Morals and Society in Asian Philosophy by Brian Carr

Author:Brian Carr [Carr, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138994201
Google: DpH4MAAACAAJ
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2016-11-24T04:56:08+00:00

*Previously published in Asian Philosophy Vol. 5, No. 1, 1995.

6

Is Daoism ‘Green’?*

David E. Cooper

I

‘The green movement should learn from ancient civilizations’, urges a recent Chinese author, ‘so as to reconstruct the world of values for … modern man’.1 Many people in that movement, those of a ‘deep’ hue of green, have been following this advice. Unlike their ‘shallow’ colleagues, they deny the capacity of mainstream Western approaches, such as utilitarianism or natural rights theory, to foster those values which, as they see it, ‘modern man’ requires if he is to stop pillaging his environment. Some have turned for inspiration to aboriginal cultures in which, one is told, the natural environment is held sacred. Others look for a source in the philosophies of the ancient Asian civilisations. A head-count of this second group would, I suspect, show that it is daoist thought which is deemed to hold most promise for ‘reconstructing’ an environmental ethic. So, for example, one pair of authors construe Zhuang Zi’s parable of the cook who follows the dao when carving meat as teaching a lesson that ‘green movements all over the world are striving to achieve’ – that of ‘operating according to the law of nature without inappropriate human intervention’.2 For Fritjof Capra, in his bestseller The Tao of Physics, the very survival of our civilisation depends on heeding the daoist message of ‘a oneness of the universe’ and ‘harmony with the natural environment’.3

Someone may wonder how any moral lesson is to be gleaned from ancient masters who could treat considerations of benevolence and righteousness as symptoms of decay (Dao De Jing, 38), or find conventional ‘goodness and fairness … as odious … as vice and depravity’ (Zhuang Zi, 8d).4 The reply would be: it is precisely the failure of the Western tradition to acknowledge values beyond those ‘artificial’ ones (in Hume’s sense) which facilitate social cooperation that debars it from accommodating an adequate environmental ethic. Whether these more primordial, pre-conventional values should be labelled ‘moral’ is a semantic question which should not divert us from identifying and promoting them.

I hope to do three things in this paper. First, I try to identify those aspects of daoist thought which prima facie are sympathetic to ‘green’ concerns. Second, however, I argue that it is much more difficult than it first appears to discern a ‘green’ message in those aspects. Finally, I suggest that, on a certain construal of daoist thought, there is nevertheless a rather deeper aspect which is, so to speak, environmentally friendly.

There are four alleged themes in daoist thought which ‘deep’ environmentalists have variously adduced in support of the attitudes towards nature which they favour – respect for nature, a sense of harmony with it, and so on. These themes might be labeled ‘holism’, ‘anti-pragmatism’, ‘primitivism’, and ‘femininity’. Put them together, and you have the idea that Daoism incorporates a vision of the unity of everything in the universe, including ourselves; an hostility towards the pragmatic, means-end mentality held responsible for so much environmental devastation; an

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.