Tag Archives: religiosity

Oftentimes we encounter writers who are on the quest for a new Spiritual-Religion. Chuang-Tzu himself transcended the ordinary categories of just what constitutes common notions of such a quest.  One of my resources in this series is a book by Ge Ling Shang entitled Liberation as affirmation: the religiosity of Zhuangzi and Nietzsche. This author has provided a key term that best expresses the aforementioned quest: Religiosity. He has chosen unlikely bedfellows whose dissimilar philosophies broached the subject, yet they did share one common characteristic. As the author writes, “both Zhuangzi’s and Nietzsche’s attack on traditional values was not so much an attempt to present another system of human values as an attempt to overcome and transcend all traditional values to reach a state of liberation and freedom. For, according to Zhuangzi and Nietzsche, liberation itself is not a value in a customary sense, but the transcending of all previous values.” Nietzsche would call this a Transvaluation of all Values. He broke through all traditional notions that had become metastasized in normative structures like a pounding hammer, whereas Zhuangzi did so in the gentle flight of a butterfly, or the ethereal breath of the Tao itself. They both succeeded in transcending all mundane conventionalities in that spirit of Religiosity. Religiosity empowers the spirit to soar beyond the narrow confines of the composed into the boundless-freedom of the Unborn. read more