Lesson: Daoism, Dao, and Metaphor
Daoism is the philosophy of the Way (dao), but an immediate problem is that, as the famous opening lines of the Daodejing tells us, dao ‘cannot be spoken of’. Although the early Daoists offer us different arguments about why dao is ineffable, they agree that it is not amenable to literal propositional description. But this does not mean that we are left empty-handed, for we can draw upon other ways of speaking…