The Taoist Pedagogy of Pathmarks

Critical Reflections upon Heidegger, Lao Tzu, and Dewey

Jie Yu

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783030016050
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Teoria e pratica della didattica

Based on the intertwined complex conversations among Heidegger, Dewey, and Lao Tzu, this book explores the possibilities of the Taoist Pedagogy of Pathmarks as a clearing between truth and untruth, responding to the spiritual call of Tao as inaction and teaching as releasement. In this book, Yu provides a critical exploration of the rich dynamics in the "direct" conversations among the three great thinkers of east and west, highlighting the implications of their ideas for education throughout. As more educational researchers, teacher educators, and teachers recognize the limitations of didactic teaching-as-telling, the author brings an alternate pathway to light.

© The Author(s) 2018

Jie YuThe Taoist Pedagogy of PathmarksSpirituality, Religion, and Educationhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01605-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Jie Yu¹

(1)

Rollins College, Winter Park, FL, USA

Jie Yu

Email: [email protected]

Abstract

Lao Tzu, Heidegger, and Dewey lived in quite different historical periods and places, but their insightful thoughts resonate with each other in my exploration of the Taoist Pedagogy of Pathmarks. As explored in this chapter, the Taoist Pedagogy of Pathmarks encourages teachers to release or step back to create a “void,” a space which possesses nothing but at the same time accommodates everything. In this void, both teachers and students are put on a journey of experiencing to learn as all of them are addressed to be responsive and thus open to the lived calls on their own ways or paths.

Keywords

Lao TzuTaoismWayEmptinessHeideggerDewey

End Abstract

Let me start the book with the poetic lines Lao Tzu , the founder of Chinese Taoism, uses in his masterpiece Tao Te Ching (500 B.C./1990) to describe the usefulness of the nothingness:

Clay is molded to make a pot,

But it is in the space where there is nothing

That the usefulness of the clay pot lies. (p. 70)

Not coincidentally, Martin Heidegger (1950/1971a), a contemporary German philosopher in phenomenology, also uses the same metaphor of holding vessels to define the essence of beings by the void created by their material construction: When we fill the empty jug with water, the “emptiness, the void, is what does the vessel’s holding,” so the “empty space, this nothing of the jug, is what the jug is as the holding vessel” (p. 169). Though conceptualized thousands of years and continents apart from one another, both Tzu’s pot and Heidegger’s jug derive presence from absence, something from nothing, establishment from clearing . This emphasis on the “emptiness,” voidness, or nothingness of beings directly connects with two key concepts in the theoretical frameworks of both philosophers, “Tao ” in Lao Tzu and “clearing” in Heidegger.

In the first chapter of Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu (500 B.C./1990) says as the “mystery of mysteries” and “gate of all wonders,” Tao can be observed only through constant “voidness” (p. 59). In many versions of the translation of Tao Te Ching, the word “Tao” is translated as “way .” This is not surprising because the original meaning of the Chinese character, 道 (Tao ), is the way or path on which people walk. It is not a coincidence that Heidegger (1945/2002) adopts the metaphor of path /way, which he uses so often in his works, as being “the guiding principle” of his thought (p. 32). Through his collaboration with a Chinese philosopher in translating Tao Te Ching in 1946, specifically its eight chapters concerning “Tao,” Heidegger acquired a deeper understanding of “Tao ” as “way.” He explains in “The Nature of Language” (1959/1971b) that “The key word in Laotse’s¹ poetic thinking is Tao , which ‘properly speaking’ means way ,” “the way that gives all ways” as “a great hidden stream which moves all things along and makes way for everything”—“All is way ” (p. 92, emphasis added). In the preface to Pathmarks (1976/1998), a collection of his seminal works between 1919 and 1961, Heidegger notes, “Whoever lets himself enter upon the way toward an abode in the oldest of the old will bow to the necessity of later being understood differently than he thought he understood himself” and “this necessity is grounded in the possibility that a free realm continues to be granted” (p. xiii). When people walk through the forest, the first thing they need to do, Heidegger says, is to make an open place in the woods free of trees. This “free realm” created on the path for possibilities, the openness in the midst of beings, is a clearing , one of the most significant terms in Heidegger’s thoughts and writings. For Heidegger (1959/1971c), this clearing means to “form a way and, forming it, to keep it ready”—it does not mean to move things up or down on a prescribed path but “to bring the way ” (pp. 129–130). In other words, clearing is way-making or more specifically “waying,” a key word in not only Heidegger’s phenomenological work, but also in Lao Tzu’s Taoist thoughts.

Both key concepts, Tao in Tzu and clearing in Heidegger, can be used to explain that the “jugness” of a jug is its void. In Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu (500 B.C./1990) claims that Tao is “empty, yet never refills with use” (p. 62) while emphasizing that “being and nonbeing give birth to each other” (p. 60). Heidegger (1936/1993a) adds that nothingness as clearing is “more in being than are beings”: “This open center is therefore not surrounded by beings; rather, the clearing center itself encircles all that is, as does the nothing, which we scarcely know” (p. 178, emphasis added). Since the open space of the clearing can accommodate everything “as does the nothing,” it is neither merely a quick deconstructive process of erasing or swiping away present beings, but the reopening of openings toward new possibilities, i.e., making cracks and holes in beings.

This emphasis on the “emptiness” or “voidness,” i.e., the “not” of beings, is unusual from a Western perspective, where it seems, Nature abhors a vacuum.² Such a desire to erase emptiness is also echoed in one of the oldest Chinese sayings of teaching and learning: “Teacher must first have a full bucket of knowledge and then s/he can fill in students’ small cups.” This is still a widely used slogan for teachers, especially in teacher education programs in China. Here, students are taken as empty vessels but in a sense different from the meaning of the “emptiness” in Lao Tzu or Heidegger. The state of being “empty” in this case is measured by that of “full,” and thus “emptiness” is regarded as a negative state that needs to be finished, i.e., “filled,” as soon as possible. If the teacher aims to “help” students to overcome this voidness by filling their empty cups full from his/her own bucket, two results are striking: Students will have the same water as their teachers and their cups will be always smaller than the teacher’s bucket. Growth will always be less.

Unfortunately, such an aggressive teaching philosophy, which aims to “fill” up students’ “empty” minds, is often adored in the schooling system. In my first lesson in the educational major twenty one years ago, one of my professors told me, “As teachers, our first and foremost responsibility is to teach truth to our students.” Even now I can recall so clearly his passionate lecture in that class: “We teachers should be the most faithful preachers, shepherds who guide our helpless lambs in the light of truth. This is why education is called enlightenment.” At that time, I found this advice inspirational, and I began to imagine my future career as a “hero” leading the blind out of the black world into the light, as in Plato’s cave allegory . Over the last two decades, however, my extensive teaching experience in both China and the USA has caused me to interrogate teaching as “pouring” so-called “truth” into my students’ “empty” heads. Do we, as teachers, really possess such a thing called truth? What does truth mean for us and for our students? Is our job to teach such truth to students? If yes, how can we teach truth? If not, what should we teach?

The question of truth as it relates to the teacher’s role in the classroom raises not only issues of what and how we should teach, but challenges the very purpose of teaching. Since truth itself is a major question of phenomenology, I choose to use the works of Heidegger, especially his phenomenological treatment of truth, with the hope that it can shed some important light on the fundamental questions of teaching and learning.

When I explored Heidegger’s disrupting³ explorations of the essence of truth for insights into taken-for-granted assumptions about education and the purpose of teaching and learning, I felt a resonance to his phenomenological perspective on (un)truth, especially the notion of clearing , which can be aligned with the essential spirit of Chinese Taoism, Tao . The complex conversations between Lao Tzu and Heidegger, with additional insights from John Dewey,⁴ created for me a philosophical bridge between East and West that has enabled me to explore a Taoist “Pedagogy of Pathmarks.” Central to this teaching philosophy is what I would call “Releasement,” as suggested in the last chapter title of this book. The Taoist Pedagogy of Pathmarks encourages teachers to release or step back to create a “void,” a space which possesses nothing but at the same time accommodates everything. In this void, both teachers and students are put on a journey of experiencing to learn as all of them are addressed to be responsive and thus open to the lived calls on their own ways or paths. Silence speaks loudest in such responses.

Lao Tzu, Heidegger, and Dewey lived in quite different historical periods and places, but their insightful thoughts resonate with each other in my exploration of the Taoist Pedagogy of Pathmarks in this book. After the Introduction, Chapter 2 begins with my two unsettling journeys into teaching in China and the USA and then my explication of the Taoist Pedagogy of Pathmarks. After critically reflecting upon my past teaching experiences as student teach...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. A Long, Unsettling Journey into a Taoist Pedagogy of Pathmarks
• 3. “View the Stars by Day” in a Deep Dark Well
• 4. Waiting for the Sun, Superman, or God?: The Tao of Inaction as “Wait[ing] in Silent Readiness”
• 5. Respond to the “Call of the Pathway” in “Noiseless Ringing of Stillness”
• 6. The Taoist Pedagogy of Pathmarks as Releasement
• Back Matter