04/23/2026
“The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.”
—Laozi, Tao Te Ching, Chapter 1 (D.C. Lau translation, 1963, p. 57)
This opening line of the 'Tao Te Ching' sets the tone for the entire text.
The ultimate nature of reality (the Tao) cannot be fully captured in language, concepts, or fixed descriptions. Any articulation is already a partial rendering, not the living whole.
From a Holovitalist perspective, the “real” is not a static object to be described, but an ongoing unfolding.
Concepts are tools within the process, not containers of it.
Any worldview (including Holovitalism itself) is at best a participatory approximation.
Trying to define reality is more like a fun game we can play, but it's not certain we can win. Regardless of whether we eventually win this game doesn't matter. We need to have fun playing it.
If we do hope to win, we have to let go of being fixated on winning, or even on thinking that we've figured out how (as the game is constantly changing). Instead w are learning how to move with it, articulate within it, and remain open to its excess.
Laozi's statement, perhaps not intentionally, closes the door on all totalizing frameworks.
Holovitalism keeps the door open a smidge, but remembers it never had hinges to begin with. We envisioned the door, and the game of getting through it to begin with.
This is similar, and related, to the academic skeptical position compared to the Pyrrhonic. The Academics say we must doubt the truth of everything, but suspend disbelief to function. The Pyrrhonists say, “Nothing is true, not even this.”
That is part of the point: the statement folds back on itself. It is paradoxical in the same way Laozi’s statement is paradoxical. The Tao cannot be fully spoken, yet it must be spoken of. The moment we try to totalize reality in language, the claim undermines itself from within. In that sense, the whole thing starts to resemble a philosophical strange loop.
(This is obviously similar to the liar’s paradox—“this statement is false”—and related to Gödel’s incompleteness.)
It could be seen as self-negating (especially if approached from a mental-rational "law of non-contradiction" centered angle), but the statement folds back on itself reflexively. It is paradoxical in the same way Laozi’s statement is paradoxical. The Tao cannot be fully spoken, yet we can't help but to grasp at it. The moment we try to totalize reality in language, we freeze and shatter and destroy it—the claim undermines itself from within. In that sense, the whole thing turns into a philosophical strange loop.
Wittgenstein (at least early on in his philosophy career) often suggests this is a problem of the limits of language. In the Tractatus, he writes “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world,” but perhaps this is not merely a problem in language, but a clue about reality itself. Wittgenstein helps with the claim that language cannot totalize 'the real' without running into self-undoing. Holovitalist thought begins, here, with Wittgenstein’s insight into the limits of language, then goes beyond by reading those limits as a clue to the processual character of reality itself (something Bergson/Whitehead did as well, independently of, but in alignment with ancient Taoist thought).
Reality does not seem to unfold in a flat, linear, binary fashion but in a dynamic, recursive, perhaps even toroidal, and torsional way—continually folding through itself, reformulating kaleidoscopically, while still retaining some continuity of well-established patterns. From within a rigid either/or logic, this reflexivity can look like contradiction or a circular fallacy. But from within a living and processual view, it looks more like the way reality actually works, even empirically, which is self-relating, self-differing, and endlessly unfolding without ever becoming reducible to a final, static form.
Another important piece to consider here is how the unnoticed assumptions of the lens, or worldview itself shape the empirical experience of reality itself (something Husserl, Heidegger, and phenomenology explore deeply). Changing the "lens" can show us a whole new world, but even simply noticing that we are necessarily looking through one is enlightening.
Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra says, “After first examining one’s means, one should either begin or not begin. Surely, it is better not to begin, than to turn back once one has begun.”
Perhaps knowing that language, rationality, logic, and our other conceptual tools are likely unable to ever allow the Tao to be fully "told," we would have not begun. But we are all born well in the midst of this project, to which there may be no end.
And there is no turning back.
Let's keep going.
(photo credit - Nguyen Duc Toan, Pexels)
