Adapting

Mercedes Valmisa's 2021 monograph, Adapting: A Chinese Philosophy of Action, constructs a sophisticated and nuanced account of action—what she calls “adaptive agency”—centered on early Chinese philosophical sources. Valmisa argues that the process of acting is one of the most fundamental topics of concern in early China, and Chinese philosophers had their own assumptions, developed their own vocabulary, and built distinctive conceptual tools to engage questions of how to act and how not to act in a given situation. She argues that “early Chinese philosophy of action aims at developing strategies that enable us to manage our own lives in relation with others and our shifting contexts, which include both human and nonhuman actors; efficaciously achieving our goals; shaping our own lives and controlling the outcomes of our actions; coping with openness, uncertainty, and change in ordinary life; and creating order and harmony with/in nature and society” (1–2).Valmisa's facility with early Chinese sources includes, but extends well beyond, the usual set of texts one might expect in such a project. Zhuangzi in particular plays a central role in Valmisa's argument, but she draws on a wide range of materials with depth and ease, from canonical philosophical texts to excavated texts and artifacts of material culture. Chapter 1, “What Is Adaptive Agency?” lays out the key aspects of adaptive agency: the design of strategies ad hoc, the lack of constant standards to select the right course of action, the difference between constitutive standards and structural goals, the radical question of how to act in a world without standards, adapting as a procedural metamodel of action, how to train in adaptability, and how masters educated others in adaptive agency (10). The last passage of this chapter features a good example of Valmisa's use of nonstandard philosophical materials. She considers how the excavated manuscript Entities Necessarily Have Forms Chart (Wu ze you xing tu 物則有形圖) functioned as a performative text, where the philosophical content of the text is the way that the text encouraged a performance in adaptive agency from its readers, inculcating a perspective where how to act and what to do are codetermined between the agent and the situation, and responses cannot be determined a priori but must be negotiated with and adapted to the entities or situations at hand. Even scholars well versed in canonical materials stand to learn something new, both from how more common sources are reframed in her larger project and from the less common sources she so skillfully includes.Chapter 2, “Locating Adaptive Agency,” lays out the philological argument for adapting, examining the key term yin 因 and its constellation of related terms. She gives concrete examples from a variety of sources and carefully explains unorthodox translation choices. The chapter also engages in careful conceptual disambiguation between “adapting” and other concepts that are often involved in translating/parsing yin, including flexibility, relying, conforming, balancing, and spontaneity. Although Valmisa notes that those without the background or interest in philology might move on quickly from this chapter, I think the conceptual disambiguation in this chapter is fantastic (especially between adapting and balance) and crucial for her larger argument.Chapter 3, “Strategy and Control,” is a brilliant discussion of militarist literature. This chapter, with its many concrete examples from across the militarist literature, provides a clear account of what philosophy of action looks like in early China and how adaptive agency developed as one strategy among others and in response to others. The chapter could be usefully excerpted as a stand-alone piece for undergraduate or graduate courses that engage militarist literature, and in my opinion it is perhaps the best philosophical discussion of this literature currently available.Chapters 4 and 5 are tied together. Chapter 4, “The Reifying Pattern,” explores the concept of ming 命, which Valmisa parses as “fate.” She uses case studies from Mengzi and The Way of Tang and Yu to develop an account of ming/fate as unknowable and uncertain, a condition of existence that is impersonal and that provokes feelings of helplessness and the need for coping strategies (119). Chapter 5, “Coping with Uncertainty,” builds on the discussion of fate to discuss mantic and philosophical strategies for coping with existential incompetence, ending with an in-depth exploration of Zhuangzi's sixth chapter, where on Valmisa's reading the characters are demonstrating and advocating for an adaptive approach to existential uncertainty.Chapter 6, “The Unifying Pattern,” explores the implications of adopting an adaptive approach. Valmisa introduces Peter Sloterdijk's term nobject as a way to help readers appreciate what/how the world beyond the person is, if not experienced as an “object” (149). She considers how sages use this perspective and strategy to “de-reify” their experiences and shows the movement from descriptive accounts of adapting (biological, cultural) to normative recommendations for adaptive agency. The book ends with a discussion of freedom, joy, and play as crucial implications of adaptive agency.Valmisa notes in the introduction that part of her goal with the monograph is to enable a shift in perspective, and she has certainly done this and more. I think it is not exaggerating to suggest that this book could set the standard for a generation of scholarship. I do have some small quibbles—I am not yet convinced that ming and tian always or even usually have the relationship Valmisa describes; I am curious about how invincibility and adapting relate to each other in light of the militarist materials—and some larger questions, for instance, about the tension between the notion that adapting is present in some form across many philosophical boundaries in early China, and the sense that, as Valmisa has developed it, it does seem most at home in a Zhuangzian environment. But the quality of the scholarship and the subtlety and care with which Valmisa builds her argument are truly exemplary

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