Category: education
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‘I don’t know… Let’s find out.’
Earlier this week, one conversation partner asked me to give him a better account of the art of inquiry. I replied that a certain genre of discourse would arise and would be suitable for a certain age. Panegyric and encomia would arise during, and be suitable for, a heroic age, since the poet’s job would…
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Can what really matters pass the test of being a joke?
‘How do you know that what you’re making–or what you’re thinking of making–really matters?’ This was the question that my friend Dougald Hine and I were discussing over Skype at the end of last week. We started joking, he recounted how he’d come up with the one liner that ‘there’s something joke-like about the nature…
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‘Yet here I am in my wretchedness’
The end of Chapter 6 of Chuang Tsu’s Inner Chapters is startling. It has been raining for 10 days, and one friend, Tsu Ysu, believes his friend Tsu Sang to be in a bad way. When he arrives at Tsu Sang’s house, he hears a lamentation. ‘O Mother! O Father! Is it heaven, or is it man?’
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‘Knowing enough to stop when one does not know is perfection’
Chuang Tsu observes, ‘Knowing enough to stop when one does not know is perfection.’ I welcome Chuang Tsu’s thoughts, his humor and his lightness. His measure and delight. Kant and Locke wrote of knowing one’s limits, but Kant said nothing of stopping and would have been shocked by Chuang Tsu’s epigrammatic ending: that stopping when…
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Arguing is useless
In Chapter 2 of the Inner Chapters, Chuang Tsu says, ‘Words that argue miss the point.’ Arguing is useless, since there is no sense in wanting to be right and no change of heart in being proven wrong. Arguing makes a mockery of dispassion: niceties turned into traps in order to be sprung upon unprepared opponents.…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 