![]() ![]() This article identifies terms of chaos, such as dun dun 沌 沌, hundun 渾 沌, and xingming 涬 溟 in Laozi and Zhuangzi and examines the passages in which they occur. This processional activity, although taken in one sense as cosmogonic, in a more important sense is immanent at every moment of activity. This chaos is a primal disorder, akin to Hesiod's, but rather than threatening disruption, it is replete with creative potential and through spontaneous action yields orderly processes that proceed from the concretion of things to their dissolution and back, in a complex web of relations. In contrast to a similar early Chinese notion of chaotic disorder (luan), early Daoists posit a type of chaos that is to be cultivated rather than feared. Going all the way back to Hesiod, we see chaos as a cosmogonic state of utter confusion inevitably reigned in by laws of regularity, in a transition from fearful unpredictability to calm stability. ![]() Can we conceive of disorder in a positive sense? We organize our desks, we discipline our children, we govern our polities-all with the aim of reducing disorder, of temporarily reversing the entropy that inevitably asserts itself in our lives. ![]()
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