[MD] "knowing that" versus "knowing how"

[MarshaV]

http://ccbs.ntu.edu.tw/FULLTEXT/JR-MISC/101801.htm   



Greetings,

This is a very interesting article addressing both the Daoist point-of-view (represented by Zhuangzi) and the Buddhist point-of-view (represented by Nagarjuna) on the subject of truth versus no-truth.  Here is a few paragraphs:

    "To realize that there are no things is not to float in a porridge where each spoonful is indistinguishable from the next; it is to store away in the Gate of Heaven which remains no-thing even as all things arise from it and transform into each other... If we replace "things" in the previous sentence with "words", what would that imply about language?

    According to Graham, grasping the Dao is a matter not of "knowing that" but of "knowing how," as shown by the many craftsmen Zhuangzi is fond of citing. This distinction is not as useful as one would hope, but it is useful to consider: what would "knowing how" with words be like? It is no coincidence that Zhuangzi himself provides one of the greatest examples, and not only for Chinese literature. Clearly there is a special art to this as well, which is not completely indifferent to logic and reasoning as we have come to understand them in the West, yet which is not to be completely identified with them. One of the delights of the Zhuangzi for Western readers is the way its polyvocal text disrupts our distinction between form and content, rhetoric and logic -- a bifurcation which may be not "natural" but an unfortunate legacy of the Western intellectual tradition."



Marsha 
 
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