[MD] Reading & Incomprehension

[Krimel]

[Bo]
You escaped at once.  My "X" was just to indicate reality being 
something - TAO for example. That it is undefined and nothing can be 
said about it goes without saying, but we have the term TAO. What 
improvement did it bring in its wake? Was there anyone before Lao 
Tsu who claimed that there was no Tao? Don't bite my head off, I 
would like to know. 

[Krimel]
I think reality is "something." I am sure not sure what. Every time I think
I have it nailed down it changes into something else. It always seems to run
faster than I can. I find myself always talking about what I thought it was
just a bit ago but then it is gone again. And so I call it Tao. That's kind
of what Lao Tsu says. I call it Tao because it is a strange word from a
strange culture and that helps remind me that I don't actually know what it
means. I think it is infinitely better than Quality because regardless of
what Pirsig says I always think in the back of my mind somewhere that I do
know what that word means.

But Lao Tsu was writing around 500 B.C. within a tradition that dates back
some 1000 years before him. As any student of intellectual history should
know, even a poor one, Lao Tsu was one of the writers in the Axial Age, that
flourishing of philosophical theology that includes the Buddha, Zoraster and
the unknown prophet in Isaiah. 

[Bo]
Well what did Lao Tsu mean by TAO if not the source from which 
everything emanates or are "carvings" out of?

[Krimel]
He said he didn't know what to call it so he called it "The Way" and that
you could recognize it through the common relationships that underlie all
opposition. Rough and smooth, dark and light. It is like water. In a cup for
example it is not the substance of the cup that is of value but the space it
encloses. It is the possibility of sculpture inside the uncarved block. You
can define all of the term you use to talk about it but it is also in what
escapes your talking. Lacan talks about "the real" kind of like this as what
is left over and beyond our conceptions.