‘Following the Way of Heaven’: Exemplarism, Emulation, and Daoism

Abstract

Many ancient traditions recognise certain people as exemplars of virtue, the models for the good or flourishing human life. Certain traditions, however, incorporate a cosmic mode of emulation, where the virtues are manifestations, in human form, of qualities or aspects of the ground or source of the world. I defend this claim using the sustained case study of the forms of Daoist exemplarity found in the Book of Zhuangzi, then consider the charge that the aspiration to cosmic emulation is inhumane. It emerges that there are forms of emulation where the ultimate model for the good or flourishing life as manifested by the exemplar is nothing human.

Daoism, humanity, and the Way of Heaven

“…Given the intersubjective form of the aspiration to allegiance, for instance, one might naturally expect practices of thanksgiving and worship and such virtues as faith and piety. Although we find them in Western monotheistic religions, they are absent from early Daoism, where one finds practices of ‘wandering’ ( you ) and ‘fasting of the heart-mind’ ( xinzhai ): by ‘fasting’ from our tendency to treat our judgements and classifications rigidly and objectively, they become more porous, enabling one to explore other ways of encountering the world, other schemes of ‘likes and dislikes’, and ‘roam’ among the ways of other creatures, until ‘the outside world slides away’, until one experiences ‘the vastness at the root of things’ (Z 22, 19, 33) – a claim whose connection to the aspirations to emulation are described by Cooper (2018) and Kidd (2019). Without insisting that aspirations must be rigidly connected to a set of practices, one can expect certain natural ‘couplings’, but the real test will be careful investigation of specific spiritual dispensations, shorn of normative expectations about the proper forms of spirituality.…”