@bryankam @philosophy
Has anybody? Well, yes, at a wild guess I'd say lots of people have. At very least, you. đ
@bryankam @philosophy
Has anybody? Well, yes, at a wild guess I'd say lots of people have. At very least, you. đ
@bryankam @philosophy If you read ć as "logos", then the opening of the Dao De Jing suggests that they were seen as distinct concepts, but still closely related, as suggested by the symmetry. See e.g. the Legge translation:
The Dao that can be trodden is not the enduring and unchanging Dao
The name (ć) that can be named is not the enduring and unchanging name
@Animus714 @bryankam Well in this context it's used as a verb, so how would you turn a noun meaning path/way into a verb? You often see people use "follow" as well.
I've previously joked that to preserve the noun-verb symmetry in that line, you could also go for "tracks gonna track"
You might be interested to look at how Zhuangzi in many ways engages with the paradoxes of his contemporary of the "dialectician" school Hui Shi (School of Names, Mingchia).
It's a little weird because it was through paradoxes (what survives as the 10 paradoxes in Zhuangzi) something like a skeptical nominalism towards ontological essentialism. Daoism in Zhuangzi at least radicalizes this further and vibes with a "greater understanding" in the complete transience of even nominalist conceptions of identity (Did I dream I was the butterfly or am I the butterfly dreaming a man? you know)
So in this sense I don't think Daoism usually maps onto representational, categorical systems of the Logos of western discourse, except in heterodox offerings.
(A fun comparitive piece is Genuine Pretending about Stirner and Zhuangzi but that one's crazy.)
I think the only real classic mainline treatment I can really recall enough to recommend right now is Benjamin Schwartz's "The World of Thought in Ancient China.""
I'm no where near an expert in chinese philosophy but I do find the most fruitful parallelisms simply must lie in Hegel. A really cool book that might shift how you view a logic like Hegel's can relate to language is Hegelâs Grammatical Ontology by Jeffrey Reid and even compare it to the semantic approaches offered by people like Brandom.
Cheers.
@bczahler @philosophy Hey B.C.! Thanks for this. I'm a big fan of #Zhuangzi and know Hui Shi, mainly through A. C. Graham, both his translation of the Zhuangzi as well as in Disputers of the Tao.
What I was getting at with the Logos question is pre-Socratic Logos, which seems to be more about speech/discourse.
I had the impression that Tao can also mean "speak," as in the first line of the Tao Te Ching?
I don't know the Schwartz! Nor do I know Reid/Hegel much! This was really helpful :)
@MortenBay @bczahler @philosophy Thank you! I normally just look at five different english translations of the #Tao and try to guess what's going on đ
http://www.mobilewords.pro/Tao/chap01.htm
https://terebess.hu/english/tao/_index.html
Never thought to get an actual philosophical edition, brilliant idea
@bryankam @bczahler @philosophy ...and one that's (beautifully) written by two of the greatest Western scholars of Chinese philosophy ever to boot :)
Have you ever read Ursula Le Guin's version? It's not very scholarly, but very poetic.
Oh yeah, Iâd just state it simply that a like Gospel of John level Logos, a willed word explaining into existence the cosmos is quite incompatible with my interpretation of zhuangziâs portrayal of Dao
I mean quite emphatically the Pre-Socratic conception of Logos to me, again not my strong shit either way, is that logos is the organizing force. Reason itself. We link it to word I think because reason is about explaining the causes and transitions even in like Heraclitusâ impermanence.
I think itâs quite difficulty to say except that there are as you are aware tiny daos and then the Dao, the great mystery that all falls into. If youâre like Philo of Alexandria you set up Logos as a mediator between the transcendental god and our experience being modular. But this explanation is, well, not the Dao but instead just a huge assemblage of tiny understandings (language) precisely explaining all matters of life and flesh and such.
But Zhuangzi (and I suppose this maybe isnât even useful to you . Iâve like skimmed other Dao thinkers but I know Zhuangzi I think so perhaps Iâm preaching to the choir ) remark how much of it is both the rejection of the requirement for the assemblage (language) and also the intuitive or spiritual or whatever accessibility to the lessons of Dao; Perhaps my favorite statement from Zhuangzi that is both baffling and hilarious : âwords exist because of meaning ; once youâve gotten the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so that I can have a word with him ?â (Page 233 in my âThe Complete Zhuangziâ. Interestingly Iâve only ever read the Burton Watson translation )
In short this is why the first line is âThe tao that can be spoken of(described, named, explained in language as such.) is, and by âisâ like material equivalence, the eternal Dao
I mean for me itâs like : obviously the Dao is like « Logos »in that both are superficially conceptually « underlying reality », however to me Zhuangzi at least teaches that such Dao as interpreted via language is not of course the same thing. Language doesnât even become to get close to what the ontological features are for Zhuangzi, whereas in Christian Logos certainly, we are led to believe that the access to reason is at similar , perhaps barely, infinitesimally approximate, but still similar to that of God. Zhuangzi will argue for none of this explanatory power of language to ever approach the realm it thinks itâs approaching
One can even make the profound point that Zhuangzi is precisely like that of Max Stirner, more of a anti-philosopher committed to the absolute relativist plurality of shifting objects that language desperately tries to organize and control
I hope that this is of any interest or use to you at all
:)