@michaelshallcross
Being a Hegelian is pretty sweet actually ngl

Gives you the intellectual confidence to think you can find the oppositions and false posits in every position. Gives an idea of historical progression, etc. Etc.
This is probably the same projecting that Schopenhauer used towards Hegel lmao

@bryankam @philosophy

Oh yeah, I’d 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 zhuangzi’s 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 Heraclitus’ impermanence.

I think it’s 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 you’re 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 isn’t even useful to you . I’ve like skimmed other Dao thinkers but I know Zhuangzi I think so perhaps I’m 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 : “words exist because of meaning ; once you’ve 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 ?” (Page 233 in my “The Complete Zhuangzi”. Interestingly I’ve only ever read the Burton Watson translation )
In short this is why the first line is “The tao that can be spoken of(described, named, explained in language as such.) is, and by ‘is’ like material equivalence, the eternal Dao
I mean for me it’s 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 doesn’t 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 it’s 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
:)

@bryankam @philosophy

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 Hegel’s Grammatical Ontology by Jeffrey Reid and even compare it to the semantic approaches offered by people like Brandom.

Cheers.