ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is to argue that we can understand the Daodejing better if we understand it as a deconstruction of ethics similar to Levinas’s attempt to pull the metaphysical rug of Being from underneath ethics. The idea that Daoist philosophy is deconstructive is not new. Indeed, many commentators have argued that it bears comparison with Derrida’s deconstruction in the main aspects of both (Yeh, 1983; Cheng, 1990; Chien, 1990; Ownes, 1993; Nuyen, 1995). However, these efforts tend to focus on the metaphysical issues, hence on Chuangzi, leaving the ethics of Daoism, and the ethics of the Daodejing in particular, unexplored. I shall argue in this chapter that the “deconstructive way,” as one commentator has put it (Yeh, 1983), is seen most clearly if we focus on the ethical issues. With this in mind, it is more productive to read the Daodejing through the lens of Levinas rather than Derrida. It is not my intention to make a direct comparison of Levinas and Laozi, reading one as the other, nor to show that Levinas’s philosophy can be construed as Daoist, nor that Daoist philosophy is Levinasian. There are sufficient profound dissimilarities between Levinas and Laozi, and between Levinas’s ethics and the ethics of the Daodejing, to discourage such efforts. Rather, I aim to show that in both Levinas and Laozi, there is an ethics that is deconstructive, or more precisely, that both speak of ethics deconstructively. In Section I, I shall explain what it means to “speak of ethics deconstructively.” In Section II, I shall show how both Levinas and Laozi do so. Specifically, I want to show that, in the Daodejing, de stands to dao as Levinas’s ethic of responsibility stands to the otherwise of Being, to the saying from beyond essence.
