The Dao of Rhetoric

1. Culture, Text, and Context

CHAPTER 1 Culture, Text, and Context Daoists believe that texts are not created in isolation but are products of a vibrant, interactive environmental field. An account of the historical environment or context for the works of the sages, which are analyzed specifically in the next three chapters, adds richness to the potential meanings and applications of Daoism for rhetoric. Insights about context may help distinguish aspects of the texts that are situation-specific, bound by context in such a way as to be irrelevant in other contexts, from elements that espouse timeless wisdom. Examining the historical environment or milieu, therefore, can assist our understanding of these ancient texts and how their views of Daoism might be applicable to rhetorical theory and criticism. Exploring the historical context for these texts also engages a theoretical issue of the text/context distinction.1 It thereby provides an opportunity to investigate important philosophical underpinnings of Daoist rhetoric and contrast those with philosophical suppositions inherent in classical Western rhetoric. I begin this chapter by elaborating on dominant features of classical Greek and Daoist worldviews in order to articulate a Daoist view of text and context. I then consider contextual elements, factors outside of the texts, which I believe interacted most significantly in their assemblage. These factors include the translation process, rhetorical personae, and the political and philosophical environment. DAOISM AND CONTEXT In order to distinguish classical Greek and Daoist rhetorical perspectives on text and context, and thereby delineate the unique Daoist perspective 9 on this issue, one must begin with their respective fundamental worldviews . At a cosmological level, Ames (1993) characterizes the Greek view as a “two-world” theory while the Chinese espouse a “one-world” view. To the Greeks, there is a permanent real world that stands behind appearance . This view is starkly exemplified by Plato’s distinction between the true world of forms and the seductive pseudoreality of the sensual world, and later by the Christian distinction between heaven and earth. By virtue of the belief in an underlying objective reality, “knowing” to the Greeks means discovering the “mirroring correspondence between an idea and an objective world” (Ames, 1993, p. 57). To know something, therefore, is to discover its “true” reality. Within this conception, reason plays a paramount role. Reason is thought of as “a human faculty independent of experience that can discover the essence of things” (pp. 55–56), and “rational explanation” lies “in the discovery of some antecedent agency or the isolation and disclosure of relevant causes” (p. 56). The Western notion of dualism is also apparent in conceptions of the self. Individuals are thought to look a certain way or behave in certain ways, but what one exhibits or how one acts at a particular time may be distinct from one’s fixed nature, essence, or core self. The idea of manifest and latent self, as well as body and soul, communicates a dualistic sense of the individual that is foreign to Daoists. In Daoism, there is one world, and it alone constitutes reality. There is no independent agent, such as a god, to provide order and life. The world’s order results from a continuous interaction of the opposing forces of yin and yang. Reality is a ceaseless alternation “between rising and falling, emerging and collapsing, moving and attaining equilibrium that is occasioned by its own internal energy of transformation.” This movement “is not ‘cyclical’ in the sense of reversibility and replication, but is rather a continuing spiral that is always coming back upon itself and yet is ever new” (Ames & Hall, 2003, p. 28). The order in the universe is not created by a grand design but is the natural consequence of the dynamic interaction of all life forms—“the many making one.” There are no essences that define, stabilize, and make unique the entities of reality. Instead, everything in the universe is constantly changing, developing, and interacting. The inherent nature of reality is change and novelty. In contrast to the Greek notion that reality is a “permanent structure to be discovered behind a changing process,” the classical Chinese view is that knowledge is “a perceived intelligibility and continuity that can be mapped within the dynamic process itself” (Ames, 1993, p. 55). Knowing, then, rests on the ability to perceive the connections and interactions, the comprehensiveness, which constitute the world: 10
THE DAO OF RHETORIC Without an assumed separation between the source of order in the world...