The ineffable Tao
The Tao finds worth in worthlessness, use in uselessness, beauty in ugliness.. The Tao was a source of yin and yang, the reconciliation of opposites.
This is Who made our minds? my Thursday essay probing the greatest, cruellest and most beautiful minds of the past 5,000 years, inspired by my book, The Soul: A History of the Human Mind (Penguin 2024). Coming up: Ecstasy in the Nunneries, Homer’s Psyche and The (French) Revolutionary Conscience.
LAOZI (born c. 571 BCE), also known as Lao Tzu, was a Chinese philosopher usually credited with the ‘discovery’ of the Tao.
The Tao is the ‘Way’ or the ‘Path’ to understanding the nature and flow of the universe and the essence of all things. If we accept the existence of this endless, indivisible ‘life force’, it seems truer to say that the Tao ‘discovered’ Laozi.
The Tao’s origins are obscure. The concept appears to have sprung from the Spring and Autumn Period (c. 770–481 BCE), which preceded the Warring States Period. It flourished much later, from the second century BCE, as a reaction to the perceived austerity a…