The Unwobbling Pivot (2): Dag Hammarskjöld and the Chinese Classics

Time, Place

It has been some time since the last entry at this site—apologies to readers from New Paltz (New York) to Singapore who have joined the exploration! Completing the book on Dag Hammarskjöld’s mind and methods, for which this site is a rehearsal and companion, has had to take precedence. But let us resume and do some hard work.

We know from the previous entry that Hammarskjöld was reading Chinese classics in 1956, including the poet Ezra Pound’s translation of three Confucian sourcebooks: The Unwobbling Pivot, The Great Digest, and The Analects. Chinese thought at that stage is neither wholly about the inner life nor wholly about life in society: it concerns both. Through the one, it speaks of the other. In Hammarskjöld’s journal, Markings, there is a marvelously complex but rewarding set of entries in 1956-57 concerning passages in the Pivot and Digest. In this edition we’ll look at the first pair of entries; in the next we’ll look at the third, which if anything is richer still.

Dag Hammarskjöld’s spiritual path during the UN years had entirely private dimensions—that is to be expected—but nonetheless had much to do with renewing himself from day to day so as to serve most effectively his public office and live it as a journey of discovery. In this light, we can understand his close attention to the following passage from The Unwobbling Pivot, a work of the 5th century BCE, said to have been written by the grandson of Confucius, Zisi (Hammarskjöld uses an earlier transliteration, Tsze Sze). The passage has two key topics: the empty chalice as a metaphor for complete freshness and readiness, and the nature of positive influence in the human community.

The ultimate experience is one:
‘Only the most absolute sincerity under heaven can bring the inborn talent to the full and empty the chalice of the nature. He who can totally sweep clean the chalice of himself can carry the inborn nature of others to its fulfillment... this clarifying activity has no limit, it neither stops nor stays.... it stands in the emptiness above with the sun, seeing and judging, interminable in space and time, searching, enduring.... unseen it causes harmony; unmoving it transforms; unmoved it perfects.’ Tsze Sze, not Eckhart.
(Markings, 1956, 134 [trans. slightly revised], citing Pound 175-83)

The passage reflects Hammarskjöld’s search in high office for a selfless attitude which, he had learned, freed him to play whatever role was required by circumstances and to act as wisely as possible. He loved poetry, and the soaring poetry of the passage must have spoken to him, but ultimately its point was down-to-earth: clarity, appropriateness, and improvisational freedom as a leader in world affairs. In his brief closing observation, Hammarskjöld notes the link between Zisi on the radiant power of emptiness and a closely comparable insight in Meister Eckhart, the medieval Christian mystic whose writings accompanied him.

The very next entry in Markings turns from The Unwobbling Pivot to a passage in The Great Digest from which Hammarskjöld quotes just two words—semina motuum, the seeds of movement. This occasions the following complex reflection:

Semina motuum. In us the creative power became will. In order to grow beautifully like a tree, we must attain that restful unity in which the creative will again becomes instinct. Eckhart’s ‘habitual will.’
(Markings, 1956, 135, trans. slightly revised, citing Pound 59)

An interpretive problem here: Hammarskjöld is citing just two words from a longer passage in the Digest, and without the rest of the passage we are a bit lost. Where does the image of the tree come from? Here is the completed text in Pound:

One humane family can humanize a whole state; one courteous family can lift a whole state into courtesy; one grasping and perverse man can drive a nation to chaos. Such are the seeds of movement [semina motuum, the inner impulses of the tree]. That is what we mean by: one word will ruin the business, one man can bring the state to an orderly course.
(Pound, 59-61)

Isn’t this breathtaking?

Hammarskjöld’s metaphor of the tree and his insight about the need for a creative will that has returned to instinct—by which he must mean deeper set than thought on its own, and more sensitive—enrich the concepts we first encountered in the image of the empty chalice. Some months after these Chinese entries, on New Year’s Day 1957, he took up that image again in most demanding terms. Initially encountered in the heaven of classical Chinese visionary poetry, the image now helps frame a rule for life, extremely rigorous—who can live this way?—but credible and attractive:

Each day the first day: each day a life.
Each morning we must hold out the chalice of our being to receive, to carry, and give back. It must be held out empty—for the past must only be reflected in its polish, its shape, its capacity.
(Markings, 1957, 147)

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The unwobbling pivot

Time, Place

At the beginning of 1957, Dag Hammarskjöld wrote a surprising letter to the poet Ezra Pound. ‘It may amuse you to hear,’ he wrote, ‘that your Confucius, especially The Unwobbling Pivot, is one of the books to which I have most often returned during the past years when most policy-making has been of a kind somewhat different…from the one our Chinese friends recommended. Anyway, you have in me a follower in your admiration for the political philosophy to which you, through your translations, have given us such splendid access’ (Nelson, 90). 'Our Chinese friends’ are Confucius and his disciples—key contributors to what we’ve come to call the Axial Era, the 5th century B.C.E.

What did Dag Hammarskjöld read for political insight during his years as secretary-general? He was a continuous learner—but from what did he learn? This week’s exploration may initially seem like a literary tea party—there are details to set in place—but it moves quickly toward something else and better.

A note to readers of this site: in the months to come, I’ll aim to publish new material every two weeks, rather than weekly, while I complete a book on this good man, Dag Hammarskjöld.

Like everyone aware of the situation, Dag Hammarskjöld made a sharp distinction between the literary works of Ezra Pound and the furious insanity of the poet’s later years, for which he was committed to a mental institution in the United States after World War II. Prof. Marie-Noëlle Little, a literary critic and scholar, has shed light on Hammarskjöld’s effort, in cooperation with prominent American authors, to persuade the US authorities to release the very elderly Pound on humanitarian grounds (biblio., Little 2). Hammarskjöld especially valued Pound’s translation of the Chung Yung, variously translated as The Unwobbling Pivot or The Doctrine of the Mean, attributed to Confucius’ grandson, Zisi.

And here the adventure begins. This book of ancient political wisdom, expressed in highly condensed language, often with Pound’s unmistakable crackle, became a living source for Hammarskjöld. He was able to translate its compact, often abstract thought into guidelines endowed with moral force. There is no end of practical pointers in the book, but also severe inspiration—as in the following short passage, which Hammarskjöld transcribed with slight changes into Markings (1956, 133):

Who has this great power to see clearly into himself
without tergiversation, and act thence, will come to
his destiny (that is a high destiny). (Pound, 135)

What changes did Hammarskjöld make? He left out the phrase about ‘high destiny’—it must have seemed beside the point to him, or pretentious; he knew perfectly well that as secretary-general he was engaged with a high destiny. And he italicized the words ‘and act thence’, as an indication of their importance to him. ‘Tergiversation’ is a Latinate marvel of a word, compounding the Latin for ‘back’ and ‘turning’—therefore, turning your back.

Now where are we? Hammarskjöld found in these few ancient words powerful reminders of his own working wisdom: to recognize self-knowledge as the basis for sound and creative dealings with others, to go after self-knowledge with great sincerity and, insofar as possible, without fear or evasiveness, and then not to stop there, but to act on this basis, to enter into the life of the world. His emphasis on those oddly formal words in the passage—to ‘act thence’—reflects in a poignant way his willing immersion in events, his unwillingness to drown his mind.

In the next edition, we’ll continue exploring Hammarskjöld’s attention to ancient Chinese political wisdom.

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