The way dao that can be spoken of dao Is not the constant way dao The name ming that can be named mi

1
The way dao that can be spoken of daoIs not
the constant way daoThe name ming that can
be named mingIs not the constant name
ming.The nameless was the beginning of heaven
and earthThe named was the mother of the myriad
creatures.--Laozi, DDJ 1
2

• How does the Ddj use language?
• Why does the Ddj use paradoxical language?
• What does it have to say about language?
• See Ddj, 1, 2, 5, 14, 23, 32, 43, 46, 56, 73,
  81.
• What is the meaning and role of binary opposites,
  contraries, and opposites?
• See Ddj 2, 22, 26, and 28.

3

• The distinction between philosophy and religion
  is ambiguous in the case of Daoism insofar as
  there are many Daoisms even if there is only one
  Dao.
• Daoism is a philosophy of wise sages an
  aesthetic of wine-drinking poetic literati an
  anarchistic, libertarian or libertine politics a
  mysticism of fasting the self and riding the
  wind, and/or a contradictory set of popular
  religious practices and institutions.

4

• If we consider Daoism as a popular religion, it
  blends into the practices and beliefs of Chinese
  folk-religion.
• Religious Daoism includes and flows into a great
  wealth and variety of practices and goalsfrom
  the focus on techniques of spiritual
  self-discovery and transformation (inner
  alchemy), to the promotion of bodily longevity
  and the martial arts, to practices such as
  astrology and geomancy (feng shui), to rites
  dedicated to various gods and immortals, and to
  forms of alchemy, magic and sorcery.

5

• Confucianism (rujia)
• Dao as moral order
• Moral cultivation
• Living according to moral duty
• Rationalistic and moralistic
• Things are hierarchical, ordered, set in their
  place.

• Early Daoism (daojia)
• Dao as natural order
• Cultivation of natural and spontaneous
• Living according to nature
• Naturalistic and mystical
• Things are dynamic, flowing, relativistic,
  perspectival, and equal

6
Early Daoism is sometimes described as the
spiritual counter-culture of China. However,
they are not Beats or Hippies! Laozi and Zhuangzi
advocate living according to the Dao and the
basic flow of nature in a different sense than
western nature-romantics.
7

• The Dao De Jing emerged as a radical and powerful
  countercultural alternative vision in an
  epochthe Warring States Period (403-221 BCE)of
  conflict and uncertainty. Although not pacifist,
  it turns away from assertions of power and law
  (legalism) and the moral coercion of virtue
  (Confucianism) to questions of the
  self-cultivation of naturalness and spontaneity
  in general and of the cultivation of the sage and
  true king in particular. The later Chinese
  tradition states that its primary focus is
  self-cultivation, even if it is the cultivation
  of spontaneity, of coming to feel at home in the
  world and making this life in its immanence
  significant in order to intensify and optimize
  experience.

8

• Recent evidence suggests that the work
  attributed to Laozi must have been standardized
  as a classic fairly early. Its genre is that of
  proverbial wisdom literature that encourages a
  sympathetic audience to conjure up the conditions
  necessary to make its point. It does not present
  us with doctrines or propositional truths,
  whether religious or philosophical, but with an
  art of nondogmatic thinking/living that calls for
  noncoercive collaboration such that listeners are
  required to enact the text in their own concrete
  and unique ways. This way of thinking evokes and
  indicates its own enactment through a
  prescriptive regimen of self-cultivation.

9

• The Dao De Jing calls for responsive
  participation both in the text and in the world.
  This responsive spontaneity as a creative
  mirroring response to the other on its own unique
  terms. The primary senses of ziran ??spontaneity
  and the intrinsic uniqueness or self-so-ing of
  the other are related through responsiveness.
  The oneness and interdependence of beings with
  their singularity and uniqueness.

10

• The primary metaphor that governs this connection
  is not that of the organism but of the family.
• The Chinese cosmology of this period, both Daoist
  and Confucian, sees all relations as familial.
• The person is thus inherently constituted in a
  web of relations in which she has a unique place
  and position.

11

• The primary familial metaphor of ru ?  or
  Confucian thought is that of father and filial
  son, but mother and child take precedence in
  early Daoism. This explains the repeated appeals
  to the feminine (Ddj 5, 10, 28, 61), the maternal
  (Ddj 1, 20, 25, 28, 51, 52, 59), and the
  child-like (Ddj 10, 20, 28, 49, 52, 55) in the
  Dao De Jingthat is, to the creative and fecund,
  the receptive and affirming, the natural and the
  spontaneous.

12

• Early Daoism does not lead to the dichotomy
  between systematic totality and the abstract
  isolated individual that dominates the one/many
  metaphysics of Western thought. It is neither
  totalizing nor dualistic. Instead the focus/field
  relationship brings out the singularity in
  contextuality or the dynamic interconnectedness
  of particulars.

13

• The Dao implies the mutuality of the singular and
  the whole rather than the dominance of one term.
  It thus evokes the hermeneutical circle that
  indicates the movement between singular and whole
  without the possibility of closure or reducing it
  to the priority of one of its terms.

14
Who are the Daoists and why do some of them love
mountains, streams, and wilderness?
15
Daoism advocates a spiritual aesthetic of
naturedo beauty, balance, harmony, and
naturalness make a difference?
16

• Why prioritize wood and water?
• What does unhewn wood signify in Ddj 15, 19, 28,
  32, and 57?
• What is the importance of water in Ddj 8, 15,
  16, 66, and 78?

17
What is the significance of the incessant
activity of life creativity?
18
What is the ecological significance of Daoist
philosophy? Do you agree or disagree that by
living in harmony with nature, understood as an
interdependent whole, both the self and the
environment will be healthier? Why do Daoists
and Confucians focus on the concept of health?
19
Whereas the western view often sees nature as the
raw material of its activities, operating as
atomistic discrete units according to mechanical
laws of cause and effect, the Taoist sees nature
as a living whole that is harmonious in its
constant transformations.
20
Living according to nature means not to force
things but to embrace the flows and rhythms of
life, to live naturally and spontaneously
according to the inner organization of ones own
and others nature.
21
Daoism is based on a few principlesDao the
way which informs and runs through all
things.Ziran unforced and uncontrived
spontaneous naturalness. Wuwei no action it
means effortless action, deferential or
non-coercive activity, or the principle of the
least amount of effort with the maximum results.
Can we learn from the Daoism and be more
ecologically or naturally minded than we
currently are?
22

• The significance of the wu ?  words.
• These terms do not imply some kind of
  indifference or inactivity. For example, they
  translate wuwei ??  not as nonactivity but as
  noncoercive action in order to highlight its
  receptive and responsive character (Ddj 43-45).
• Wuyu ?? does not imply the negation of desire but
  the achievement of deferential desire. Nor does
  Daoism demand a governing principle or arche,
  since this kind of wisdom or knowledge (zhi ? )
  is rejected as the growing absence of the dao
  (Ddj 18-19).

23

• Wuzhi ??  does not mean embracing ignorance but
  is rather an unprincipled knowing involving
  receptive and responsive mirroring. This is
  crucial to a proper understanding of the text.
  This interpretation helps clarify the
  controversial Chapter 3, which seems to justify
  the oppression of the people, and which is thus
  incongruent with the emphasis on noncoercive and
  even compassionate action seen elsewhere.
  However, the denial of knowledge and desire in
  this passage reflects the assertion of the value
  of anarchic knowing (wuzhi) and objectless or
  deferential desire (wuyu). This passage
  accordingly should be read as suggesting
  liberation from knowledge (wuzhi) and desire
  (wuyu) through noncoercive action (wuwei) that is
  advocated throughout the work.
• The political implications of this text are
  anarchistic and minimalist in the sense that they
  suggest noncoercive political structures as well
  as tolerance and appropriateness.

24

• Daoism involves the ontological parity of beings,
  which in Zhuangzi is presented through the
  principles of difference or perspective and
  equality or parity between beings. Another
  consequence of this unprincipled and anarchic
  knowing (wuzhi) is that the myriad or
  ten-thousand things (wanwu ??) are to be
  understood as processes and events (15, 67). They
  are happenings that involve both transformation
  and integrity (15-16). The dao is thus
  creativityor fecundity and generativityitself,
  intrinsically connected to our own
  self-creativity and co-creativity.

25

• The Dao De Jing is radically nondualist, since it
  insists on the unique particularity or difference
  and the interdependence of things. This dynamic
  nondualism is a wider feature of Chinese
  thinking, as one can see with the word xin ?. Xin
  is usually translated as heart and/or mind, but
  thinking and/or feeling brings out its process
  character. The Dao De Jing realizes the aesthetic
  harmony, balance, and need to keep the center
  precisely in embracing the transformation and
  change, the fluidity and flow, of this world. One
  is thus centered in being decentered and
  spontaneous in being receptive and yielding.
  Daoism embraces the mutuality of opposites. It
  speaks through saying and unsaying, affirming and
  denying, in order to evoke the nameless (wuming
  ??), the namelessness that is the fetal
  beginning (Ddj 1).

26

• Laozis Daoism is a provocative philosophical
  way of thinking, since it presents us with a form
  of nonreductive naturalism. It is nonreductive,
  since it embraces both the wholeness and
  singularity of nature. It is naturalistic, since
  (1) it does not devalue immanence and (2) it
  avoids and critiques the humanism (in its
  Confucian guise) which reduces the significance
  of things to human purposes and values.

27

• The Dao De Jing is not humanistic (man is not the
  center of all things) without being anti-human,
  since humans find their significance in relation
  to being underway themselves.
• ???? Dao is great.
• ??? Heaven is great.
• ??? Earth is great.
• ???? Humans are also great.
• ??????... These are the four great powers...
  (Ddj, 25).

28

• Is it possible to argue that the Ddj develops a
  critique of morality that is still ethical?
• For example, although benevolence and
  intervention in the name of helping all things is
  rejected when it undermines the sages own course
  (ziran ??) in Chapter 64, compassion / loving
  kindness is seen as the fruit of noncoercive
  activity (wuwei ??) in Chapter 67.

29

• The criticisms of conventional and Confucian
  ethics are not so much anti-ethical as they are
  arguments about the degeneration of the ethical
  into moral rules and conventions (Ddj 18-20).
  Some passages speak of going beyond good and evil
  and others of treating the just and the unjust
  alike, but these suggest overcoming conventional
  discrimination and being equally responsive to
  all.

30

• Chapters 3 and 5 contain the most controversial
  passages of the Ddj. Can they be understood as
  Daoist or must they be seen as "legalist"
  additions?
• Do Daoism and legalism share any common features?
  To answer this, compare the first paragraph of
  Han Feizi, chapter 5 (p. 298). Why do you think
  this passage, and works such as The Art of War,
  sound Daoist? Does this mean they are the same?
  See Han Feizi, chapter 6 (p. 302) to address this
  last question.
• If Daoism and legalism are the same, what do you
  make of those passages in the Ddj rejecting war
  and overusing laws and punishments, and those
  suggesting benevolence to the people?

31

• What should we make of Chapter 5 and its
  controversial reference to straw dogs?
• Does it mean that nature is indifferent to
  humans, cruel to humans, or can the reverential
  aspect of the straw dog ritual be highlighted,
  where the straw dogs are given their moment and
  then returned to nature.
• This suggests that nature and the sage revere the
  singular in its passing moment, rejecting
  institutionalized morality not for immorality or
  moral indifference but for moral spontaneity.

32

• Can a work that criticizes the exploitation and
  oppression of the people by their rulers, the
  decay of ethical responsiveness into an adverse
  bureaucratic morality, and the unforgiving
  consequences of war be unethical or nihilistic?

33

• Do you agree or disagree that we need to look at
  the whole rather than isolated parts and at the
  inner principle rather than at the external
  appearance?
• Is the attempt to conquer and exploit nature
  leading to our own loss of dignity and identity,
  self-alienation, self-denial, and possible
  self-destruction?

34

• Do we need to see the environment not just a
  setting but as a basic fabric of life to which we
  also belong?
• Do we need to awaken to self-examination and
  self-knowledge and not simply be a victim to a
  limited and partial conceptual prison?