Zhuangzi

"Zhuangzi, we are told, lived in the fourth century BCE. We actually don’t know much about him. In truth, all that we have from him—apart from later stories that are told about him—is this one text, which is extraordinary. It is a text that will later be categorised as a Daoist text, so as part of the same way of thinking as the Laozi . I tell my students to think of it as a very different take on a somewhat similar set of ideas. But it really is a different take. As far as we know, Zhuangzi didn’t know the Laozi . The term ‘Daoism’ did not exist at the time. It’s a later term that is aimed at bringing together these texts. In a nutshell, what the Zhuangzi is trying to do is to break us out of our patterns of thinking. But the way it will do that is not simply through very short, gnomic paradoxical statements. The way the Zhuangzi will do it is through this extraordinary, imaginative prose that will try, in the very way it’s written, to break us from our limited perspectives. So, as you’re reading it, you will take the point of view of a butcher, you will take the point of view of a bird, of a piece of bark, a fish. Zhuangzi is trying to break us out of our limited understandings so that we begin to get a sense of the world as endless flux, endless transformation, in which, if we can train ourselves to do so, we can begin to understand its tremendous multiplicity. It’s in between the two, and there’s also an element of a third part as well. Unlike a meditating, decentring process, it’s about training yourself to sense this multiplicity. A lot of the stories, for example, will revolve around skill-based activities. A butcher is one of the examples: a butcher, by the very ways that he undertakes his butchering activities, is learning to break away from his tendencies to think in very limited ways, and to sense the complexity of situations. It’s a very telling story. It’s meant analogically, of course. The butcher will begin simply slicing up pieces of meat according to a very rational calculation. Every slab is cut in exactly the same way. And, because that means you’re digging through all these bones and muscles and sinews, he has to constantly stop to sharpen his knife. Then the argument is that he slowly begins to realise, as the years go by, that the meat in fact has its own patterns. There are places where, say, the muscles will wrap around the tendons, which wrap around the bone, and every piece of meat is slightly different. There is no single way of understanding that. What you must do is learn to sense where these patterns flow. And he becomes so good at it, at a certain point, that he’s able, not with his mind but with his spirit, simply to sense these patterns and take his knife and slide it through the patterns of meat so flawlessly that he’s able to cut them perfectly without ever having to sharpen his knife again. That’s a perfect analogy. One is training oneself in a sport to become so good that you’re no longer thinking about what you’re physically doing—you’re just sensing situations perfectly. Learning a musical instrument would be another good analogy: you’re training yourself, over the years, to play the musical instrument, to affect the room, by being sensitive to the situation. The argument of the Zhuangzi is that we should do this in our everyday lives. Imagine, in our everyday lives, training ourselves with the same kind of work that we would do to train ourselves in a sport or when we learn a musical instrument. We would be training ourselves in our lives, not to be battling through the world, not to bash against the world, but to sense situations, work with situations, alter situations as we work with them. In other words, in your daily life, you would be performing the same sort of work that we otherwise think of doing in these restricted, skill-based activities. Very much so. Now, there were some thinkers in early China who did begin developing arguments a little bit like Kant’s, but much more consequentialist: they tried to develop a utilitarian calculus that we should be following to determine what to do and what not to do, how to become a good person, how not to become a good person. But, indeed, the texts we’ve been discussing so far are very Aristotelian. They’re pushing against such attempts and saying, ‘No, no, no it’s all about personal practice, about gaining the ability to sense situations well, of becoming virtuous over time by the way one senses situations.’ They are, therefore, very suspicious of attempts to say we can work out by some kind of a calculus—whether that’s deontological or utilitarian or what have you—what to do. Extraordinarily so. These are ideas that have been incredibly important throughout Chinese and, indeed, all of east Asian history. In the 20th century, many of these texts were burned. There was a strong push against them, as a result of the self-conscious attempt to build a communist society that stood very strongly against these old traditions. Now, intriguingly, they’re coming back. The texts are being read again, they’re being debated again. Of course, this is not just happening in China: it’s really a global phenomenon. These texts are coming back to life. Very much so. We are also physically uncovering many old texts. There are many old texts that are being found and studied for the first time. China is rediscovering its old traditions. It’s a really extraordinary moment."

"My next recommendation is also an eponymous text from 4th century BCE. China, the Zhuangzi . If you read Zhuangzi carefully it’s clear that, although he never mentions Mengzi by name, he’s read him and he’s giving a critique of his ideas. There are several translations of Zhuangzi that each have their own strengths and weaknesses. I’m suggesting the one by Burton Watson, which is one of the most beautiful ones. Students always fall in love with Zhuangzi . It’s a philosophical work that makes its points through a combination of explicit arguments, very intriguing short stories, and poetry. One of Zhuangzi’s most interesting philosophical arguments is a kind of regress argument for scepticism. He says: ‘Suppose you and I are arguing and I win the argument.’ He doesn’t specify what counts as winning an argument, but I think that’s part of the genius of his account: you can specify whatever conception of ‘winning’ you wish. So Zhuangzi asks, ‘Well, does the fact that I won the argument mean that I’m right and you’re wrong?’ The idea is that we cannot think that winning an argument guarantees that the conclusion is correct, because we know of cases where people ‘win’ arguments that we think they shouldn’t have won, where the other person simply couldn’t think of a response on the fly, or the audience or judge shouldn’t have been persuaded by the argument. But then Zhuangzi says: ‘So all we know in an argument is who wins according to some criteria. That doesn’t show us who is right. And we don’t have access to anything except different criteria for judging that someone has or hasn’t won an argument, which in each case will be inadequate to establish what’s actually right.’ He continues: ‘I suppose we could get a third person to determine whether or not I’m really right or you’re really right, but now the problem is we’ve just pushed it back one level because we can ask whether this person should have been convinced. We can’t say that for sure because third parties can also be wrong in judging who won an argument.’ So, he’s suggesting that nothing that humans do in debate could ever give you a really compelling reason for believing that we’d arrived at the truth. It’s a very powerful sceptical argument. It also reminds me of some of the arguments the ancient Sceptics gave, a version of one of their infinite regress arguments. I’m not ultimately convinced by Zhuangzi. I’m not a sceptic myself, but it is a powerful argument. Think about it this way: imagine we’re watching an argument between somebody who believes in intelligent design or creationism, and someone who believes in evolutionary theory. Consider two outcomes: suppose the person who believes in intelligent design wins the argument by whatever criteria – they silence the other person, or they’ve convinced most people in the audience, or they correctly applied some set of rational standards. The epistemological condition of the person who believes in intelligent design is this: they believe the debater they agree with has correctly applied all the relevant standards of evidence and they have further corroboration of that in the fact that they’ve either silenced their opponent, or they’ve convinced people in the audience. However, you and I think that the advocate of evolutionary theory did not deserve to lose the argument, and the advocate of intelligent design is mistaken. Now consider a second outcome: suppose the person we agreed with at the start of the argument, who advocated evolutionary theory, had won the argument. We would now be in exactly the same epistemological situation that the advocate of intelligent design was in the former case. We’d say, yes, the person who won applied all of the rational standards correctly and we have further corroboration for the correctness of our account because they silenced their opponent or convinced the audience. However, most advocates of intelligent design will think that the advocate of intelligent design did not deserve to lose the argument, and they will continue to believe in intelligent design. Notice that, in this second case, we advocates of evolutionary theory are in the same epistemological situation that the advocate of intelligent design was in the first case. But we thought that the advocate of intelligent design in the first case was mistaken. So there’s no way internally to distinguish our epistemological situation from the epistemological situation of someone who we agree is mistaken. All we ever know in any argument is who ‘won’ the argument, by some criteria of winning. But we all know of cases in which someone ‘wins’ an argument even though we think they are mistaken. So there is no non-question-begging way to infer from winning an argument to being correct. Great question! One way of reading Zhuangz i is as using rational argumentation to undermine rational argumentation, but then also using language in other imaginative ways to reorient us towards a different way of seeing the world, other than a way in which we think language accurately describes the world. He does. There is a powerful image early on in the Zhuangzi of a butcher who carves up an animal carcass and does it so skilfully and so quickly that a noble person who’s watching just says: ‘I didn’t know skill could reach this height.’ The butcher responds: ‘What I care about is ‘the Way,’ which goes beyond mere skill.’ He continues: ‘I follow the natural pattern of the ox as I carve it, and as a result my blade never dulls because it always goes right in between the bones without ever striking anything and getting dulled.’ This suggests an image of going through life such that you spontaneously respond to the structure of the world around you, but you don’t do it by arriving at conclusions through argument; you do it by getting better at spontaneously responding to the structure of the world like a butcher who has, after years of practice, learned to effortlessly carve an ox carcass. “You don’t do it by arriving at conclusions through argument; you do it by getting better at spontaneously responding to the structure of the world” Incidentally, I mentioned that Zhuangzi is often a critic of Mengzi—one of Mengzi’s most famous examples is of a ruler who shows his compassion by sparing an ox being led to slaughter, and Mengzi says that the compassion the king showed by sparing the ox proves that he has the innate disposition toward benevolence. Mengzi then adds: ‘and this is why gentlemen never go into the kitchen.’ The implication is that if you’re really tender-hearted, you can’t stand to see animals being slaughtered. So who does Zhuangzi pick as an example of the ideal person? That butcher in the kitchen slaughtering and carving up the animal! It’s by going into the kitchen and watching that butcher slaughter the animal that the ruler in Zhuangzi’s story learns what you should really do, instead of just chatting with Mengzi up in the courtyard while someone else does the dirty work. You are in good company in making that suggestion. There have been philosophers in the Chinese tradition who have said that ultimately Confucianism and Daoism are consistent. Similarly, my colleague Ted Slingerland has emphasised that both Confucianism and Daoism embrace the ideal of wuwei, spontaneous action that is perfectly responsive to the situation. As a result, both have to deal with the paradox that you have to self-consciously cultivate the ability to respond unselfconsciously. Despite these important similarities, much of the Zhuangzi seems to be critiques or parodies of the things that Mengzi says. For example, Confucians regard mourning for the deaths of loved ones as both natural and an ethical obligation. But in the Zhuangzi there are several famous stories of people dying and their loved ones not performing any funeral rituals for them. Instead, the survivors just embrace their death with a kind of joy. “If you really saw the way the universe is, you’d transcend ordinary social conventions like mourning for the dead, or fear of your own death” In one story a man dies and his friends are just happily singing over the body when one of Confucius’ disciples comes and upbraids them for not performing the proper funeral rituals. The disciple goes back to Confucius and says, ‘Oh you wouldn’t believe these people, they’re just terrible,’ but Confucius expresses admiration for them, saying, ‘I should have known better than to send you to help them. They wander beyond the six directions of space; I wander within it. I’m just scarred by heaven with benevolence and righteousness and cannot escape them.’ So Zhuangzi is appropriating Confucius as a mouthpiece here to express his own view that if you really saw the way the universe is, you’d transcend ordinary social conventions about things like mourning for the dead, or even fear of your own death. Things such as mourning (which the actual Confucius thought is natural when loved ones pass away), or even concern for your own life and death, are attachments that you can escape, if you realise they’re just imposed on you by society. They’re not things that are part of the Way. Yes, they are. Mengzi was living in a time of brutal civil war, and so the suggestion that ‘human nature is good’ was in itself radical. His proposal for how to govern was also radical because Mengzi said the keys to governing are compassion and integrity on the part of rulers, in contrast to thinkers of his era who advocated realpolitik in foreign affairs and severe punishments in domestic affairs. Zhuangzi, too, as you point out, was very willing to question common sense and traditional practices. My colleague Paul Kjellberg likes to emphasise a very interesting but gruesome image in the Zhuangzi: in the middle of the night a woman who’s a leper gives birth and she quickly grabs a torch and comes back to make sure that the baby does not look like her. The point of the story seems to be: why do we want our children to be like us? Maybe we should rather want our children not to be like us. Precisely. Richard Rorty tried to capture this distinction by saying that Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein are ‘edifying’ philosophers, in contrast with ‘systematic’ philosophers like Plato and Hume. I think Zhuangzi is also best understood as edifying rather than systematic. Systematic philosophers construct and defend coherent worldviews; edifying philosophers seek to undermine philosophical systems in general, without trying to supplant them with a new system. Of course, there is a legitimate question about whether this is a coherent project. Isn’t the practice of ‘undermining all systems’ itself a system? But even if we are not edifying philosophers ourselves, we can learn a lot by reflecting upon the critiques that philosophers like Zhuangzi and Nietzsche offer of systematic thought."