 The idea that the distinctive character of a “world picture” lies partly in the interests they embody seems plausible. Daoism and Confucianism, at least after a certain stage in the development of these schools, exemplify the way that a set of interests intertwine with beliefs about the world. Both schools exemplify in different ways a conception of understanding the world that is inseparable from the interest in coming into “attunement” with it, to use a felicitous word from Charles Taylor (1982). To become attuned to the world is to see its goodness and to know one’s place in the order of the world. To say that Daoists exemplify this theme about seeing the goodness of the world is in a way misleading, since there is in the Daodejing and Zhuangzi a profound mistrust of our conceptual separations between opposites such as good and bad. The notion of “nonaction” or wuwei, most prominently featured in the Daodejing, does not denote literal inaction but presupposes something like the possibility of an unforced acting with the grain of things, and that presupposes that it is possible to become attuned to that grain while in a state of awareness that is not cluttered by distorting conceptual oppositions. The Daodejing straightforwardly recommends wuwei and in this sense seems to presuppose the goodness of the world and the way its “grain” goes. Confucian texts uphold the ideal of a different kind of attunement, under which the world and its order can be called good without the ambiguity that Daoist skepticism with conceptual opposition creates. For example, the Mencius (the name is actually a latinization given by Christian missionaries for‘Mengzi’) presents a theory that human nature contains the germs or sprouts of goodness, tendencies to certain feelings and judgments such as manifested by the feeling of compassion for a child about to fall into a well. These sprouts are in human nature because they were sent by tian (literally meaning ‘sky’ but most often translated as ‘Heaven’ and perhaps best conceived as an impersonal ordering force of the universe). Taylor thinks that modern science has severed the connection between understanding and attunement. In Fleischacker’s terms, modern science is predicated on different interests, prediction and control foremost among these interests. Taylor believes that the severance of understanding and attunement resulted in superior understanding at least of physical nature. But as he is careful to point out, no single argument can prove global superiority. If we can take attunement as an ideal, we have failed miserably, even as our technological control of nature has increased immeasurably. Perhaps, then, the contrast between a Chinese world picture in which attunement figures prominently and a modern scientific view predicated on the interests of prediction and control serves as an example of the sort of moderate incommensurability Fleischacker has in mind. One question to be raised about this kind of incommensurability, however, is whether it truly involves lack of understanding between traditions. Taylor himself draws examples of the theme of attunement from Plato and the European cultural tradition. Do we really fail to understand the appeal behind world pictures of attunement? Taylor’s complex assessment suggests no inability on our part to understand the force behind both kinds of world pictures. Even to take the stance that attunement pictures are comforting illusions (an assessment less complex than the one Taylor adopts) is to suppose that one does understand the appeal behind them.