Hermeneutics and Pedagogy: Gimme That Old‐Time Historicism
Hermeneutics and Pedagogy: Gimme That Old‐Time Historicism
Michael LaFargue aims to cultivate in students a capacity to see the DDJ from the point of view of its many literary forms and implied interlocutors. By exploring the structures of proverbial sayings he leads students away from the tendency to take its statements too literally, a tendency that typically makes the DDJ seem more obscure and mysterious than it is. LaFargue encourages students to ask: What “pragmatic implications” of the DDJ's statements can we reasonably attribute to the early Daoist practitioners who both produced and made use of this text? This leads to a historicist understanding of the DDJ that is rooted in questions quite different from those that a contemporary western reader would typically bring to the text.
Keywords: Daode jing, Tao Te Ching, Laozi, Lao Tzu, Daoism, Taoism, Chinese religion, Daoist practice, hermeneutics, literary forms
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