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Introduction 1 Notes Introduction 1. Oscar Wilde, “A Chinese Sage,” in Reviews, ed. by Robert Ross (London: Metheuen and Co., 1908), 533–534. 2. Wang Fuzhi , Chuanshan Quanshu , Volume 10 (Changsha: Yuelu Shushe, 1998), 613–614. 3. It should be noted that I am not taking what Michael Puett has called a “contrastive approach” to early Chinese thought where I understand texts to be representative of entire cultures or ways of life. Rather, my methodological aim is to complicate the categories of compari- son by illuminating the contexts and histories of interpretation in the background of much comparative work, revealing how certain “uni- versal yardsticks” like “morality” connote meanings which are more parochial. Thus, while the Zhuangzi may strike an unfamiliar chord in regard to received wisdom in the history of Western philosophy, the differences are not absolute and can be interpreted (not transcended) through thick description and historical sensitivity. See Michael Puett, To Become a God: Cosmology, Sacrifice, and Self-Divinization in Early China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 4. Jeffrey Stout, Ethics After Babel: The Languages of Morals and Their Discontents (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 60. 5. Sima Qian , Shi ji gu shi xuan yi (Beijing: Zhonghua shu ju, 1959), 2144. 6. See A. C. Graham, “How Much of Chuang-tzu Did Chuang-tzu Write?” in Studies in Chinese Philosophy and Philosophical Litera- ture (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1990), 283–321. See also Liu Xiaogan, Classifying the Zhuangzi Chapters (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, The University of Michigan, 1994); and Guan Feng , “Zhuangzi waizapian chutan” ,inZhuangzi neip- ian yijie he pipan (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1960), 319–358. 7. See Fukunaga Mitsuji , S¯oshi (Tokyo: Asahi, 1978). 8. Holmes Welch, Taoism: The Parting of the Way (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), 88. 9. Ibid. 10. In other words, although texts like the Zhuangzi and Huainanzi repeatedly make use of terms like dao and daoshu (“techniques 140 Notes of the Way”), none employ Tan’s phrase daojia (“school of the Way”) nor speak of a self-identifying school of thought, even in the limited sense that Confucians and Mohists do during the fourth and third centuries. See Kidder Smith, “Sima Tan and the Invention of Daoism, ‘Legalism’, et cetera,” The Journal of Asian Studies 62.1 (February 2003), 129–156. 11. Shiji, 3289. Sima Tan’s appellation of “Daoism” militates against the received view, initially promulgated during the Wei and Jin dynasties by Neo-Daoists and held by more recent scholars (e.g., Fung Yulan, Herlee Creel), that a foundational “Lao-Zhuang” lineage of Daoist philosophy, exclusively concerned with mystical and cosmological interests, existed prior to Sima Tan’s classification. 12. Jens Østergard Peterson, “Which Books Did the First Emperor of Ch’in Burn? On the Meaning of Pai Chia in Early Chinese Sources,” Monumenta Serica 43 (1995), 34. 13. Mark Edward Lewis, Writing and Authority in Early China (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1999); and Michael Puett, To Become a God. See also Nathan Sivin, “On the Word ‘Taoist’ as a Source of Perplexity, With Special Reference to the Relations of Science and Religion in Traditional China,” History of Religions 17 (1978), 303–330. 14. Puett, To Become a God, 25. 15. Mark Csikszentmihalyi, “Traditional Taxonomies and Revealed Texts in the Han,” in Daoist Identity: History, Lineage, and Ritual, ed. by Livia Kohn and Harold D. Roth (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002), 83–84. 16. On the notion of “inventing traditions,” see Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983). One also calls to mind Foucault’s notion of a “discursive formation.” See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1994). 17. See Harold Roth, Original Tao: Inward Training and the Foundations of Taoist Mysticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 173–203. 18. Andrew Meyer, “The Altars of the Soil and Grain are Closer than Kin : The Qi Model of Intellectual Participa- tion and the Jixia Patronage Community,” Early China 33–34 (2010–2011), 38. 19. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Third Edition, trans. by G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), §66. 20. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Third Edi- tion (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 222. 21. A. C. Graham, Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1989), 31. Notes 141 Chapter 1 1. Michael Walzer, Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), xi. 2. Ibid. 3. See James Legge, Confucianism in Relation to Christianity (London: Trubner, 1877), 9. 4. Bryan Van Norden has suggested recently that we do not need exact lexical correspondences to make philosophical comparisons between traditions so long as we can “look at the particulars of the two lan- guages being compared in order to determine whether the presence or absence of a particular term is significant.” While I would agree with Van Norden that responsible comparisons can be made even when there are no lexical counterparts, the question that I am rais- ing concerns those instances where we seem to have surface lexical compatibility but the depth grammar of the terms reveals something thicker and more culturally loaded. See Bryan Van Norden, Virtue Ethics and Consequentialism in Early Chinese Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 22. 5. N. J. Girardot, “ ‘Finding the Way’: James Legge and the Victorian Invention of Taoism,” Religion 29.2 (April 1999), 118. 6. Anna Seidel, “Taoism: The Unofficial High Religion of China,” Taoist Resources 7.2 (1997), 40. 7. This should not be construed as a broadside against those working in the fields of Daoist studies, religious studies, or comparative religious ethics in regard to their interpretations of Daoism. My aim is merely to highlight why Daoism receives less attention than even other schools of early Chinese thought (e.g., Confucianism, Legalism) in regard to its moral philosophy and how we can bring Daoism into conversation as a specifically moral tradition, not only with other schools of thought in ancient China but also potentially with moral traditions in the West. 8. Herlee G. Creel, What Is Taoism? And Other Studies in Chinese Cultural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 3, 4, 43. 9. Norman Girardot suggests that the contemporary Western under- standing of Daoism owes many of its guiding assumptions to the late Victorian invention of Daoism by sinologists such as James Legge (1815–1897) who tended to locate a “pure” form of Daoism in cer- tain “sacred texts” (e.g., the Laozi) in opposition to ritualistic or “magical” elements of the later tradition. The Leggian picture of Daoism survives in Creel’s work, on my reading, as two dichotomies which structure his entire discussion of Daoism—namely, the dis- tinction between “philosophical” and “religious” Daoism and the contrast between the “contemplative” and the “purposive” aspects of Daoism. It is my contention that both dualisms, along with 142 Notes uncritical assumptions about the nature of morality, contribute to Creel’s blindness to the moral dimensions of Daoism. 10. Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 174–175. 11. See Elizabeth Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Philosophy 33.124 (January 1958), 1. 12. I will from now on be using “morality” to refer to the special sys- tem of obligations and the “ethical” to denote the larger realm of the moral life. 13. For a helpful guide on the controverted nature of “morality” in comparative contexts, see David Wong, “Comparative Philosophy: Chinese and Western,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2011 Edition); Edward N. Zalta, ed., http://plato.stanford.edu/ archives/fall2011/entries/comparphil-chiwes/. As Wong notes, crit- ics of “morality” like Bernard Williams have tended, perhaps unfairly, to confine “morality” to Kant’s moral philosophy. Although Kant did exert a tremendous amount of influence on contemporary moral phi- losophy, I think there are other dimensions of our received notion of “morality” (listed above) that go beyond Kant. 14. Charles Taylor, “Iris Murdoch and Moral Philosophy,” in Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness, ed. by Maria Antonaccio and William Schweiker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 3. 15. Alan Gewirth, “Common Morality and the Community of Rights,” in Prospects for a Common Morality, ed. by Gene Outka and John P. Reeder, Jr. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 30. It should be noted that there are a small number of ethicists working within the tradition of “morality” who recognize that it does not cover the entire playing field of ethics. To take one recent example, T. M. Scanlon suggests that the narrow domain of morality having to do with our duties to other people (e.g., requirements to aid, prohi- bitions against harming and killing), “what we owe to each other,” comprises a “distinct subject matter, unified by a single manner of reasoning and by a common motivational basis. By contrast, it is not clear that morality in the broader sense is a single subject that has a similar unity.” See his What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 7. 16. Arthur Danto, Mysticism and Morality: Oriental Thought and Moral Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 114. 17. Danto explicitly states that he is referring to morality “as such, not this or that moral system.” See Ibid., 119. 18. Ibid., 115. 19. Ibid., 118. 20. Hans-Georg Moeller, The Moral Fool: A Case for Amorality (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). Notes 143 21. On amoralism, see Ronald D. Milo, “Amorality,” Mind 92.368 (1983), 482: “To say that a person is amoral is to say that moral considerations play no role in his practical deliberations and that moral beliefs form no part of his motivation for acting as he does.
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