The Ecological Aaspects of Daoism: The Chaotic Nature and the Ethics of Non-interference

Abstract

Daoist concept of nature emphasizes its chaotic side which evades all possible articulation and domestication. The chaos theory, a scientific formulation of the wilderness idea, forms a concept of nature as a stable chaotic system and thus introduces a few fundamental modifications into the ecological thought. The understanding of causal relations between the human activity and its effects in nature is also changed due to the nonlinearity and indeterminism of the chaotic systems. In Daoism the nature is considered as a spontaneous (ziran) flow of change (hua) and it functions similarly to stable chaotic systems. Therefore this paper tries to analyse the applicability of the Daoist non-interference principle wuwei as a possible maxim for human activity in nature. It does so by introducing the principle De which connects individual human beings with the nature as a whole. Thereby this principle provides a basis for the so-called moderate Daoist approach to ecological activity.