Flowing

 Flowing

There is a moment near the end of 冯友兰’s History of Chinese Philosophy where the voice softens. After centuries of schools, arguments, sages, wars, reforms, dynasties rising and collapsing, he does not end with triumph or doctrine. He ends with a description of how a human being may live. Four ways, he suggests—not as ladders to climb, but as modes of inhabiting the same world. What startled me when I first encountered this was how little changes on the surface. A person at the beginning and a person at the end may look identical. They wake, work, eat, speak, age. And yet inwardly, they are living in different universes.

In the earliest way of being, life simply happens. One is born into conditions, customs, needs. Hunger dictates action, fear shapes choices, desire pulls the body forward. History has always been full of such lives. Think of peasants during the Han dynasty or medieval Europe, whose entire cosmos was weather, soil, tax collectors, and ritual. They did not ask what life meant. They endured it. This was not ignorance so much as unbroken immersion. Like fish unaware of water, they lived without distance from their living.

Then something changes. Reflection appears, often triggered by scarcity or competition. The Warring States period in China was such a moment. As kingdoms fought, thinkers emerged who asked not how to survive, but how to win. Strategy, benefit, efficiency entered the moral vocabulary. This utilitarian consciousness has never left us. It flourished again during the Industrial Revolution, when human value was measured in output, speed, optimisation. Even today, this way of being dominates our cities. We speak in metrics, targets, productivity. Life becomes a problem to be solved, and the self a tool to be sharpened.

But history shows us the cost of this narrowing. After wars, after revolutions, after the devastation of meaning reduced to utility, another voice always emerges. In China, it was Confucius walking among the ruins of ritual order, insisting that life must be more than survival and advantage. In Europe, it was Kant after the Enlightenment, speaking of duty beyond inclination. In such moments, humanity begins to ask not what works, but what is right. Responsibility returns. The individual feels answerable not only to outcomes, but to conscience. The world does not become easier at this stage; it becomes heavier. One carries others, traditions, expectations. And yet something stabilises. Meaning, though fragile, becomes shared.

And then, if one lives long enough—long enough to be disappointed even by morality itself—another shift may occur. This is the quiet territory Feng Youlan gestures toward, where the human being returns to the world without carrying it on their shoulders. Outwardly, nothing changes. One still teaches, farms, writes, raises children, drinks tea. But inwardly, the need to justify existence dissolves. The Daoist sage moves through the market without clinging. The Chan monk sweeps the floor as if sweeping were the universe itself. History remembers such figures poorly because they leave no monuments. Their victory is reconciliation.

Perhaps this is why the Daoist never answers the question of life’s meaning. Laozi watched empires strain toward greatness and collapse under their own seriousness. He saw that meaning, once demanded, becomes a tyrant. Zhuangzi laughed at philosophers who tried to pin the cosmos down with concepts. For them, the question “What is the meaning of life?” was already a symptom of misalignment. Life does not explain itself, they would say. It flows. To insist otherwise is to fight the river.

Confucius, ever the realist, would disagree without opposing. If the cosmos is silent, he would say, then humans must speak through conduct. Meaning is not discovered; it is enacted. A father caring for a child, a minister refusing corruption, a friend keeping faith—these do not answer metaphysical riddles, but they prevent the world from unraveling. History remembers Confucianism not because it solved existence, but because it held societies together when nothing else could.

Buddhism, arriving later, cut through both positions with surgical clarity. The Buddha did not argue about meaning at all. He looked at suffering—at aging bodies, anxious minds, grieving parents—and asked why it persists. His answer was unsettlingly simple: because we cling. To pleasure, to identity, to stories about who we are and why we matter. Liberation, in this view, is not finding meaning, but no longer requiring it. When clinging ends, the question dissolves by itself.

I think of Sisyphus here, eternally pushing his stone. When Albert Camus wrote about him after the Second World War, Europe was exhausted with grand explanations. Camus refused consolation. The stone will fall again. There is no final victory. And yet, he insisted, consciousness itself transforms the task. To know the absurd and continue anyway is a form of freedom. Not transcendence, but dignity.

This is where Feng Youlan’s quiet insight begins to feel unexpectedly contemporary. We are now facing another historical rupture—this time not of empires or ideologies, but of intelligence itself. Artificial intelligence challenges us in precisely the domain we once thought uniquely human: cognition, pattern recognition, language, even creativity. Many respond from the utilitarian stage, asking how to optimise, dominate, or monetise it. Others retreat into moral panic, demanding strict control, fearing displacement. Both reactions are understandable. Both are incomplete.

Perhaps the deeper lesson is inward rather than technical. AI may outperform us in calculation, synthesis, even expression. But it does not inhabit the stages Feng described. It does not suffer meaning, nor release it. It does not reconcile itself to mortality. If humans attempt to compete with machines on utility alone, we will lose. But if we take seriously the final stage Feng gestures toward—where outward action remains ordinary while inward attachment loosens—then coexistence becomes imaginable.

In such a world, humans need not prove their worth by efficiency. Our calling may be quieter. To witness. To contextualise. To remember without clinging. To act responsibly without imagining ourselves indispensable. AI can calculate; it cannot reconcile itself to existence. That reconciliation remains a human art.

And so I find myself still typing. Not because I believe writing will solve anything. But because thinking, recording, and sharing are how I participate in the flow. I am not searching for the meaning of life anymore. I am watching how meaning appears, disappears, and leaves traces behind. Words on paper. Text in digital space. Small anchors against forgetting.

Perhaps that is enough. History does not ask us to finish the story. It asks only that we enter it honestly, and leave marks gentle enough for others to recognise themselves within.