Abstrakt
Excavated cosmological texts from the Warring States period encourage their readers to stop practicing divination and relying on ancestral authority and instead start distinguishing what is right and wrong from within themselves. The texts de-scribe this turn towards one's self as "embracing the one," "holding on to the one," or "being one with Dao." In the philosophical discourse shaped by the ancient Greek worldview, there is a contradiction between "looking for answers within oneself" and obeying a higher cosmic power or principle.
However, using the proposed cosmological image to reformulate the question of human agency and freedom, one may obtain an alternative view of the self that may, under certain conditions, coincide with the undifferentiated source of all things and there-fore be free in a radical sense. Through examples from the texts, both excavated and received, the article illustrates how the problem of freedom can be reinterpreted within a different cosmological framework.