i was extremely pleased to get ahold of daoism and anarchism, by john rapp. that's my religion and my politics, or my anti-religion and anti-politics, together like bacon and eggs, abbott and costello, love and pain. let me start with the amazing strengths, what makes it worth its excessive price in spite of everything. there are several texts here, appearing for the first time in english, or at any rate very little known to western scholars, that fully substantiate a history of extremely clear taoist anti-statism and anti-hierarchical thinking more or less all the way through. in particular, texts denoted 'bao jingyan' (5th century ad) and 'wu nengzi' (9th century ad), were completely new to me and, i believe, are fundamentally important in the history of both daoism and anarchism.
now for the extreme drawbacks. 'john rapp' sounds like the name of a native speaker of english, but his own text appears to have been mistranslated from mandarin or something. he's got some uselessly doctrinaire vision of what anarchism is and is always apologizing that taoist sages don't sound more like bakunin. but it'd be tough to be a taoist sage in the tenth century pursuing violent proletarian insurrection, i feel. in every case including the whole book he starts by formulating devastating objections from imagined interlocutors to his own project, but it is impossible to say why. this material needs an enthusiast and a scholar, not a series of defensive manouevers against the last 3 bakuninists.
on behalf of the wunengzi, he apologizes to anarchists cause it's too tolstoyesque, and to enthusiasts for taoism because it's too buddhist. but all the great chinese philosophy of that era and hundreds of years before and after is actually syncretic; all the mnost interesting stuff has taoist, confucian, and buddhist elements. this is true of the great neo-confucians, for example. it can be done in a profound way, and often is, and you have got to take the era on something like its own terms to get it at all.
when in his appendix of texts he reprints burton watson's translations, one can't quibble, of course. but he seems to have commissioned his own translation of the wunengzi, which could be a major contribution to the taoist canon in english. (nevertheless, rapp apologizes to anarchists for its taoism, etc; he doesn't appear very impressed with it, has all sorts of reservations.) the translation is an unbelievable wretched mess, just as though no one even read it over in english before they published it. here's a sample and i tell you it is representative: "People of ancient times until now, those determined to be their relatives were their blood-kin, thereupon their affections had a point to specialize on." there is sentence after sentence like that, and sheer gobbeldygook is, believe it or not, only one of the grotesque issues. bloomsbury academic published this in the uk, continuum in the us. no, absolutely not.
what i am going to do here in a bit is re-work part 1, chapter 1, which appears to me to be extremely profound on multiple levels, into something resembling contemporary english.
