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"Mountain"
Luo Erchun 1987 Oil on canvas 36" x 46" Luo
Erchun still prefers to paint scenes from his homeland, Hunan Province,
even though he has lived most of his life in Beijing and sometimes in
Paris. He feels a passion for this and is particularly interested in
the color of the soil there which he still remembers from his childhood.
CC_0346
The Hefner Collection |
| Stanford Studies on Daoism Definition of "Daoism" Philosophical Daoism: A Primer The Zhuangzi strain, informed by contact with Chinese philosophy of language, recognized that a blanket anti-language position was self-censuring. Their pluralist reading is that all de facto rival practices are natural daos in virtue of their being actual practices. Human daos in general are a part of natural dao . That they "are walked" shows they are, in that sense, compatible with natural constancies. Similarly, all actual rival daos are part of great dao simply in virtue of being followed — as the Zhuangzi says, "daos are made by walking them". Both pluralist and primitivist Daoism would reject the Confucian-Mohist assumption that political authority should bring about a harmony of daos — making everyone follow a single dao. The social world survives as well (or better) when people follow different ways of life. Focus on either tian nature:sky dao or Great dao thus undermines the sense that it is imperative to master any particular first-order dao. The primitivist version of Daoism, however, typically takes the form that nature does endorse a particular normative dao, albeit not a human one (particularly one in discourse form). There is a single, constant, correct way of life that cannot be expressed or presented in practices, rules, narratives, maps, examples, songs or any other human or social form of communication and advocacy. Though we usually think in terms of the natural dao, there could, in principle, be multiple, equally natural and "primitive" daos. The contrarian version expresses itself via deliberate flaunting or "reversing" all the norms and attitudes in the conventional dao. Laozi's is the most famous example of this dao of reversal, though overtones can be found in Zhuangzi's description of "the perfect" person or ability as one that is so incomprehensible and so irrelevant to our concerns that he appears as the opposite whatever we normally respect. The political consequence is still a government guided by a discourse dao — the systematic reversal of the dominant Confucian dao. Relativist (pluralist) or skeptical versions need not deny that that there are norms for endorsing some daos over others, but would observe that the norms of endorsing a dao constitute a distinct dao that is presupposed. It, by hypothesis, is also both natural and "actual." Relativism may deserve the ‘Daoist’ appellation on the further ground that it entails that normative authority comes from dao not from the Confucian-Mohist tian nature:sky. It's not that we should flaunt or violate nature, but that, in principle, we can't. Hence, "follow nature" is empty (tautological) as a normative guide — a dao that does not dao. Whatever dao we choose will be a natural one, in virtue of being one we can choose and "walk". The naturalist, mystical, and intuitionist versions similarly draw differently nuanced conclusions from this analysis of the role of daos in nature and actual history. Intuitionism tends toward the religious strain's claim of special epistemic access, but could be developed in a egalitarian way. Naturalism is inherently more egalitarian while mysticism's implications are unclear. Daoist mysticism tends toward what some call "external" mysticism. It arises from these reflections on the context sensitivity and normative complexity of dao rather than on some "inner" experience as of an inexpressible "oneness." If combined with some doctrine of a particular (discourse or non-discourse) dao, it tends to foster religious claims of superlative "access" to a mystically "correct" penetration of the complexity — though it may still claim that the insight is equally accessible to everyone. Despite the divergence in these versions of Daoism, all can claim to underwrite a theme of harmony with nature — the pluralist seeing the point of such harmony as permissive & tolerant, the primitivist seeing it as a more intolerant rejection or prohibition of any conventional dao and so forth. Metaphysically, Daoism is naturalistic in that any first-order dao must be rooted in nature. |