On the “Naturalness” of Laozi and Zhuangzi
Recently I helped a new first-year junior sister look over a paper, and in passing I jotted down a question here. This question is rather naive, but many people still make this mistake. Quite naturally, like many beginners and even some scholars who comment on Laozi and Zhuangzi only in part, she understood “自然” as the “自然” in “自然界” (“nature” as the natural world). But in ancient China and ancient Greece, the word “自然” did not have this meaning at all (see my earlier article “Ancient Greek Natural Philosophy and the Scientific Spirit”). Exactly what the word meant in ancient Greece may still require detailed textual verification, but in ancient…
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