What Wu Wei Gets Right (and Wrong) About Free Will

When I play the piano, I don’t think about my index finger on the F-sharp. The moment I start thinking about the angle of my wrist, the phrase falls apart and the rhythm trips. You’ve probably seen the same thing somewhere else: the basketball player at the free-throw line who starts thinking and misses a shot he’s made ten thousand times, or the writer whose sentence is coming easily until she stops to wonder whether it sounds clever, and then it’s gone. Past a certain point, trying harder gets in the way.

Daoism has a word for the other side of that point: wu wei (无为). Laozi’s Dao De Jing uses it in short political and cosmic sayings, but the pictures that make it come alive are in the Zhuangzi, and they’re mostly pictures of craftsmen. The most famous is Cook Ding, who carves an ox so cleanly that his knife hasn’t needed sharpening in nineteen years, because, he says, he goes at it by spirit and doesn’t look with his eyes. Wu wei usually gets translated as “non-action,” which makes it sound like lying in a hammock. Cook Ding isn’t lying in a hammock. He’s doing something hard without straining at it, going with the grain of the ox instead of hacking against it.

A careful reader will object that my piano isn’t Cook Ding. I drilled those pieces for years; that’s habit. The Daoists seem to promise something bigger, an ease that works even in situations you’ve never practiced for. I think the two are closer than they look. Good improvisation in an unfamiliar room uses the same ability, reading a situation and answering it without stopping to deliberate, just stretched further. But I’ll grant that the Daoists claim more than any piano teacher would.

Where this gets interesting is free will. Discussions of free will and determinism usually split into two camps: hard determinists, who say physical causes leave no room for freedom, and compatibilists, who say freedom and responsibility survive anyway. Harry Frankfurt, one of the best-known compatibilists, argued that you don’t need to have been able to do otherwise. What you need is for your action to come from desires you actually endorse, your settled character rather than a stray impulse. Even on Frankfurt’s view, though, there’s still someone in the middle doing the endorsing. Wu wei is suspicious of that someone.

The part wu wei gets right is the psychology. In Trying Not to Try (2014), the sinologist Edward Slingerland connects these old Chinese ideas to modern research on two kinds of thinking: a fast, automatic, pattern-matching kind and a slow, effortful, deliberate kind. Skilled performance happens when the slow kind backs off and just keeps watch, and the fast kind does the work. The everyday picture of free will puts a little self in a control room, pulling levers. The research and the Daoists agree that you’re at your best when the control room goes quiet.

Whose action is it, then? If the deliberating part of you steps aside so the playing can happen, who gets the credit for the playing? In one sense the answer’s easy: your body and your years of practice did it. In the sense that matters for praise, the sense where we say “she decided, and she did it,” the answer’s less clear, because the deciding is the part that dropped out.

That’s where wu wei puts pressure on Frankfurt. At first it looks like his dream case. There’s no inner conflict at all; the action flows straight out of deep character. You couldn’t ask for a cleaner example of acting from what you are.

But Frankfurt’s whole project is to keep the agent intact, to show that a person can own their actions even in a determined world. The Daoists aren’t trying to save the agent. They think the agent, the self that stands apart and owns things, is part of what’s in the way. When it gets out of the way, the world can act through you.

So I’m left with two readings, and I can’t fully choose between them. Maybe wu wei is compatibilism said beautifully two and a half thousand years early: an agent acting from settled character, with no friction. Or maybe it’s a real alternative, and the moments when you feel most fully yourself at the piano are the moments when there’s the least of you there.

Editor’s note: you can put the “conscious chooser in the control room” picture to the test yourself. The Urge Clock asks you to act on a spontaneous urge, then mark the exact moment you first felt it.