adelina

holy cows!!!


Biology/anatomy buff?

Hey...

I'm no kind of expert at all on knives, but I know that people who care about such things do distinguish between, say, a meat-carving knife and a vegetable-chopping knife and a cleaver and so on... different-shaped blades work best for different purposes. But that has little to do with my mention of a carving knife as my weapon of choice. I was mostly concerned with the idea of the "analytic knife", with which we divide large concepts into smaller ones. The canonical example is a motorcycle (from "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"): one can divide it into components in many ways, depending on the objectives one is seeking. This is what science does, which is why I find it interesting: classify things into successively more refined groups, according to criteria which may or may not make sense... there is endless room for debate about how to carve up the world of ideas to maximize utility... even supposing we could agree on a utility function. So it really has nothing at all to do with the kinds of knives chefs use...

About the Tao Te Ching, I can offer little help. Which edition are you reading? Mine is translated by D. C. Lau. He has this to say about other translations: "The Lao tzu is, without a doubt, by far the most frequently translated work in Chinese, but unfortunately it cannot be said that it has been best served by its numerous translators, as the nature of the work attracted many whose enthusiasm for Eastern mysticism far outstripped their acquaintance with Chinese thought or even with the Chinese language." In other words, what you're reading may or may not have much to do with what was originally written (unless you're reading it in Chinese, of course...). But I can offer a couple of comments:
1) The introduction to my edition makes it clear that this can be seen most clearly as a political (as opposed to philosophical) work: how is the peasant to survive in the face of a powerful government, and how is the governer to best govern? Then a lot of it makes more sense (to me, at least).
2) There is an implied progression of learning. The bit about "those who know don't teach, those who teach don't know..." can be perceived better if you imagine degrees of knowing. At the ultimate end of knowing, one won't bother teaching or speaking at all... but in the intermediate stages, when one has achieved some knowledge but not all, one might pass along the bits one has learned to those who haven't learned it yet. That's how I read it, anyway...

But I'm the first to admit that I'm just guessing wildly here. I recommend Huston Smith's book "The World's Religions" for an excellent overview of the main points of Taoism (as well as the other major religions of the world, as the title suggests).

I hope you were visited by the solid chocolate bunnies of redemption (or something like that) this weekend...