The Philosophy of the Daodejing

Hans-Georg Moeller

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9780231510103
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Eastern Philosophy

For centuries, the ancient Chinese philosophical text the Daodejing (Tao Te Ching) has fascinated and frustrated its readers. While it offers a wealth of rich philosophical insights concerning the cultivation of one's body and attaining one's proper place within nature and the cosmos, its teachings and structure can be enigmatic and obscure.

Hans-Georg Moeller presents a clear and coherent description and analysis of this vaguely understood Chinese classic. He explores the recurring images and ideas that shape the work and offers a variety of useful approaches to understanding and appreciating this canonical text. Moeller expounds on the core philosophical issues addressed in the Daodejing, clarifying such crucial concepts as Yin and Yang and Dao and De. He explains its teachings on a variety of subjects, including sexuality, ethics, desire, cosmology, human nature, the emotions, time, death, and the death penalty. The Daodejing also offers a distinctive ideal of social order and political leadership and presents a philosophy of war and peace.

An illuminating exploration, The Daodejing is an interesting foil to the philosophical outlook of Western humanism and contains surprising parallels between its teachings and nontraditional contemporary philosophies.

CHAPTER

1

How to Read the Daodejing

Darker even than darkness—

Gate of multiple subtleties

LAOZI I

The Daodejing or, as it was called earlier in history, the Laozi,¹ is a book that can both fascinate and trouble its readers. Many feel attracted and inspired by its “darkness.” For some, this darkness appears as a depth that contains intellectual mysteries and wonders. To others, this same darkness appears as an obstacle to understanding. These readers find it difficult to make sense of the cryptic verses and vocabulary. They cannot detect anything truly enlightening in the text and find nothing of interest in the hidden and dark.

The “darkness” of the Laozi is partially due to the fact that long ago it changed from one type of text into another. Initially, the text was not written to be read, particularly not by readers of the twenty-first century. The Laozi is a collection of sayings that grew into its present shape over several centuries, and in its early stages it was transmitted orally rather than in writing. It seems that, originally, the text was neither intended to become a “book” nor to be read by those who studied it. It was to be recited, not perused.

The oldest manuscripts of the Laozi—written on bamboo or silk and unearthed only in the past few decades—have been found in tombs. They had been given to the dead not so much as reading materials but likely as signs of prestige and wisdom, as indicators of power and status for their passage into the world of the ancestors. Writing was done for ritual purposes, in these cases funerals, and funeral rites were the most elaborate and important type of rites in ancient Chinese society. In the life of Chinese antiquity, however, the Laozi was not present in the form of a book. Rather, it has to be assumed that it (or, more precisely, the sayings that later constituted it) was taught orally to those who had access to education, that is, the small privileged stratum of people who held social power and property. These people learned texts such as the Laozi by heart. Its poetic character, the political and philosophical content, and the historical background of the cryptic sayings suggest that they were transmitted from mouth to mouth within a cultural elite. In the time between the fourth and third centuries B.C.E., the Laozi was used by this group as a guideline for the exercise of social power, for the cultivation of one’s body, and for attaining one’s proper place within nature and the cosmos.

It is beyond doubt that the teachings of the Laozi belonged to the core patterns of orientations within which the ancient Chinese interpreted their position within the state and the cosmos. The teachings of the Laozi and other philosophical texts functioned as a general source of meaning. They provided a set of schemata with which the world could be understood, and, more importantly, that helped one to plan action in the world. Texts such as the Laozi are documents of the self-descriptions and self-prescriptions of Chinese antiquity. When we read such texts today, our reading differs considerably from how they were once studied. Our view of the world is not that of ancient China; consequently, the Laozi, printed as a paperback in English translation, is no longer the same as it was more than two thousand years ago. We perceive this text in an entirely different way than a member of the Chinese ruling class who tried to memorize it in a long gone age.

The Laozi, as we find it in a present-day bookstore, is no longer within its original cultural context. It is a kind of mummified transformation of a semantics—a network of meaning—that was once alive in a region which had practically no contact with the predecessors of what we call “Western civilization.” Its semantic network of meaning that once was valid and revered (not only among the living but even, as it was assumed, among the dead) has now become obscure—and this is one of the reasons why the Laozi now seems dark and impenetrable to many of its readers.

Taking all this into account, it is clear that the Laozi cannot have many of the characteristics we have come to expect from a book:

First, the Laozi does not have an identifiable author. In this text there is no writer who expresses individual thoughts. We will be disappointed if we anticipate that the text will introduce us to an original “mindset.” There is no specific person who addresses us. The “I” that we sometimes find in the text is not the ego of an individual who speaks to us and wants to convey some observations. It is rather a marker for the space that the potential reader—or better: listener—is supposed to occupy. The students of Daoist teaching can “insert” themselves and their ego into the text when the “I” is mentioned. In an anonymous way, the Laozi asks those who study it to identify with its teachings. These teachings are not brought forth as unique insights, they are rather introduced as the presentation of a general order.

Second, there is no topic that the Laozi systematically addresses. As a collection of sayings, it expresses its teachings in a fragmentary manner. Its “philosophical crumbs” are not arranged according to a specific pattern, there are no analytical steps taken to solve any explicit philosophical problem, there is no particular order of logical conclusions, no chain of arguments: There is no obvious point that the text aims at. Unlike the Analects of Confucius, there are no dialogues between a master and his students clarifying, in the question-and-answer format, philosophical terms or moral values. There is no discernable issue at stake, no obvious range of content; there is not even a general explanation of what the text is about. The reader certainly realizes that it is trying to convey something, but one is never quite sure what it is.

The Laozi is not a text written to be read in a specific sequence, it does not truly have a beginning and end, and it does not evolve along a certain pathway. The earliest manuscripts that have been excavated suggest that the materials contained in the Laozi were initially part of shorter collections (as in the Guodian texts) and arranged in different orders (as in both the Guodian and the Mawangdui manuscripts).² We are, nowadays, used to writing and books, and we have developed corresponding habits of reading. Such assumptions—for instance, that a text has a beginning and an end—were very uncommon in early Chinese antiquity. For the ancient Chinese, a text such as the Laozi “normally” existed not between the covers of a book but in oral recitation and in memory. The early manuscripts show us only how the text was buried and “mummified.” They do not show us how the text was actually used in life—namely in the form of oral sayings of wisdom that had no strictly fixed order or sequential arrangement.

But how can the Laozi be read if it lacks an author, a clearly stated topic, and a beginning and end? How can it be read if it was not written to be read? Given its very peculiar form, the Laozi can hardly be compared with the traditional linear texts of our culture, such as books, essays, or speeches. In a certain sense it is, surprisingly, easier to compare it to nontraditional and nonlinear texts such as the so-called hypertext of the Internet. The hypertext of the Internet also lacks a specific author, it has no beginning or end, and it is not dedicated to the exclusive treatment of one specific issue.

As opposed to linear texts that unfold along a straight line of argument or plot, hypertext is of a complexity that cannot be disentangled—and it was never meant to be disentangled. The Web functions as a web, not as a thread. It has no true beginning (we can start “surfing” at any site) and no true end (because its content is continuously renewed and expanded).

The hypertext of the Internet functions like a bulletin board onto which new messages are constantly put while others are taken off. In the Net, the semantics of our society is caught. By communicating within the Net, just as outside of it, society builds its structures. Web sites, the little notices on the great board, are of a fragmentary nature. They contain dispersed and more often than not extremely condensed information that we, however, understand, because we are already familiar with their content. We are familiar with what we find on the Net because we know it from everyday life. Also, the Net is extremely repetitive. There is not one bank, one university, one newspaper, or one sports franchise on the Net—there are thousands and thousands of them. Each differs only in details. We are guided through the chaos of the Net by links, crossovers that lead us from page to page, from site to site. With their help we can find slight variations of the same information. The links lead us from one node in the Net to the next.

The brevity of many Web sites presupposes familiarity. Hypertext is a vast collection of more or less concise brochures that normally do not first explain what they are about. Hypertext is not a book and does not introduce the reader to its topic. Previous knowledge is assumed; the experienced “users” of hypertext are familiar with the terrain and surf from site to site without needing to be steered, guided, or instructed. They are already well acquainted with the topic and know what to expect.

Like many Web sites, the Laozi speaks anonymously. There is a lack of individual tone or a personal authorship in the multiple virtual postings. The messages are similar, but the messenger stays hidden or, rather, is insignificant. It does not really matter who exactly updated the text of this or that Web site. Similarly, for understanding a text like the Laozi it is often irrelevant to know who was responsible for a particular version of a particular chapter. This is demonstrated by the fact that in many cases, as on the Internet, “the “updaters” are not even known by name, and because no one is interested in keeping track of this kind of information, it soon becomes impossible to reconstruct a textual history.

As a text, the Laozi is so intricate that it can hardly be disentangled, and just like hypertext, any attempt to disentangle it would be out of place. The Laozi was never “completed.” There is no authentic original version that can be discovered. It has no original order or sequence. The materials were put onto the “bulletin board” of the Laozi at different times in different forms and in different orders. They were rewritten, recomposed, extended, and abbreviated time and again over centuries until, at a certain point, they assumed a “standard” form that resembles our concept of a “book.” However, this happened at a relatively late stage of its textual history and does not represent the nature of the text in its formative period. In the earlier stages of its history, particularly in the four or five centuries preceding the common era, the Laozi functioned less as a book and more as a kind of ancient hypertext, as a textual gestalt that was in a continuous process of construction and deconstruction, of growth and reduction.

Like many of the concise texts on the Internet, the chapters of the Laozi tend to repeat slight variations of a theme without giving an explicit explanation of what this theme means. The experienced “user” of the Laozi already knew what the issue was so there was no need for a prior initiation. The repetition of catchwords, of termini technici, and the establishment of a jargon is typical for a discourse of the already initiated. Those who “surfed” the Laozi in ancient China were familiar with its semantics. This semantics did not have to be elucidated in detail, it was simply used and reused.

The links that enable one to move, not from site to site, but from chapter to chapter, and from verse to verse, within the Laozi are, of course, not electronic signals but, rather, rhetorical ones. The bridges that connect the chapters and verses of this “chaotic,” disorderly text, the hinges that keep the text together and constitute its unity, are the expressions and phrases, the images and symbols, and the strategies and maxims that repeatedly occur in close succession. The “networking” in the Laozi is done linguistically. Every chapter refers to others by the use of the same or similar metaphors, by repeating, in slight variation, similar mottos, and by applying the same set of vocabulary.

When one takes a closer look at the Laozi, it turns out to be an endless chain of rhetorical connections, a network of related sayings, a collection of associated images and instructions. The obscurity of the text vanishes when one follows these links and traces the repetitions and variations. If the chapters are read on their own, or the book is read linearly, the text rem...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Preface: The Philosophy of the Daodejing
• Chapter 1. How to Read the Daodejing
• Chapter 2. The Dao of Sex
• Chapter 3. Yin & Yang, Qi , Dao & De
• Chapter 4. Paradox Politics
• Chapter 5. On War
• Chapter 6. Masters of Satisfaction (Desires, Emotions, and Addictions)
• Chapter 7. Indifference and Negative Ethics
• Chapter 8. Permanence and Eternity
• Chapter 9. Death and the Death Penalty
• Chapter 10. “Without the Impulses of Man”: A Daoist Critique of Humanism
• Appendix 1: A Note on the Textual History of the Daodejing
• Appendix 2: A Note on English Translations of the Daodejing
• Notes
• Index