Between 1992 and 1996 I had a bit of luck publishing articles in academic journals, including two in refereed journals. I thought that something might come of this, but nothing did. My guess is that this is partly because I had no formal status within the profession, partly because the only person in the biz who I ever met me disliked me, and partly because (with a full-time non-academic job but no money) I was unable to do the networking required to get my foot in the door. (Alternatively, of course, maybe my stuff wasn't good enough.)

Pre-Idiocentrism writings:

Publications

Thoreau Journal Quarterly, 12, Apr. 1980, pp. 5-14: "Thoreau's Construction of Taoism"

Somewhere, a review of LaFargue's Tao of the Tao Te Ching. .

Taoist Resources, Vol. 3, #2, May, 1992, pp. 47-61: "The Highest Virtue is like the Valley".

Simple doctrines are not to be looked for in Lao Tzu. Instead, the book should be thought of as a meditation on intention, desire, satisfaction, life, death, fertility, vitality, order, and disorder. While it is still possible that there is a discrepancy between the political and the contemplative layer, or between the primal fertility layer and the later immortality layer, it is more accurate to speak of the development and extension of a group of very old themes. The fundamental idea, I believe (which rather resembles the heretical Christian idea of the "fortunate fall", which is also associated with uncleanness of woman) is that since there can be no fertility without purification, there can be no fertility without pollution. Similiarly, there can be no life without death, no getting or owning without giving or losing, no being without non- being, no satisfaction without need, and so on. Lao Tzu, Ch. 15: "The muddy, being settled, slowly becomes limpid; the settled, being stirred, slowly comes to life".

 "A Stratification of Lao Tzu", Journal of Chinese Religions, #23, 1995, pp. 1-28. (Cited in "Editor's Introduction",  Lao Tzu and the Tao-te-ching, ed. Kohn and Lafargue, SUNY, 1998, p.15.)

Early layer Lao Tzu rejected the pursuit of wealth, glory, and high position, whether or not public service was entirely rejected. Contemplation and cultivation of life were the positive focusses at this stage, and it is probable that there was a mythic, ritual foundation to these practices. Even in this early stage, the attainment of social peace by indirect methods was a definite theme. Middle layer Lao Tzu developed the insights of the first layer in a more abstract, less contemplative way, but without emphasizing political devices much, and in this layer reversal (becoming-other, becoming- opposite) became the guiding theme. The middle layer is probably just a stage in a process, but the late layer, and the present form of the book, are the conscious product of an editor; in the late layer the full political development of the earlier insights was spelled out in detail. Finally, in the Han dynasty, the book came to be regarded, much against the original intent, as a recipe for success, and a vulgarized version was produced early in the Han dynasty.

The Stratification of Lao Tzu II: a sketch partly superseding the piece above, which has been made obsolete by archaeology.

Except a few passages at the end of bundle C, almost all of the Guodian Lao Tzu is found in the present text. This suggests that the an early, incomplete version of Lao Tzu already existed at that time. It seems highly unlikely, however, that the Guodian Lao Tzu was selected from the 81-chapter text we have today. It seems much more likely that the Guodian Lao Tzu is a selection from the proto-Lao Tzu which preceded the addition of Chs. 67-81 and the other chapters of the final layer.

"Yang Chu's Discovery of the Body", Philosophy East and West, Volume 46-4, October 1996, pp. 533-566:

From our Western point of view, the Yangist liberation was only partial,  and never succeeded in establishing either the "autonomous individual" or the "free citizen" in China; it is best called "privatism", rather than "individualism".  The change in Chinese life which can be attributed to the Yangists (and which was always resisted by the Confucians) was the valorization of private and family life at the expense of public and court life.  The "Chinese self" never ceased to be defined relationally, primarily in terms of kin relationships;  but for most Chinese (the Confucian elite always excepted)  the relation to the Emperor or to feudal superiors, and to public life generally, became an external and often onerous concern.  This change coincided, and effectively was identical with,  massive changes in governmental organization (initiated by government officials and military leaders),  whereby rational decision-making (cause and effect, end and means, military expansion, maximization of revenues) came to replace traditional, ritualistic patterns of action.  One consequence of this rationalization was to make government officials instruments of the crown, rather than ethically responsible, culturally splendid, and largely autonomous occupants of meaningful public positions.  One way or another, most early Chinese philosophers either participated in this transformation, or responded to it.

"Reciprocity and Reversal in Lao Tzu"

From our point of view, reciprocity is a social organizing principle especially characteristic of certain societies. For members of these societies, on the other hand, it was an unquestioned source of obligation and an indisputable natural law. Reciprocity came to be the ruling principle of an entire world view. The Gods and the afterlife were thought to restore the inequities of this-worldly give and take, while the natural world (especially the heavens) and human history were conceived of as a vast web of self-correcting reciprocal cycles mirroring (or mirrored by) the human world.

"Yang Chu in the History of Chinese Philosophy"

To begin with, while Yangism seems like liberating philosophy, it developed in the shadow of the Legalist state and was essentially defensive. The shared ritual order had been a source of meaning and value, and not merely a system of power relationships. It seems quite clear that the destruction of this order by the amoral state came first, and that the Yangist reconstitution of a satisfying private world was a response to this fait accompli.

"Who was Lao Tzu?"

On this account, Lao Tan's journey to the west and his description as a Chou archivist are simply backward contaminations from the true stories of the Grand Historian Tan and Mou Tzu's son Tsung. As Graham has pointed out, under the Han the Taoists needed to minimize their connections with Ch'in, and Lao Tan was pressed into service for that purpose. Thus, when Hsun Tzu attacked Mou Tzu, either he was attacking an independently-circulating version of the works of Mou Tzu alone (later incorporated into the Tao Te Ching), or else he was attacking something like the present text of the Tao Te Ching, which at that time was circulating under Mou Tzu's name.

Lao Tzu Translation (Chs. 1-25)

Read Lao Tzu (a work-in-progress): Learn Classical Chinese.

Bibliography of Chinese poetry and the Wei-Chin period

Bibliography of Taoism, Buddhism, Chinese Literature, and Chinese Culture, with Comparative Materials

Brief Buddhism Bibliography

Prospective:

"Wu-wei: Reality before Questioning"

"Hun-Tun, Strangeness, and Transformation"

"Cao Cao and the Origins of Chinese Poetry"

Writings about Eurasia, Mongolia, and the steppe

Idiocentrism writings:

Theory and Me Part I

(A review of Connery's The Empire of the Text, about the literary world of the Han and the San Guo Wei).

But above all, this book seems to be about theory. Meta-statements, methodological discussions, and scare quotes stud the book like speed bumps. The book is remarkably argumentative, but one of the author’s rules is that since his intervention (he uses no scare quotes on this term) attempts to replace the standard ways of talking about the era and about Chinese culture in general, he should therefore make no reference to, and use no concepts from, any of the standard interpretations except when he is refuting them.

Water and Permanence II

Passages from Lao Tzu, Po Chu-i, and Ted Hughes with different points of view about  permanence vs. the destructive power of water. Po Chu-i puts a new twist on it: for him the smoothing and levelling action of water represents a civilizing influence. (Refers to my Ruins of Rome page).

Parmenides in Szechuan

During WWII here were at leas three philosophers with the Nationalists in Chungking: Ch'en K'ang, Fang Tung-mei, and Hao Wang. Ch'en was well-established and had already published in German and English on the Plato's Parmenides, whereas the other two men still had their careers ahead of them. Fang wrote several books in English and was on to be an important public intellectual in Taiwan, and Wang migrated to the U.S., becoming an important figure in mathematical logic and the literary executor of the renowned Kurt Gödel.

During the war years Ch'en devoted himself to an annotated Chinese translation of the Parmenides. Fang wrote a 900-page work on Hua-yen (Japanese "kegon"), perhaps the most abstruse of the Chinese Buddhist schools of philosophy. Wang's activities are not known to me, but judging by his later career he was immersing himself in the most abstruse and abstract areas of Western mathematical logic.

All original material copyright John J. Emerson 

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