Talk:Laozi

Laozi and the Daodejing

Something that's my understanding from everything I've read on this topic is that Laozi's basic identity is the author of the Daodejing. I've seen Foucault's "author-function" thrown around a lot in literary critical studies of the Zhuangzi and other various early Masters Texts, but not specifically the Daodejing. But it's clear, even without being able to use that terminology directly, that the relationship is closer to Daodejing.was_written_by(Laozi) than Laozi.authored(Daodejing): the author is an attribute of the text.

When the Daodejing was compiled, what its sources and purposes were, when and how it reached the version that Wang Bi annotated, and how many people were involved in that process are all important and relevant questions, but if we're going to attribute authorship to the Daodejing (and, empirically, it was written down), then the author is this idea of "Laozi", whatever that means.

I think what I'm trying to say, while in between finding and reading sources on this, is that the idea of "Laozi" is not meaningfully seperable from authorship of the Daodejing. If we want to say he was a single person who may have lived around a certain time period, ok, but we can't say that he didn't write the Daodejing. Either a person we understand as being called "Laozi" wrote it, or a person or group of people adopted or invented the idea "Laozi" to be its author. If we're talking about someone who didn't write the Daodejing, that's another person. Folly Mox (talk) 21:15, 22 October 2023 (UTC)

This has been my understanding also, cf. Homer, Moses Remsense聊 22:02, 22 October 2023 (UTC)

Agree completely. Actually, our articles on Zhuangzi and Confucius should eventually be treated this way: the figures serve as a figurehead of authorship for their attributed texts, as much as they do as a pseudo-historical figure—i.e. there's many simultaneously valid identities at play here. The wonderful [SEP entry https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/confucius/] on Confucius begins to approach how we should be treating these figures. Aza24 (talk) 22:33, 22 October 2023 (UTC)

The New Testament of the Bible is a good analogy. Jesus didn't write it; his followers did. There was a founder of the ideology, and followers who wrote the book. It would be frankly absurd to suggest that there was no founder and they all simultaneously came up with a radical new ideology. Just doesn't make sense. Octaazacubane (talk) 11:59, 4 May 2024 (UTC)

Octaazacubane, there's considerably more historical evidence for Jesus of Nazareth than anyone named Laozi, and Jesus isn't primarily known as the author of the Bible (maybe in some Christian sects; I'm not sure). Meanwhile the textual culture of early China was very into multiple authorship, and combining previous quotes / text without attribution or any indication the text is not original. Denecke 2011 (cited in the article) has a pretty interesting theory about the development of the Dao De Jing. Folly Mox (talk) 18:00, 10 May 2024 (UTC)