The Way of Nature (The Illustrated Library of Chinese Classics)

"Staying with comics sector, I want to talk about Zhuangzi, The Way of Nature. This illustrated version was published in 2019. There are two books like this. There’s this one and then there’s The Analects . Both have been published by Princeton University Press. And basically, when you look into it, you have the original Chinese up here. And then you have the translation by Brian Bruya, which is put into a comic format. Because lots of the things in Zhuangzi lend themselves to the short comic format, of half a page or a page like in Peanuts , because you have just one story. For example, you have the story of Zhuangzi meeting his friend Huizi. There are lots of those discussions, and they’re just walking over the river, and they see fish in the water. And Zhuangzi says, ‘Oh, these are such delightful fish, look how happy they are!’ And then Huizi—he’s a logician and he is always sceptical about this philosophy of following nature and being aligned with nature, of Daoism, basically—he says, ‘You can’t know how these fish are feeling. You’re not a fish. So how can you know?’ And Zhuangzi says, ‘Yes, but you’re not me, so how can you know that I don’t know what fish feel?’ This goes on in that way and, eventually, he doesn’t quite convince Huizi but he makes a point about how there are certain limits to perspective taking. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter If you look at C.C. Tsai’s drawings in this book, they are really cute and humorous. They’re interesting for the following reason. You don’t have the entire Zhuangzi, because the entire Zhuangzi is quite big, and if you were to illustrate that you’d have a book three times the size. And there’s only very recently a book, that came out in 2020, with the complete Zhuangzi, that is a recent translation, by Brook Ziporyn. Now you have more and more Westerners who are interested in this kind of philosophy and doing philosophy globally. But there is a sense in which Zhuangzi is profound, but also funny and light-hearted. There are a lot of really silly moments, almost. And I think that this version of Zhuangzi—and I have three different versions—is the only one that really captures this playfulness, helps to remind you, when you’re reading it, that, ‘Okay, this is a serious philosophical text, but it’s also a silly and playful philosophical text.’ I think that this format does that very well. Yes, and there is something about philosophy that isn’t sufficiently recognized—because it’s hard to capture—and that is the idea of mood. Mood is a bit different from emotion , because emotion is always directed. If I’m angry, I’m going to be angry for a reason or if I’m happy, usually, there’s a reason. But mood is not directed as such. There are some philosophical works that when you read them give you a certain mood. It’s very hard to articulate, but when you read Wittgenstein , or Nietzsche, there is a certain sort of undirected mood that emanates from them. And that’s something that I think a lot of contemporary analytic philosophy loses a little bit. I think continental philosophy does this better, it does capturing a certain mood quite well."