry indifference, but a benevolence so even that it does not cling to anyone—the very way of heaven, made into conduct: letting each thing be what it is, of-itself.

Let us not confuse the two hands. Spinoza removes a design from the world: he undoes an illusion through knowledge, and his tone is that of a demolisher of prejudices. Laozi removes nothing and refutes nothing; he removes from us a favor—the pretension of being heaven’s favorite—and he does so through an offered posture, not a demonstration. One corrects an error of the understanding; the other proposes an accord of the heart with the impartiality of things. To take these two gestures as one would be to miss them both.

Is the world made for our use?

Neither says so. For Spinoza, nature pursues no end: it follows the necessity of its being, and thus has no one in view. For Laozi, heaven has no partiality: it favors no one. On one side, no design; on the other, no favor—the world is not ordered for us.

And it is the same knot that unravels. What weighed upon us was the arrow: reading every being as turned toward our use, as a provision awaiting us. To remove it is not to impoverish the world, but to return it to itself—and to return ourselves to our place, a tiny part of a whole that does not aim at us. Spinoza arrives here through knowledge, Laozi by ceasing to prefer; at the end of both paths, the same open palm releasing what it held.

The sun does not shine for us, the sea does not feed its fish for our sake. Things lose nothing by being addressed to no one. They may even become more fully visible—once we stop asking what they are for.