Zhuangzi, also known as Zhuang Chou, along with Laozi, is a defining figure of Chinese Taoism. Zhuangzi probably authored only parts of the first seven chapters of the present text, the so-called Inner Chapters. Thinkers of related but distinct theoretical orientations wrote the others. They often expand on themes in the "inner" chapters. (See “School of Zhuangzi for a more complete discussion of the "outer" chapters.)
The relation between the two founding figures of Taoism is an enduring and growing puzzle. Chinese tradition says Zhuangzi inherited Taoism, (a monist view of reality and a mystical theory of knowledge) from Laozi. We know of Zhuangzi's life mainly what we can surmise from the text. It hardly confirms that traditional story. On the contrary, along with recent archeological discoveries, the text makes it as plausible that Zhuangzi was the original Daoist. A.C. Graham speculated that he may have been responsible for Laozi's being regarded as a Daoist. Zhuangzi used Laozi as a fictional figure in his dialogues in order to "talk down" to Confucius. The doctrines placed in Laozi's mouth sounded enough like the popular (then anonymous) Daode Jing that Chinese tradition subsequently came to identify it as the Laozi.
I will assume some theoretical connection between Laozi and The Zhuangzi but not necessarily that of teacher-student. This simplifies our interpretive task since it need not settle the even more difficult interpretive questions surrounding the Laozi. I will simply treat Zhuangzi as a discussant dealing with the philosophical issues that preoccupied others in ancient China. He shares both terminology and background assumptions with most other major philosophical figures. In particular, I will not presuppose that Zhuangzi changed the meaning of dao from its usual ethical sense to a, distinctively Daoist one or that he had a mystical or religious experience and tried to describe it. The various metaphysical statuses that dao's can have will be the same for other thinkers and will be conceptually linked to the role of a dao as a guide to action—to its irreducible normative character.
Zhuangzi's familiarity with and confident handling of the technical language of ancient Chinese semantics make it probable that he had studied the arguments closely. The best indicator of this intellectual influence on Zhuangzi is his longstanding friendship and interaction with the relativist and monist dialectician, Hui Shi (370-319 BC). Zhuangzi mourns Hui Shi's death as depriving him of the person “on whom he sharpened his wits.” Zhuangzi's key strategy for combating the ancient Chinese version of realism arguably comes from Hui Shi. This article will therefore start with Hui Shi's theses (which are not included with in those of the Later Mohists). In any case, our only source of information about them is from the Zhuangzi.
Zhuangzi, despite his obvious affection, is often critical of Hui Shi's optimism that debate and analysis can resolve philosophical issues. Traditional accounts have reckoned this as the mystic Zhuangzi's haughty disdain for Hui Shi's “logic.” However, Hui Shi’d theses deal with language not logic, and they undermine rather than support drawing distinctions. Therefore, if we resist reading Zhuangzi as Laozi's mystical disciple, we get a strikingly different view of the dynamic between the two philosophical friends. Hui Shi (probably busy with politics) emerges as an erudite, enthusiastic, loquacious but a somewhat confused, rather mystical, semantic dilettante. Zhuangzi, by contrast, appears to be an accomplished and consistently rigorous linguistic analyst. Zhuangzi reports enjoying debating Hui Shi--supposedly because Hui Shi had enough learning to be worth refuting. Still, he was ultimately a soft target for a dialectician of Zhuangzi's caliber.
Hui Shi's Teaching
The "Empire" chapter of the Zhuangzi contains an account of Hui Shi's doctrines at the end of its "history of Philosophy." The history traces the progression of different dao (guiding doctrines) leading up to Zhuangzi. We can understand Hui Shi's motivation best by viewing these passages against the background of the realist theory of language given in the Mohist Canon (see Later Mohism). The realists had motivated their doctrine using the idea that real-world similarities and differences provide the basis for the conventional "carving" or "picking out" that divides the “stuff” of the world into thing-kinds. They advanced a rudimentary theory of natural kinds (natural distinctions in reality). It purported to explain how words and language could reliably guide action.
Hui Shi tried to undermine the Mohist semantic proposal by drawing attention to comparatives. Comparatives also mark distinctions, but it is less plausible that the distinctions are in-the-world. Where we draw a comparative contrast is relative to our purpose and point of view. Whether this ant is large or small varies as we compare it with other ants or other animals. Hui Shi focuses on distinctions as large/small, thick/thin, high/low, south/north, and today/yesterday. Their common feature is that from different standpoints we can assign either member of the term-pair to the same object. His typical paradox makes sense as a comment about how we might redescribe familiar examples from different perspectives.
Heaven is as low as the earth; Mountains are level with marshes.
The sun from one perspective is in the middle from another declining.
Natural kinds are from one perspective living and from another perspective dying.
I go to Yue today and arrive yesterday.
The most important implication for theory of language strikes at the Achilles heel of Mohist realism -- the construction of similarity classes, i.e., “The ten-thousand thing-kinds are ultimately alike and ultimately different. Call this the great similarity- difference.”
As the Zhuangzi develops this insight, it amounts to the claim that we can find a difference between any two things no matter how alike they are. We can also find a similarity between any two things no matter how different. Therefore, even if there are objective similarities and differences, they do not justify any particular way of distinguishing between thing-kinds. For every category and name we use, we could have had conventions that as consistently and with equal ‘world- guidedness’ divide stuff up differently.
The list of Hui Shi's sayings, however, begins and ends with claims about reality. He presupposes an ultimate perspective and a concept of "everything". Since distinctions are not in things, reality must be "one." His formulation invites the view (usually attributed to Daoists) that reality is a single, indivisible totality.
The ultimately great, which has nothing outside it, call it the Great One!
The ultimately small, which has nothing inside it, call it the Small One!
Universally love the ten-thousand thing-kinds; the cosmos is one ti (substantive part).
This concluding statement echoes the Mohists' ethical doctrine of universal love and employs their technical term ti. The Zhuangzi account does not give us Hui Shi's reasoning, nor can we be sure of the implications he drew from these formulae. However, the list exhibits a common tendency to the “relativist fallacy,” drawing absolute conclusions from relative premises. Most translators, for example, agree with Hui Shi that it is rational to conclude that all distinctions distort reality. (The fact that judgments are relative to some perspective provides us no reason to conclude anything about absolute reality.)
Since interpreters commonly treat all Daoists as committing this fallacy, we should start out by noting that The Zhuangzi presentation of Hui Shi's views concludes: "He had many perspectives and his library would fill five carts. His doctrine was self-contradictory and his language did not hit the target: his intent to make sense of things." This suggests a hypothesis that Zhuangzi understood the Later Mohists’ proof of the incoherence of denying all distinctions. Consider also Angus Graham's speculation about Gongsun Long's "Pointing and Things" (see Later Mohism) and the argument that we cannot point to an ultimate one. Whether or not Gongsun Long rejected the inference to a concept of "everything", Zhuangzi clearly did. The text almost paraphrases Hui Shi in Zhuangzi’s skeptical rebuttal:
‘The cosmos and I were born together; the ten-thousand things and I are one.’ Now, having already constructed a ‘one,’ is it possible to say something about it? Having already called it a ‘one,’ can we fail to say something about it? ‘One’ and saying it make two. Two and one make three and, going from here, even a skilled calculator cannot keep up with us--let alone an ordinary person.
Zhuangzi: Skeptical Perspectivalism
Zhuangzi had a unique philosophical style that contributes to the tendency to treat him as an irrationalist. He wrote philosophical fantasy rather than direct argument. Some Western readers interpret this style as romantic, as rejecting reason for emotion. A more plausible hypothesis is that he presents his positions in fantasy dialogues to illustrate and conform to a pluralist perspective. He puts positions up for consideration as if endorsing them, then reflectively abandons them. He does this either in an imagined conversation carried on among fantastic creatures (rebellious thieves, distorted freaks, or converted Confucians) or as an internal monologue. In his fantasy dialogues, Zhuangzi seems to challenge us to identify his voice. Even his monologues typically end with a double rhetorical question in place of a conclusion, e.g., "Then is there really any X? Or is there no X?"
One key to Zhuangzi's adaptation of Hui Shi's relativism is his treatment of ‘useful.’ Everything is useful from some position or other and there are positions from which even the most useful thing is useless or useful precisely in being useless. Zhuangzi illustrates this theme with his famous parables of the huge "useless" tree that, consequently, no one ever chopped down and the huge gourd. It was useless to eat, but made a great boat. Pragmatic arguments (like those of Mozi) will always be relative to some implicit (and possibly controversial) value. This observation does not justify our abandoning pragmatic arguments (which, as we will see below, Zhuangzi uses repeatedly). It only prompts us to be sensitive that our assumptions about pragmatic "success" might be controversial.
Zhuangzi develops his perspectivalism in a more consistent direction than did Hui Shi. Possibly because of his knowledge of the Mohist refutation, he does not fall into the trap of rejecting all language (as arguably Laozi did). Being natural does not require abandoning words. Human speaking, from the empty greetings and small talk to the disputes of philosophers, is as natural a ‘noise’ as bird songs. Disputing philosophers are ‘pipes of nature.’ Zhuangzi's use of this metaphor signals that nothing he is going to say entails that disputation should stop any more than it does that brooks must stop babbling. Then he considers an objection to his opening metaphor: “Language is not blowing breath; language users have language. That which it languages, however, is never fixed.”
He develops this critique with his own analysis of the indexicality of all linguistic distinctions. His argument relies heavily on some core terms of Chinese philosophical analysis, shi (is this: right) and fei (not this: wrong). He starts by highlighting the indexical content of shi by contrasting it with pi (that). Zhuangzi asks if anything is inherently ‘this’ or ‘that’ or cannot be ‘this’ or ‘that’? He then shifts to the contrast of shi-fei (right-wrong) which govern all linguistic distinctions. Relative to a name, any object is either shi (is this:right) or fei (is not this:wrong). These keys to language analysis illustrate the claim that it does not have any rigid, naming relation to the world. Language traces our changing position relative to reality as much as its joints and fissures. (For explaining why reflections about shi-fei extend to all words see Shi-fei and Later Mohism.)
This perspectival pluralism differs from Western subjectivity. Zhuangzi does not highlight the perspectives of continuing individual consciousness or internal representations--the private mental world. Arguably, Chinese thinkers did not generate anything comparable to Western folk psychology. (See Philosophy of Mind.) Zhuangzi seems as fascinated with the shifting perspectives within the same person in different times or moods as he is in the interpersonal differences in viewpoint. His main theoretical focus, however, is on the slants arising from using language differently, e.g., being influenced by a different moral discourse. Thus he concludes the dispute between Confucians and Mohists is irresolvable.
Zhuangzi does reflect in places on the perspective of ‘self’. Recalling Laozi’s emphasis on contrasts, he sees it as arising as a contrast with ‘other’. He suggests the deep motive for the distinction is our inability to identify the source of “"pleasure, anger, sadness, joy, forethought, regret, change, and immobility. They “alternate day and night” and, not knowing whence they come, we give up and merely accept them. Without them there would be no 'self' and without 'self,' no "choosing of one thing over another." He notes the inevitability of our assumption that there is some "true ruler" harmonizing and organizing the self, then adds, skeptically, that we never find any sign of it.
Intuitionism
Confucians, particularly innatists (e.g., Mencius) do presuppose a "natural ruler"--the moral heart. Zhuangzi wonders how it can be any more natural than the other "hundred joints, nine openings and six viscera are." Does they need a ruler? Cannot each rule itself? Or take turns? To identify one organ as supreme conflicts with the intention to give a natural basis for morality. (Mencius addresses this problem in connection with the distinction between nature and fate--see “Mencius.”)
Zhuangzi observes that all of the organs of the body grow together in encountering and adapting to life. As it does, it is cheng (completed) -- a term Zhuangzi uses somewhat ironically as suggesting that any completion leaves some defect in its wake. Translators frequently render cheng as "biased." That translation effectively emphasizes this implicit criticism of idealistic Confucianism. It suggests that the heart does acquire a shi-fei direction from its upbringing. The translation, however, loses Zhuangzi’s ironic twist. Cheng, like ‘success’ and ‘accomplishment’, denotes something we all seek. Zhuangzi's use suggests that our natural and common goal of growth and maturity is not possible without some kind of skewing and loss. In a striking illustration, Zhuangzi observes that playing a note requires a zither player to not-play all the others.
Thus, all hearts equally achieve cheng. They grow up just as the rest of the body does. For the heart, this amounts to acquiring a pattern of tendencies to shi-fei judgment. Every person's heart acquires some pattern or other. Hence, if it is this heart, which grows with the body, that is the authority, then we all equally have one. Confucian innatists make a question-begging assumption about which pattern of cheng (completion) is really right. They advocate a program of cultivating the xin (heart-mind) so it will give the correct shi-fei judgments. Without cultivating, they imply, we lose our heart's natural potential.
The sage's heart-mind is the ultimate Mencian standard for right judgment. He is allegedly one who has fully cultivated his natural moral potential. Zhuangzi wonders, what standard do we use to distinguish a sage’s heart-mind from a fool’s? Both have hearts which make shi-fei judgments. If we use A's as a guide, A will look like a sage and B the fool and vice versa. There appears to be no way to identify the proper way to cultivate all existing heart-minds. The innatists beg another question in favor of their acquired orientation when they advocate cultivation. Appeal to the “natural ruler” should simply result in the empty injunction to act as we decide to act.
Zhuangzi's analysis of the cheng xin (completed heart-mind) echoes Laozi's view that knowledge and attitudes are unconsciously acquired in the process of learning language. Attitudes that seem natural and spontaneous simply reflect early upbringing that has become second nature. No innate or spontaneous dispositions survive without cheng influences. Zhuangzi says that the heart lacks a shi-fei unless it has been put there in the process of cheng. To deny that is “like going to Yue today and arriving yesterday!”
Interpretive Issues
At this point, we fact serious interpretive controversies. Traditional interpretations take Zhuangzi to believe in a God-like mystical dao. As we have seen, Zhuangzi’s stylistic use of fantasy and parables make him unusually malleable to the interpreters’ own philosophical perspective. (Perhaps Zhuangzi intended this outcome to illustrate the vagaries of discourse.) We can either attribute perspectival pluralism to him or what actually follows from this doctrine or we may suppose that Zhuangzi was prone to the relativist fallacy. Most translators inadvertently do the latter because they assume that absolute conclusion does follow from the relative premises. That is a philosophical error, but not necessarily an interpretive one. Zhuangzi may have been no clearer a thinker than your average translator.
The only evidence is his text. If we can read it in a philosophically coherent way then, lacking independent evidence of his ineptitude, the translator's argument begs an important question. The translation tradition, thus, relies on the old myth that Zhuangzi learned Daoist monism from Laozi. If he was philosophically more clever than Hui Shi, the usual translations do him an injustice.
Interpreters who accept the Laozi affiliation tend to read his pluralism as leading to a dogmatic monism linked to an error theory, i.e., the view that everyone else’s common-sense picture of a pluralistic world is absolutely wrong. A minority read it as classic relativism--everyone is right. Neither of these, however, follows merely from the plurality of perspectives. One can argue that each conclusion explains certain passages. Still, given Zhuangzi's style, it is hard to rule out his intending certain passages to be ironical or merely as opening lines of thought to further reflection.
Some of Zhuangzi's most memorable images and parables illustrate this interpretive ambiguity. Zhuangzi tells us of an encounter between a Giant Sea Turtle and a frog in a well. It is natural to suppose the Giant Sea Turtle represents some ultimate truth not accessible to the frog (as does the Chinese adage derived from the parable). However, in Zhuangzi's account, the sea turtle cannot even get one flipper into the frog's well. He is as incapable of appreciating the frog's joys and insights as the frog is his. Similar analysis applies to the parables of the Great Bird and the small chickadee, the great fish, etc. Zhuangzi is the least likely thinker of the period to take 'great' and 'small' as signs of absolute value.
The dogmatic reading also presupposes a mystical epistemology. Zhuangzi gives no account of a route to any purported meta-knowledge that everyone else lacks. This interpretation has the burden of showing that Zhuangzi's arguments do not undermine its envisioned conception of the required special route to knowledge. The refutation of Mencius looks perfectly general. It should apply to any view of a special transcendent insight or intuition. It is not clear how Zhuangzi could be astute enough to see the fallacy in Mencius' view and naive enough to turn around and adopt its epistemic twin.
The classic relativist interpretation is plausible only to the extent that Zhuangzi clearly views all existing points of view as natural. Saying that (smoothing them on the whetstone of nature) is neither to approve nor to judge them equal. Zhuangzi removes the traditional authority of tian (nature's) standpoint. Other schools (except for the Later Mohists) took identifying which dao (guide) was tian (natural or heavenly) as the goal. Zhuangzi's argument, as we saw, was that we achieve this goal all too easily for it to be a useful guide. All we can say “equally"”of an existing point of view is “it is” -- which applies to the perspectives of other animals as well.
Zhuangzi infers that we can only rank perspectives by assuming some background dao. He sees that all authority is dao-based, not tian-based. (Dogmatists make this point using "The Dao.") Any judgment that different daos are equal in value must be a result of (a) taking some standard for granted or ( b) a misleading way to say “make no judgment.” The problem with (b) is that, given Zhuangzi's view of the relation of language and judgment, it amounts to saying that we should stop speaking which, as I argued above, we should avoid attributing to Zhuangzi.
What is the alternative? He thinks we must judge from a standpoint and his is a perspective on perspectives. He advocates something he calls ming (discrimination), but what is it? Is it a mystical total insight or a mere awareness of the plurality of perspectives? Zhuangzi, wary of Hui Shi's error, generally avoided contrasting our limited perspectives to any cosmic or total one. He contrasted perspectives mainly with other perspectives. Ming is not the viewpoint although Zhuangzi is implicitly recommending it. That stance, furthermore, does allow judgments about other perspectives (e.g., Mencius). Zhuangzi is not caught in a “Hitler problem.” Nazism was a result of the operation of nature, but a perspectivalist can (presumably would) disapprove (as Zhuangzi does of even less cruel rulers).
The safest solution, then, is to assume he does make judgments from his perspective on perspectives. In doing so, he need not presume it is an absolute, total or cosmic angle of vision. It is, as he admits, “of a type with the others.” One must have some perspective and adopting the ming view gives him no reason to stop registering his reactions. Saying it is a perspective is not a condemnation. It requires only the realization that there are other perspectives.
We do not need to presuppose some absolute or total view to recognize that our views are partial. It only requires us to appreciate that another outlook offers something ours does not. (Opponents of a perspectival interpretation may point out that this interpretation leaves out something. That would be fine -- as long as they acknowledge theirs did too.) Nor need their having limitations entail that perspectives are mistaken.
Zhuangzi's focus is epistemological more than metaphysical. His frequent suggestion that there could be a fantastically adept and successful dao (e.g., that one might reach the point of being able to endure fire, cold, lightning and wind, to harness natural powers, to travel immense distances) appears to require two things. One is that an actual world with real features which some dao reflects better than others do. The other is that we rely on our present standards of success (desires, fantasies, goals, delights, etc.) to evaluate alternative perspectives.
Skepticism v. Dogmatic Monism
The linguistic nature of perspectivalism comes more to the fore when Zhuangzi responds to the Later Mohists. He notes that their term of analysis, ke (assertable), is obviously relative to conventional, linguistic perspective. Different and changing usage patterns and principles still constitute conventions and generate a language and a viewpoint. Single schools of thought may split and disputing factions may combine again. Any language people actually speak is assertable. Any moral discourse for which there is a rival is (from the rival standpoint) not assertable.
Zhuangzi hints that the confidence we get in the appearance of right and wrong in our language is a function of how fully we can elaborate and embellish. How well can we continue on with our way of speaking? We argue for a point of view mainly by spelling it out in greater detail. This encourages the illusion that it may be a total point of view. The seemingly endless disputes between Mohists and Confucians arise from their highly elaborated systems for assigning 'is this' and 'not this'. As we saw, each can build hierarchies of standards that guide their different choices. They come to consider the errors of rivals to be "obvious."
Zhuangzi introduces ming (discrimination) again in presenting his ‘perspective’ on the relativity of language. In the same section he hints at imagining an “absolute” viewpoint -- he calls it the axis of dao. We extrapolate imaginatively reversing our historical path back to the ‘axis’ from which we began. At the ‘axis,’ he says, no limit can be drawn on what we could treat as ‘is this’ or ‘is not this.’ All shi-fei patterns are possible, none actual.
From that axis, however, we make no judgment. It is not a relevant alternative to the disputing perspectives. If we succumb to the absolute interpretive temptation, we fall back into the anti-language abyss. The absolute viewpoint neither advocates nor forbids any espousal of dao. From the perspective of ming, the absolute is not a point of view. Any practical guide is somewhere an actual path that takes one from the axis in one direction rather than another, one particular (indefinitely expandable) way of making distinctions.
Zhuangzi emphasizes the unlimited possibility of these standpoints. Occasionally, however, he presents it as almost a tragic inevitability. Once we have started on a dao, we seem doomed to elaborate and develop it in a kind of “race to death.” Youth is the state of being comparatively open to many possible systems of shi-fei. As we grow and gain “knowledge,” we close off possibilities in a rush toward old-age and death. Zhuangzi exploits the analogy of youth and flexibility. Nothing can free us from the headlong rush to complete our initial commitments to shi and fei as if they were oaths or treaties. We rush through life clinging to the alternative we judge as winning. “Is life really as stupid as this? Or is it that I am the only stupid one and there are others not so stupid?”
Given all the possible systems of guiding discourse, practical knowledge is potentially unlimited. No matter how much we advance and promote a guide, a way of dealing with things, we will be deficient at something else. To have any developed viewpoint is to leave out something. This, however, gives us no reason either to avoid language or prefer other forms of discourse. It is the simple corollary of the fact that knowledge is limitless and our lives are not.
So-called ‘sages’ project their point of view and prejudices on tian (nature), and then treat it as an authority. “Those who have arrived” allegedly know to deem everything as one – they dismiss the multiplicity of viewpoints as biased. Does Zhuangzi recommend we emulate that attitude? Instead of trying to transcend and abandon our usual or conventional ways of speaking, Zhuangzi recommends that we rest with treating them as pragmatically useful. They enable us to communicate and get things done. That, moreover, is all one can sensibly ask of them.
Beyond what is implied in the fact that our language is useful (from the standards within our discourse), we do not know the way things are in themselves. We merely signal that lack of ultimate metaphysical knowledge when we call reality ‘dao’. Treating it as an irreducible ‘one’ (mysticism) differs from saying nothing about it (skepticism) only in attitudinal ways. In the end, neither has anything to say. Only the different attitudes one takes in saying (essentially) nothing distinguishes them.
Zhuangzi's contrast of skepticism and monism surfaces in a number of places. In one he traces the “devolution” of the knowledge of old from knowing “nothing exists” to knowing “one” to knowing things but no distinctions or boundaries and finally to knowing shi-fei. In another notoriously obscure passage, one of his characters is skeptical about skepticism. However, he does not appeal to our familiar sentential grounds, i.e., ask how he knows that he does not know. The Mohists ask how he can know what we do not know. Zhuangzi’s question centers on the grounds of distinction. He wonders if he knows how to distinguish between ‘knowing’ and ‘ignorance.’.
Zhuangzi's treatment of dreams also highlights his different approach to skepticism. He does not use dreaming to motivate sense skepticism. His doubts arise mainly from semantics. (Is there any real relation between our words and things?) Dreaming then becomes a further illustration of a skepticism rooted in worries about whether there is a right way to distinguish with or “pick out” using a word. The dreaming-waking distinction is one we use to organize “what happens” (in the broadest sense). We have learned to use that distinction to bring greater unity or coherence to our experience.
In a dream we can still make the distinction between dreaming and waking. Ultimately we can wonder about other ways (the pragmatic advantages) of making that distinction. Zhuangzi fulfills his heart’s desire in dreaming the butterfly. He does not know how to distinguish Zhuangzi’s dreaming a butterfly from a butterfly’s dreaming Zhuangzi. (Translators typically convert the distinction-point into a propositional one.)
Practical Implications
Zhuangzi's perspectivalism arises in a form of discourse that expects a philosophy to have some moral. None seems to follow from absolute skepticism, monism or relativism. In any case, we should take Zhuangzi to be reflectively aware that his advice comes from one perspective -- his ming approach to discourse. What follows from that insight into the nature of knowledge? We should expect any advice to be tenuous and hedged.
We have already hinted at a couple of the useful recommendations. First, Zhuangzi “mildly” recommends a kind of perspective flexibility. He “recommends” it in the sense one can “recommend” that you be young. To be young-at-heart-mind is to be open to new ways of thinking and conceptualizing. The more committed you get to a scheme, as we saw, the “older” you become intellectually until you are “dead” from learning.
This practical line is paradoxical on several grounds. First, any reason we may have for being flexible in adopting or tolerant to other points of view has to be a reason that motivates us from our present point of view. We must now be able to envision that the alternative ways of thinking will help us more with goals we now have than our present scheme does. Not any other point of view will be a candidate for such openness. So this could not be an abstract argument for total openness. Similarly, it advises tolerance only within certain limits and where we draw them depends on our present moral stance. Thus Zhuangzi is not, as we argued above, required to be “tolerant” of Nazism. From a ming standpoint, judgment is not only still possible, it is inescapable.
Second, the motivation for being open to other schemes of knowledge presupposes the potential value of acquiring them. The openness of youth is valuable only because it represents the possibility of mature sophistication. If we were to take the invitation to openness as anti-knowledge in principle, then perspectivalism would give us no reason to value it.
The second moral is negative. One reaction to dissatisfaction with some normative conventions is blanket rejection. As we have noted, the Later Mohists showed that this negative posture, as applied to language at least, is incoherent. Zhuangzi recognizes that we need not avoid conventions. The second bit of “advice” is simply not to waste useful conventions. Again, we must judge usefulness from some standpoint, some values and standards.
The third bit of advice comes in a famous parable. In it, Zhuangzi draws an uncharacteristically favorable portrait of specialization. His example reminds us Aristotle's observation that the exercise of acquired skill is fulfilling to humans. Highly honed skills invite paradoxical, almost mystical, description. In performance we seem to experience a unity of actor and action. Such practice is a way of losing oneself as much as one might in contemplation or a trance. We can mystify ourselves by the fluid accuracy of our own actions. We do not understand how we did it--we certainly cannot explain it to others.
We all recognize the state of responsive awareness which suspends “self-other” consciousness as we are totally absorbed in our skillful activity. This feature of dao mastery explains the temptation to read Daoist use as propounding a metaphysical thesis. It is natural to express this ideal of skill mastery in the language that suggests mystical awareness. It does normally involve suspension of self-consciousness, ratiocination and seems like surrender to an external force. That language should not confuse us, however. The experience is compatible with Zhuangzi’s window on perspectives. Here is Zhuangzi's account:
Cook Ding was slicing an ox for Lord Wen-hui. At every push of his hand, every angle of his shoulder, every step with his feet, every bend of his knee--Zip! Zoop! He slithered the knife along with a zing, and all was in perfect rhythm, as though he were dancing at Mulberry Grove or keeping time to qing-shou music.
“Ah, this is marvelous!” said Lord Wen-hui. "Imagine skill reaching such heights!"
Cook Ding laid down his knife and replied, "What I care about is a dao which advances my skill. When first I began cutting up oxen, I could see nothing that was not oxen. After three years, I never saw a whole ox. And now--now I go at it by spirit and do not look with my eyes. Controlling knowledge has stopped and my spirit wills the performance. I depend on the natural makeup, cut through the creases, guide through fissures. I depend on things as they are. So I never touch the smallest ligament or tendon, much less bone.
"A good cook changes his knife once a year--because he cuts. A mediocre cook changes his knife once a month--because he hacks. I have had this knife of mine for nineteen years and I've cut up thousands of oxen with it. Yet the blade is as good as if it had just come from the grindstone. . . . "
"Despite that, I regularly come to the limit of what I am used to. I see its being hard to carry on. I become alert; my gaze comes to rest. I slow down my performance and move the blade with delicacy. Then zhrup! it cuts through and falls to the ground. I stand with the knife erect, look all around, deem it wonderfully fulfilling, strop the knife and put it away."
Traditional interpreters stress the mystical flavor and the reference to dao. One can read the claim that dao advances skill as saying it surpasses skill. This traditional commitment to a mystical, monistic dao suggests that there is a short-cut to the butcher's accomplishment. The reading detaches achievement from its ordinary connection with effort. It comes from some sudden and inexplicable insight, mystical experience or attitude. This interpretation coincides with a familiar Zen puzzle about 'sudden' enlightenment. The absolutist monistic interpretation needs to avoid the suggestion that Ding knows his dao and still can improve. How can you have some of a dao that has no parts? When you have it, you suspend entirely all thought and sensation.
Cook Ding's story, thus, clashes slightly with this religious or mystical view of Zhuangzi's advice. His description implies that Ding has a hold on a particular way of doing only one thing. Further, Ding's way is still "developing." He continues to progress in pursuing his skill by tracing his dao to points beyond his previous training. When he comes to a hard part, he has to pay attention, make distinctions, try them out and then move on. The focus required for a superb performance may not be compatible with deliberating self-consciousness. This supports the view that developing skill eventually goes beyond what we can explain using concepts, distinctions, or language, but it is not consistent with sudden total, "mystical" perfection.
Ding clearly sees his skills as related to his learning--what in other places Zhuangzi calls a cheng (completion). He does not report any sudden conversion where some mystical insight flowed into him. He does not suggest he found a mystical shortcut that revealed his practice to be a mistake. Nor does he hint that by being a master butcher, he is in command of all the skills of life. He could not use his "awareness" of dao to be a master archer. His account is compatible with perspectivalism. He has mastered one particular dao.
Note, furthermore, that Cook Ding's activity is cutting--dividing something into parts. When he is mastering his guiding dao, he perceives a world in which the ox is already cut up. He comes to see the holes and fissures and spaces as inherent in nature. That seems a perfect metaphor for our coming to see the world as divided into the natural kinds that correspond to our mastery of terms. When we master a dao we must be able to execute it in a real situation. It requires finding the distinctions (concepts) used in instruction as mapping on nature. We do not have time, anymore, to read the map; we begin to see ourselves as reading the world. Mastering any dao thus yields this sense of harmony. It is as if the world, not the instructions, guides us.
Cook Ding can be aware that others may have different ways to dissect an ox. He simply cannot exercise his skill while also trying to choose among them. In real-izing a dao of some activity in us, we make it second nature. The sense of being "pulled" is neither mere, inert, cognition of external force nor a surrender to a structure already innate in us.
The choice of a butcher for this parable is pivotal. Cultures seldom hold butchering to be a noble profession. Even the "Ding" may be significant -- it may not be the cook's name but a sign of relatively low rank--something like an also-ran. Other popular examples of the theme include the cicada catcher and wheelwright. Zhuangzi probably intends to signal that this level of expertise is available within any activity.
We may achieve this absorption in performance by achieving skill at any dao -- dancing, skating, playing music, butchering, chopping logic, love-making, skiing, using language, programming computers, throwing pottery, or cooking. At the highest levels of skill, we reach a point where we seem to transcend our own self-consciousness. What once felt like a skill developing inside us, begins to feel like control from the natural structure of things. Our normal ability to respond to complex feedback bypasses conscious processing. In our skilled actions, we have internalized a heightened sensitivity to the context.
Traditional interpretations, however, rule out some activities. The examples above, together with Zhuangzi's obvious delight in parable, fantasy, and poetry invite the common analogy to a Western Romantic. Is Zhuangzi suspicious of direct, reasoned, logical discourse in favor of the more "emotional" arts? At least, one should eschew "intellectual" activities. The dichotomy, however, is hard to motivate in the Chinese philosophical context. We find no counterpart of the human faculty of reason (or its logical correlate) still less of the contrast of reason and emotion.
The romantic interpretation seeks to explain why Zhuangzi criticizes Hui Shi, the alleged logician. The problem is that Zhuangzi parallels his comments about Hui Shi with similar observations about a zither player. Furthermore, he criticizes the search for total know-how and not for that of specific activity. Zhuangzi's "criticism" is that in being good at X, these paradigms of skill are miserably inept at Y. These are his examples of how hui (defect) always accompanies cheng (completion).
These reflections lead us to a problem with "achieve dao mastery" as a prescription. As we have noted, Zhuangzi is ambivalent about mastery. Any attainment, he notes, must leave something out. Most particularly, to exercise any skill is to ignore others. Masters are frequently not good teachers. They fail with their sons or disciples. We trade accomplishment at one skill for ineptitude at some other. If the renowned practitioners have reached completion, he says, then so has everyone. If they have not, no one can.
Thus the three parts in Zhuangzi's dao pull in separate directions and we must treat each as tentative and conditional. The flexibility advice seems hard to follow if we also accept convention and work for single-minded mastery. That, in the end, may be the message of Zhuangzi’s perspectivalism. We have limits. . . but we might as well get on with life.
Bibliography
Giles, Herbert A. Zhuangzi, Mystic, Moralist and Social Reformer. (London: Allen & Unwin,1981 .
Graham, Angus. “Zhuang-tzu's Essay on Seeing Things as Equal,” History of Religions 9 (1969): 137-159.
Graham, Angus. Zhuangzi: The Inner Chapters. London: Allen & Unwin,1981.
Hansen, Chad. A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Mair, Victor (ed.). Experimental Essays on Zhuangzi. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1983.
Watson, Burton. Zhuangzi: Basic Writings. New York: Columbia University Press, 1964.
Chad Hansen