34. You Don’t Say! The Dao That Cannot Be Told

I am curious about the Chinese word for endurance in the first line of Lao Tzu. I can imagine at least two meanings, either a temporal one (something which will persist in space and time) or a more metaphysically loaded meaning, what endures is essential or prior. Do you know which is more applicable here? It also reminds me of the series on Indian philosophy in the sense - can this philosophical statement survive itself? Are Nagarjuna's arguments themselves empty, is Jain perspectivism itself a perspective, and is Lao Tzu non-enduring if it can be written? Can we understand it more as Wittgensteinian therapy, i. e. you read it so that you may throw away what you read?

I had come across the line from the Daodejing, "The Dao that can be told is not the eternal Dao", several times before. Often by a writer giving a dismissive or puzzled context. Something like: "Lao Tzu says the true Dao cannot be told, yet here he is telling us about it, what's going on!?"

This podcast is the first time I can remember a clearly set out alternative interpretation of that line. Thank you for this. Perhaps the people who write about Daoism like to emphasise the cryptic nature of Daoism. At least those I've come across online. Maybe I just pay more attention when I'm listening to your podcast. Your interpretation that there are many Daos, but the ones that we can talk about are not the enduring Dao, or are not enduring Daos, makes much more sense. This reminded me of Kant: noumena and phenomena. We can't know anything about things in themselves, we can only know about things as they appear to us. That does not mean our inquiry is hopeless, just that we can only know about what appears to us. Here with Daoism, we can only talk about the Daos that we can talk about, though there may be other Daos besides those.

However, with Kant, it's reasonably clear to me what the distinction is between what we can know about and what we can't know about. In Daoism, what makes it so that we can talk about some Daos, but not others? What is it that distinguishes enduring Daos, from Daos that do not endure? So far it just seems to be unprincipled assertions. What principles are in play that makes this the case? Sure, language will "blind" us from being able to talk about some Daos, but why would it blind us to enduring Daos, but not other Daos?

One possibility maybe that in a certain language and culture, certain Daos can spoken about, but that other Daos are unspeakable. That culture and language are "blinded" to those unspeakable Daos. But in a different culture and language, some other set of Daos could be spoken about, while some other set of Daos could not be spoken about, because in that different culture and language, a different set of Daos would be "blinded" to us. But this doesn't work, as it doesn't explain why it is that it is specifically the enduring Daos that cannot be spoken and the non-enduring Daos that can be spoken about. In any culture and language, it would simply be a different arbitrary set of Daos that can and can't be spoken about, if it were just a matter of different languages "blinding" us to different sets of Daos. I feel like more needs to be said by the Daoist. Perhaps your series will go on to explain this distinction. Or maybe I missed something.

In Zen Buddism and Stoicism there's also a lot that people could be dismissive and puzzled about, as with the famous line from the Daodejing. "There is no self", or, "live according to nature". Zen Buddism and Stoicism appeal to me more than Daoism, so unlike with Daoism, I took the time to think about and read on what they might mean, what they could mean, by things like "there is no self", or "live according to nature".

If you make it that far, I would be interested to hear you cover Zen Buddhism, you would probably talk about the influence of Daoism on Zen, but this may be many years in the future.