A review of Michael
LaFargue's Tao and Method, by John Allen Tucker, in China Review
International, Vol.3, No.1, 1996. I have included
excerpts of this review. Some technical words are used: "Lebenswelt:"
world of living experience. "Hypostatize:" M. LaFargue's
definition: "To hypostatize something is to speak of it as
though it were an independent entity or force. 'The weather is acting
strangely today' is an hypostatization of the weather." ***** Rather than viewing them as philosophy, TM sees the Laozi's verses as aphorisms that have meaning insofar as they counter a particular "target mentality," the Confucianism of Mencius, and insofar as they express and invite "conversion" of one's own mentality to Laoism (p. 142). The text assumes that self-cultivation is the primary means of preparing oneself for gaining positions of political authority from which one can provide for the greater material prosperity and social harmony of the community at large. The Laozi aphorisms convey a unified message, TM suggests, via their implicit advocacy of "organic harmony," or the harmony that exists naturally but is realizable by understanding that entities are complex wholes which need to be coordinated with others (p. 162). When Laoist aphorisms extol what is quiet, subtle, and empty, their intent, TM claims, is to compensate for prevailing contrary tendencies which might disturb the organic harmony. The highest good for the Laoists, TM rightly notes, is organic harmony. Some sayings of the Laozi, TM claims, have no clear parallel "in our culture." These include sayings like (following LaFargue's translation): "The world has a source, the Mother of the World," and "Tao produced the Oneness/ The One produced the Two/ Two produced Three/ Three produced the thousands of things," "The Tao that can be told is not the invariant Tao," and "Nameless it is the source of the thousands of things." Contrary to the recent interpretations of the Laozi that explain these saying as mystical expressions of cosmological or metaphysical ideas (here LaFargue's chief opponent in Benjamin Schwartz), TM insists that the statements were originally meaningful in the context of the practice of Laoist self-cultivation. It argues that interpreters who see the Laozi in metaphysical, mystical, or cosmological ways bring with them to the text the assumption that the Laozi conveys a philosophical message. Here TM's claims seem contradictory because on the one hand they admit that metaphysical interpretations of the Laozi historically trace back to its earliest commentator, Hanfeizi, but then deny that there is any historical evidence for a metaphysical reading of the text's original message. The whole tradition of Chinese commentary on the Laozi suggests that the metaphysical hermeneutic was not one imposed by Western scholars seeking "Descartes' Dream." TM seems narrow in claiming that Laoist notions such as stillness, emptiness, femininity, softness, the oneness, the uncarved block, the mother, the dao, and de are not actually philosophical notions but instead hypostatizations of states of mind that Laoists cultivated. While these terms were surely crucial in Laoist self-cultivation techniques, TM limits the seminal nature of the Laozi by arguing that it is misconstrued if viewed philosophically. Few sinologists will question TM's claim that self-cultivation was central to the Laozi, but they might challenge TM's assertion that, when rightly understood, there are no philosophical doctrines in that ancient piece of literature. One of TM's key arguments proving that the Laozi conveys no philosophical doctrines notes that the Laozi uses terms like dao inconsistently and unsystematically. For example, TM states: "The lack of concern for consistency is evidence that Laoist cosmogonic sayings do not reflect any attempt to formulate a set of cosmogonic or metaphysical doctrines" (p. 265). TM takes this "as an indication that sayings involving these special terms neither teach nor invoke any system of doctrines." Rather it concludes: "All the terms have basically the same phenomenologically concrete reference (Bedeutung), to the ideal state of mind Laoists cultivate" (p. 209). TM assumes that philosophical concepts can be systematically developed only via consistent and logical analysis. But that assumption is vulnerable to the very flaw that TM warns against: imposing preconceived and primarily Western notions, in this case in regard to what "systematic" means. The Laozi is systematic, but its system is an anti-system, one designed to deny dialectically all systems except those which are equally dialectical. Thus when the dao is subjected to verbal elaboration, it is no longer a constant dao. The system of the Laozi is one of reversal: once "A" is defined, the same is soon denied. Chapter 27, "Goblet Words," of the Zhuangzi expresses a view of language similar to that at work in the Laozi. The Zhuangzi explains that it discourses with "words that are not-words," that is, words which harmonize all things in the equality of Heaven. These dialectical words assert that what is true is false and that what is false is true. The true systematic nature of the Laozi, like that of the Zhuangzi (and Heraclitus perhaps), is intentionally and meaningfully contradictory, since in contradiction Laoists saw the pattern of the cosmos: day contradicts night, life contradicts death, youth contradicts age, and so on. Anything but dialectic, the Daoists believed, contradicted reality. ***** Part 4 of TM, "Translation, Commentary, and Topical Glossary," reveals that LaFargue is very capable of an imaginative reconstruction of the Laozi. His translation is interesting, but it may seem most so to those who are not interested in the text's original meaning. Slipping into "Descartes' Dream," TM translates the text as if it were, or should have been, a systematic and consistently arranged text, one wherein thematically linked sayings are grouped together. TM arranges the chapters around the following categories: (1) Excellence that is Not Outstanding, (2) Stillness and Contentment, (3) Self-Cultivation, (4) Knowledge, Learning, and Teaching, (5) Majesty that is not Awesome, (6) The Soft Way, and (7) Against Disquieting "Improvements." TM justifies its rearrangements of the text by arguing that originally there was no inviolable order to the chapters; thus, presumably, one arrangement is as legitimate as any other. Again, evidence from the Mawangdui text is pertinent to TM's claims. The silk manuscripts do not corroborate all chapter divisions in the Laozi, but they do reveal that dividing the text into halves, one about dao and the other about de (though not necessarily in that order), characterized even the earliest versions of the Laozi. While there are relatively few sacrosanct chapter divisions in the earliest versions of the text, chapters 1 and 38 were nevertheless the recognized openings of the two halves of the text, regardless of which came first. If we are interested in the original text as it is known through its earliest extant versions (and anything else seems merely speculative), then we are obliged to found our understanding of it largely on the Mawangdui text discovered over twenty years ago. But perhaps the fundamental weakness of TM is that it proposes to recover the original meaning of the Laozi. A better project would have been to explicate its original meanings (plural), recognizing that it had many levels of significance. TM does not allow that there were original meanings, but instead insists that there was one, and only one, meaning; surprisingly, it seems to claim that it and only it alone is privy to this original meaning while all previous commentators who have approached the text have missed the same. The latter assumption, it seems to this reviewer, violates the organic harmony of self and community that should characterize Laozi studies. John Allen Tucker
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