Articles and Chapters

1. Wong, DB, Unsettling the Hierarchy within the Person/Body in Daoism, in Metaphor and Analogy in Chinese Thought Governance within the Person State and Society (January, 2025), pp. 165-210 [doi].
   (last updated on 2026/01/09)

   Abstract:
   This lecture contains a detailed reconstruction of the dynamic interplay of classical Confucianism and Daoism. It first explains the reason for the claim that the Daoist texts Dào Dé Jīng and Zhuāngzǐ, with greater emphasis on the latter, respond to arguable flaws in Confucianism. The lecture begins with a characteristic criticism of Confucians to be found in the Daoist texts, which is that the project of achieving virtue tends to degenerate into a striving for superiority over others that not only perverts the aim of self-cultivation but defeats the equally important aim of helping others to improve. While this criticism is not decisive, it helps to flesh out a useful critique of Confucian ideas of governance, both within the individual and in state and society. In terms of the internal governance of the person, moral hierarchies with the heart-mind as a leader can become overly rigid. In doing so, the heart-mind misses opportunities for more flexible and inclusive ideas of what is valuable and appropriate. Moreover, the Confucian use of metaphor can have a back-and-forth movement between the intrapersonal and social and political domains, where the source domain can provide metaphors for conceptualizing the target domain, and then become the target domain as its metaphors can get further revised, developed, and augmented arising from inquiry into the other domain. The lecture then draws on the notion of the body’s qi to explain the ideal of harmonious and flexible hierarchies.