DAOISM AS A PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE

The paper aims to debate Daoism as a “philosophy of language.” It is based on the presumption that Chinese philosophy, especially Daoism, regards the world as the changeable, variable, volatile, and fluid flow of changes and transformations. Therefore, one of the critical questions in this philosophy is how we can name this changeable world. How could naming, which is a kind of fixation, grasp the fluidity of reality? To understand the Daoist vision of naming and how Daoists resolved the issue of naming the changeability, the article discusses the concepts of Dao and ming and their relation in the opening paragraph of Daodejing. The article argues that its usual interpretation, which is close to the ideas of apophatism, needs revision. Through the content and expression of its treatises, Taoism presents a philosophy of language that is in harmony with procedural thinking. It expresses reality's multivariate and multi-layered nature, the ever-renewing inexhaustibility of the possibilities for realizing what is happening and its naming