Talk:Laozi

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Laozi was one of the Philosophy and religion good articles, but it has been removed from the list. There are suggestions below for improving the article to meet the good article criteria. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake.

Article milestones
Date	Process	Result
November 4, 2007	Peer review	Reviewed
January 18, 2008	Good article nominee	Listed
October 10, 2019	Good article reassessment	Delisted

Current status: Delisted good article

Laozi and the Daodejing[edit]

Something that's my understanding from everything I've read on this topic is that Laozi's basic identity is the author of the Daodejing. I've seen Foucault's "author-function" thrown around a lot in literary critical studies of the Zhuangzi and other various early Masters Texts, but not specifically the Daodejing. But it's clear, even without being able to use that terminology directly, that the relationship is closer to Daodejing.was_written_by(Laozi) than Laozi.authored(Daodejing): the author is an attribute of the text.

When the Daodejing was compiled, what its sources and purposes were, when and how it reached the version that Wang Bi annotated, and how many people were involved in that process are all important and relevant questions, but if we're going to attribute authorship to the Daodejing (and, empirically, it was written down), then the author is this idea of "Laozi", whatever that means.

I think what I'm trying to say, while in between finding and reading sources on this, is that the idea of "Laozi" is not meaningfully seperable from authorship of the Daodejing. If we want to say he was a single person who may have lived around a certain time period, ok, but we can't say that he didn't write the Daodejing. Either a person we understand as being called "Laozi" wrote it, or a person or group of people adopted or invented the idea "Laozi" to be its author. If we're talking about someone who didn't write the Daodejing, that's another person. Folly Mox (talk) 21:15, 22 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

This has been my understanding also, cf. Homer, Moses Remsense聊 22:02, 22 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Agree completely. Actually, our articles on Zhuangzi and Confucius should eventually be treated this way: the figures serve as a figurehead of authorship for their attributed texts, as much as they do as a pseudo-historical figure—i.e. there's many simultaneously valid identities at play here. The wonderful [SEP entry https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/confucius/] on Confucius begins to approach how we should be treating these figures. Aza24 (talk) 22:33, 22 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]