The Useless Tree

Taoism

  • Her life is not a tragedy: Zhuangzi understands this

    A nice piece in yesterday's Boston Globe by Beverly Beckham about her grandaughter, who has Down Syndrome, and how she and her family came to see the beauty in this girl's life.  It is a familiar tale, to those of… Continue reading

  • LeBron James, Daoist Sage

    OK, not really.  But one aspect of the narrative of his NBA championship did bring Zhuangzi to mind (I'm reading Zhuangzi and the Daodejing closely just now,  so many things bring Daoism to mind…). Last year, when he failed, James… Continue reading

  • Why We Need Chinese Philosophy

    I want to recognize, and expand upon, Justin H. Smith's piece in the NYT, "Philosophy's Western Bias."  He makes a case for why academic philosophy departments should incorporate more "non-Western" schools of thought in their curriculum.  I am all for… Continue reading

  • Chinese Intellectuals Need Freedom: Zhuangzi Anticipated This…

    Louisa Lim has a report on NPR this morning that reminds us that Chinese intellectuals and artists continue to press for freedom of expression, speech, and thought.  She presents the work of artist Yang Weidong: A deceptively simple question has… Continue reading

  • The Porosity of Culture

    Just want to add my voice to those others (on Twitter) who have called out the nice little piece in the NYRB on translator Red Pine (aka Bill Porter).  For me, it demonstrates some of what I have been blogging… Continue reading

  • The Dao of Inter-Cultural Commensurability

    I've been thinking more about the possibilities of inter-cultural commensurability since my last post on the topic.  A thought has come to me that I want to posit and explore here: The entire topic of commensurability/incommensurability is, essentially, a Western… Continue reading

  • Daoism is not a Strategy

    A rather odd blog post over at Huffington Post College, by Keith Weigelt, a Professor at the Wharton School, gets off to an incongruous start: I am a strategist in the Daoist tradition. One tenet of Daoism is that individuals… Continue reading

  • Thinking about Nothing

    In a punchy book review in Sunday's NYT, philosopher David Albert takes down physicist Lawrence Krauss: Lawrence M. Krauss, a well-known cosmologist and prolific popular-science writer, apparently means to announce to the world, in this new book, that the laws… Continue reading

  • Breaking News! Zhuangzi is right: there is no human nature

    Over at the NPR blog (ht Sullivan), Cosmos and Culture, Barbara J. King, biological anthropologist, tells us: …I would assert that there is no set-in-stone human nature. Anthropological studies show that humans respond with incredible plasticity to the social and… Continue reading

  • How to lose a culture war

    In a speech given last October, and published in a Party theoretical journal on January 1st (Happy New Year!), China's President, Hu Jintao, throws down the cultural gauntlet: “We must clearly see that international hostile forces are intensifying the strategic… Continue reading