Michael LaFargue
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Meaningful text or Rorschach test? 5 out of 5 stars.
15 of 15 people found this review helpful.
Michael LaFargue says the Tao Te Ching is the former even though it's often treated as the latter.According to LaFargue (my paraphrase), there are two ways to read the Tao Te Ching, just as there are two ways to read any text.
The first -- the one taken by any number of readers of Lao-Tzu, including some "translators" whom LaFargue doesn't name and I won't either -- is to point your face at it and sort of see how it makes you, like, _feel_, you know?
The second, and the one LaFargue favors, is to place the text in the context for which it was written and try to understand what its writer or speaker would have intended by it.
This is the approach LaFargue uses in order to produce his excellent (and thoroughly annotated and cross-referenced) translation of the Tao Te Ching. He also, in an extremely helpful essay on hermeneutics, discusses this approach at length and explains the context in which he believes the text to have been written.
I won't try to discuss every topic he covers, but one extremely helpful point is his identification of much of the text as what he calls "compensatory wisdom." On his view, some of the Tao Te Ching's pithy sayings are intended not as metaphysical speculation but only as counters to contrary human tendencies. (When we say that "a watched pot never boils," we surely do not mean that if you sit there and watch a pot, it will literally _never_ boil. We are merely warning against a common tendency to rush things that can't be rushed.)
This seems to me to be right on the money, and indeed to be pretty widely applicable to Oriental religious literature including the Bible. It is the right way, for example, to read the book of Proverbs, and some of Jesus's sayings from the Christian New Testament as well.
LaFargue's volume, then, may be of interest both to readers of Lao-Tzu and to readers of the Jewish and Christian Bibles. In discussions of "biblical inerrancy" and such, it is too often forgotten that the Bible is ancient Near Eastern literature and therefore not written to modern Western European standards. Inerrantists and religious "liberals" alike could surely profit from greater appreciation of this point; many apparent contradictions just disappear (and so do some theological creeds) once we understand that the text isn't _always_ offering us metaphysical principles.
In any event, widespread reading of LaFargue's book might spare us another spate of ill-considered screeds on "the Tao of" this, that, and the other thing. What a relief that would be.
