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The Cologne Basic Law and Daoism
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Photo: Verlag/Greven
Köln Can you imagine the people of Cologne as Daoist philosophers? The answer from here seems obvious: “I don’t know anything, I don’t break anything, I don’t know anything”. However, this would mean depriving yourself of the pleasure of encountering some of the life maxims that have now become famous as Cologne’s basic law in a Far Eastern wisdom teaching that is well over 2000 years old. In his essay, Michael Wittschier, valued as an author of imaginative introductions to philosophy as well as a renowned philosophy didactician, explains what Laotse’s “doing without doing” known as Wu Wei has to do with successfully postponed bicycle repairs and dilapidated Rhine bridges, which Chinese thinkers like Dschuang Dsi or Menzius connects with the Kalk school principal Heinrich Welsch or with Joseph Cardinal Frings.
Sounds weird? Who knows what it is for?
Konrad Beikircher, a native of South Tyrol, has gotten to know the people of Cologne and the Cologne mentality very well over the many years in his adopted home on the Rhine. “Since I have been living in the Rhenish universe, I have become increasingly suspicious that I am not dealing with Europeans here. The kinship with the Buddhist and Daoist world struck me when I realized how much the people of Cologne live in the present,” he writes in his foreword to the book published by Greven Verlag.
There, Michael Wittschier compares the most important principles of Cologne with the findings of the great Far Eastern teachers and philosophers such as Laotse, Chuang Dsi, Mencius and Confucius. These include “Et es, wie et es. What do you do best?” as well as “Et kütt, wie et kütt. Nothing bliev like et wor” or “Et would still have joot jejange. Watt is fat, is fat”.
2023-12-11 22:43:10
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