On Wed, 23 Oct 1996 brvannorden@vassar.edu wrote:
>If the "distinctions marked out by daos ... are socially constructed," then humans and their societies must exist prior to the dao. But what the passages from both Zhuangzi chapter 6 and Dao de jing ch. 25 clearly state is that the dao (or "a dao") exists prior to everything in the natural world (i.e., prior to "Heaven and Earth"), and, in fact, creates Heaven and Earth.
What the passage from the Zhuangzi states is that a dao that you can pass on (but which can't be received) is before sky and ground. The problem is to understand what sort of thing both could be passed on and could be before sky and ground. I do not know how to give this a metaphysical reading. On the other hand, if the claim is not about the material stuff named by "sky" and "ground", but about the categories marked out in dao, then it makes sense. In which case the claim would not be that dao existed before the natural world of which humans are a part.
As for humans and their societies existing prior to dao, I'm not sure that works. You can't have dao without society, but can you have society without dao? If a dao is a way of doing things, then society and dao seem to come together.
(Indeed a line from "Qiwulun" might be making a related point. In "Names and Objects", the Later Mohists say (from memory) that if you don't have a dao you have nothing to put into practice. Now, the context is different from "Qiwulun", but the claim seems to be one that classical thinkers would accept. But Zhuangzi says, "As for daos, put them into practice and they become complete." Does dao or practice (xing) come first? Well, neither. It is dao that you put into practice, so there must be dao before there is practice -- but it is only through practice that dao becomes complete, so there must be practice before dao. As Holger remarked, chicken and egg.)
I am not competent to discuss the _Laozi_. However, if it does indeed offer a metaphysical dao, the passage you quoted (Wang Bi 25) could be taken as establishing the new use of the word. There is nothing like that in the inner chapters of the _Zhuangzi_. (The one possible exception is the brief mention of "dadao (great dao)" in "Qiwulun". But that is parallel to claims about great distinctions, great benevolence and so on. If "dadao" names a metaphysical entity, so should "daren" and the rest.)
>>Then he [Hansen] argues against
>>"meaning-change" hypotheses. His conclusion is that a term with a well-established philosophical meaning is not likely to be given a radically different meaning by other philosophers without them pointing out the meaning-change. We would wonder about someone who used a word to refer to a social teaching and also of a pre- social absolute, without explicitly marking a distinction between these uses -- especially if the claim is that one should achieve the absolute through unlearning the teachings.
>But there are clear precedents in the history of philosophy for a thinker hypostatizing a term which previously had a concrete meaning. The word EIDOS in Classical Greek originally referred to the visible form or shape of a concrete object. Plato adopts the term to refer to his transcendent entities (the Form of Beauty, of the Good, etc.). Then Aristotle uses the very same term to refer to the immanent form or structure of a particular thing. Now, I am not saying that dao is like either Aristotle or Plato's forms; I'm just pointing out that the kind of "meaning change" which you find so implausible frequently occurs in the history of philosophy.
The question to ask is: How did Plato avoid misunderstandings? One way is that no one would interpret talk of "the eidos of Beauty" as talk of "the visible form or shape of the concrete object Beauty". They might take him to be talking about "that by which we determine if something is beautiful" -- perhaps quite close to the normal use (I don't know). Also, Plato might have discussed the "meaning-change" explicitly (again, I don't know).
Another point is that there were likely no convenient words in classical Greek for the entities Plato wanted to talk about. The same does not seem to be true for the alleged metaphysical use of "dao". "Dao" names something social, the metaphysical Tao names something presocial. "Tian/ nature" and "li/pattern" also name something presocial (not always in the case of "li"). So why not talk of "tiandao" (later people did) or "tianli" (Zhuangzi does, in the Cook Ding story)?
>Furthermore, the "Taoists" do warn us that they are using the term dao in a new way. This is part of the rhetorical force of the paradox the opens the Dao de jing (ch. 1 in the Wang Bi text): "A way that can be spoken of is not a constant way." The text is warning us that it is going to be using old words in new ways.
You put "Taoists" in scare-quotes, but you depend on the existence of such a school for your argument, at least if you want the claim to work for Zhuangzi as well. As Paul Goldin reminded us, there is no evidence that such a school was recognised by pre-Qin thinkers. Though the term is useful to talk about Zhuangzi and Laozi together, there can be no presumption that what goes for Laozi also goes for Zhuangzi.
I suggested above that Laozi 25 could be read as establishing a new use of the word "dao". Laozi 1 does not, however. I can say "A teaching that can be taught is not a constant teaching" (this is not a translation) without any suggestion that I am changing the meaning of the word in some radical way. I am just making a controversial claim.
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Someone asked what work the word "metaphysical" was doing in this discussion. There are (at least) two ways that dao is understood as metaphysical. One, it is the transcendent source of all things. Two, it is the true pattern of reality. In either case, the point seems to be that dao is that by which we unlearn socially-learned behaviour and evaluation, and return to a pure spontaneity.
DanDate created: 10/28/96 Last modified: 10/28/96 Questions? Contact: Stephen C. Angle