Tag: Daoism

• April 4, 2013

  The Daoist ethic without principles

  ‘Now the Taoist ideal,’ writes the ever-quarky Raymond Smullyan in his best Lewis Carroll The Tao is Silent, ‘is not so much to feel that he shouldn’t be moral (which is, of course, a morality all its own), but rather to be independent, free, unentangled from moral “principles”‘ (112). The poem from the first chapter of the…
• March 30, 2013

  Split wood, light breathing

  The Dao has nothing to say not because it is mute, not because it is coy but because it communicates in its own way. Best, therefore, not to ask it anything but to rest–anywhere–in the light of its presence. On  this second spring, the mountains will serve that end. The Daoist Sage does everything lightly,…
• March 21, 2013

  Religion without God: Our post-Kantian moment

  Ours is a post-Kantian moment. We can neither do without the idea of transcendence but nor can we embrace it as a substantial presence coursing throughout our lived experiences. For the Kant of the First Critique, reason aspires to travel beyond the bounds of human understanding but, when it does so and when it seeks…
• June 6, 2012

  Walking… philosophy… waking: A reverie

  My personal essay on Daoism and philosophical practice can now be read at The Dark Mountain Project. In terms of genre, it embodies the form of a gift. It also serves as a companion piece for my intellectual history, “Following Nature’s Course,” Dark Mountain Project: Book 3, which is forthcoming.
• February 16, 2012

  Commentary on Laozi’s Daodejing, no. 34: ‘The great Way floods her banks…’

  The excerpt, below, is from Laozi, Daodejing, trans. Edmund Ryden, intro. Benjamin Penny, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 71. Bracketed numbers, e.g., [1], occurring at the end of the lines correspond to my notes following the text. Bear in mind that I have never studied Daoism and, in fact, had not picked up Daodejing…