Conversation

Embed this notice

?Hidden? (hidden@cawfee.club)'s status on Monday, 17-Jun-2024 05:40:44 JST

?Hidden?

in reply to

大道廢，有仁義

"When the Dao is abandoned, there is 仁 Ren and 義 Yi." Ren 仁 and Yi 義 are two of the highest Confucian virtues, usually translated as benevolence/humanity and righteousness/justice respectively, considered here to be overly contrived and forced, leaving behind the genuine natural virtue (De, 德) of the Dao for forced Confucian ethics which cannot genuinely address each situation but is instead based on rules and perceptions retroactively fitted to each situation.

智慧出，有大偽

"When Zhi 智 and reason arise, pretense becomes abundant." Zhi 智 is another one of the Confucian virtues, normally translated as "wisdom," but closer to something like "shrewdness," in this context, since it is said sardonically, here referring to the ability of being able to judge whether the actions others take are right or wrong. Daoism often attacks knowledge and rationalising for the way it abstracts people away from the Dao, advocating empty-mindedness instead, and here it ties in that critique with the previous line's critique of Confucian morality by bringing up another one of the Confucian key virtues and tying it together with a more general scholarly intelligence. The ethical judgements and knowledge devised by scholars are then disconnected from reality, and used to justify anything.

This line is somewhat controversial since the oldest manuscript of the Dao De Jing, the Guodian text does not include it, and some say it makes the meaning less ambiguous and more of a direct attack on Confucianism.

六親不和，有孝慈

"When the six relations lack harmony, filial piety arises." Here the six relations is refers to the 6 relationships in the family: brothers and sisters, parents and children, wife and husband. Here, when the Dao is abandoned, the natural harmony found in the love between family members is lost, and has to be replaced with contrived filial piety and duty; empty social rules mimicking what was once innate and effortless. Although no specific Confucian virtues are named, the dutiful nature of familial relations is incredibly important to Confucianism, and here it is attacked as a poor imitation of the real thing.

國家昏亂，有忠臣有。

"When the state is in disorder, the devoted ministers appear." It's hard to say if this line ties into the previous critiques of Confucianism since at the time Confucianism had not yet penetrated the upper echelons of society and was still merely a rival in the hundred schools of thought. In fact it's impossible to say if any of these lines are referring to Confucianism rather than the political situation at the time, during the Warring States period, but the rivalry between philosophies at that time and the rich tradition of Daoist writers depicting Kong Qiu as a soyjak suggests to me that they were, not to mention the specificity of terminology. This line ominously hints at the sort of ineffective and inhuman bureaucracies that arise to stabilise a state that is not properly following the Dao. In isolation this doesn't make too much sense, but considered in context of the rest of the Dao De Jing it does. The political commentary in the Dao De Jing often suggests politicians should seek a sort of negation — the ideal ruler essentially negates his own existence, and his people are unaware of him. Bringing it back to the current line, we can imagine a state falling into disorder at the hands of a heavy handed ruler trying to consolidate power, and imagine how the state continues to develop in an inefficient and dishonest manner to account for it.

Thank you for coming to Hidden's Dao De Jing passage 18 commentary. I'll see you again another time when I'm feeling bored.