Understanding Laozi and Taoist Thought
Laozi is the most important sage of the East. For more than two thousand years his Tao Te Ching, barely five thousand characters long, has been recited, annotated and quoted by countless readers, and it is among the most translated of all Chinese classics. Yet the more widely it is quoted, the more easily it is misread: some take it as a passive philosophy of withdrawal from the world, some as a manual of cunning statecraft, others as mystical obscurity.
This series aims to recover the true depth of Laozi and Taoist thought. What is the Tao? Why is “the Tao that can be spoken not the eternal Tao”? What rigorous thinking lies behind such sayings as “being and non-being give birth to each other”, “reversal is the movement of the Tao”, “the soft and weak overcome the hard and strong”, and “doing nothing, yet leaving nothing undone”? We will see that Laozi’s insight into how opposites depend on and pass into one another has deep affinities with Western dialectics, and echoes Heraclitus across the distance. We will also see how Taoist thought differs from Hegel’s dialectics, and where its strengths and limits lie.
We will further discuss Zhuangzi and the development of Taoism, the complementarity of Taoism and Confucianism, and what Taoist wisdom means for people today. To understand Laozi is to understand one of the deepest sources of Chinese culture.