Indeed, it appears to be articulated precisely in response to those who oppose the traditional Ruist values of humanity and rightness ren and yi by claiming to have a superior mystical ground from which to judge them to be lacking.
In this way, radical relativism actually forestalls the possibility of radical critique altogether! According to this reading, the Vast perspective of the giant Peng bird is no better than the petty perspectives of the little birds who laugh at it. And indeed, Guo Xiang, draws precisely this conclusion. But there is a problem with taking this reading too seriously, and it is the kind of problem that plagues all forms of radical relativism when one attempts to follow them through consistently.
Simply put, Zhuangzi would have to acknowledge that his own position is no better than those he appears to critique. He would have to acknowledge that his Daoist philosophy, indeed even this articulation of relativism, is no improvement over Confucianism after all, and that it is no less short-sighted than the logic-chopping of the Mohists.
This, however, is a consequence that Zhuangzi does not recognize. This is surely an indication that the radical relativistic interpretation is clearly a misreading. Recently, some western interpreters Lisa Raphals and Paul Kjellberg, for example have focused their attention on aspects of the text that express affinities with the Hellenistic philosophy of Skepticism. Now, it is important not to confuse this with what in modern philosophy is thought of as a doctrine of skepticism , the most common form of which is the claim that we cannot ever claim to know anything, for at least the reason that we might always be wrong about anything we claim to know—that is, because we can never know anything with absolute certainty.
This is not quite the claim of the ancient Skeptics. Arguing from a position of fallibilism, these latter feel that we ought never to make any final judgments that go beyond the immediate evidence, or the immediate appearances. We should simply accept what appears at face value and have no further beliefs about its ultimate consequences, or its ultimate value. In particular, we should refrain from making judgments about whether it is good or bad for us.
We bracket epoche these ultimate judgments. When we see that such things are beyond our ability to know with certainty, we will learn to let go of our anxieties and accept the things that happen to us with equanimity.
Zhuangzi also accepts a form of fallibilism. While he does not refrain from making judgments, he nevertheless acknowledges that we cannot be certain that what we think of as good for us may not ultimately be bad for us, or that what we now think of as something terrible to be feared death, for example might not be an extraordinarily blissful awakening and a release from the toils and miseries of worldly life.
When we accept this, we refrain from dividing things into the acceptable and the unacceptable; we learn to accept the changes of things in all their aspects with equanimity. In the Skeptical reading, the textual contradictions are also resolved by appealing to different perspectives from which different judgments appear to be true.
Once one has learnt how to shift easily between the perspectives from which such different judgments can be made, then one can see how such apparently contradictory things can be true at the same time—and one no longer feels compelled to choose between them.
There is, however, another way to resolve these contradictions, one that involves recognizing the importance of continuous transformation between contrasting phenomena and even between opposites. The world is seen as a giant clod da kuai around which the heavens tian revolve about a polar axis daoshu.
All transformations have such an axis, and the aim of the sage is to settle into this axis, so that one may observe the changes without being buffeted around by them. Now, the theme of opposites is taken up by the Mohists, in their later Mohist Canon, but with a very different understanding.
There must always be a clear distinction between the two. It is to this claim, I believe, that Zhuangzi is directly responding. Rejecting also the Mohist style of discussion, he appeals to an allusive, aphoristic, mythological style of poetic writing to upset the distinctions and blur the boundaries that the Mohists insist must be held apart.
If we, on the contrary, learn to nurture those aspects of our heart-minds xin , our natural tendencies xing , that are in tune with the natural tian and ancestral zong within us, then we will eventually find our place at the axis of the way daoshu and will be able to ride the transformations of the cosmos free from harm. That is, we will be able to sense and respond to what can only be vaguely expressed without forcing it into gross and unwieldy verbal expressions.
We are then able to recognize the paradoxes of vagueness and indeterminacy that arise from infinitesimal processes of transformation. Zhuangzi also insists on a level of understanding that goes beyond such relatively crude modes of dividing up our world and experiences. There are hidden modes of knowing, not evident or obviously present, modes that allow us to live, breathe, move, understand, connect with others without words, read our environments through subtle signs; these modes of knowing also give us tremendous skill in coping with others and with our environments.
What is known by such modes of knowing, when we attempt to express it in words, becomes paradoxical and appears contradictory. It seems that bivalent distinctions leave out too much on either side of the divide: they are too crude a tool to cope with the subtlety and complexity of our non-conceptual modes of knowing.
When we nurture that deepest and most natural, most ancestral part of our pysches, through psycho-physical meditative practices, we at the same time nurture these non-cognitive modes of understanding, embodied wisdoms, that enable us to deal successfully with our circumstances.
This place is to be protected bao , kept whole quan , nurtured and cultivated yang. The result is a sagely and skillful life. A technique is a procedure that may be mastered, but the skill of the sage goes beyond this. The mastery achieved is demonstrated both metaphorically, and literally by practical embodied skill. That is, practical embodied skill is also a metaphor representing the mastery of the life of the sage, and so it is also a sign of sagehood though not all those who are skillful are to be reckoned as sages.
Thus, we see many examples of individuals who have achieved extraordinary levels of excellence in their achievements—practical, aesthetic, and spiritual. The Daoists, especially the authors of the anarchistic utopian chapters, are highly critical of the artificiality required to create and sustain complex social structures.
The Daoists are skeptical of the ability of deliberate planning to deal with the complexities of the world within which our social structures have their place. The more we try to control and curtail these natural meanderings, the more complicated and unwieldy the social structures become. According to the Daoists, no matter how complex we make our structures, they will never be fully able to cope with the fluid flexibility of natural changes. The Daoists perceive the unfolding of the transformations of nature as exhibiting a kind of natural intelligence, a wisdom that cannot be matched by deliberate artificial thinking, thinking that can be articulated in words.
The result is that phenomena guided by such artificial structures quickly lose their course, and have to be constantly regulated, re-calibrated. This need gives rise to the development and articulation of the artificial concepts of ren and yi for the Ruists, and shi and fei for the Mohists.
Our judgments can be positive or negative, and these arise out of our acceptance and rejection of things or of judgments, and these in turn arise out of our emotional responses to the phenomena of benefit and harm, that is, pleasure and pain.
Thus, we set up one of two types of systems: the intuitive renyi morality of the Ruists, or the articulated structured shifei of the Mohists. Zhuangzi sees both of these as dangerous. Neither can keep up with the complex transformations of things and so both will result in harm to our shen and xing.
They lead to the desire of rulers to increase their personal profit, their pleasure, and their power, and to do so at the expense of others. The best thing is to steer clear of such situations. But there are times when one cannot do so: there is nothing one can do to avoid involvement in a social undertaking. There are also times—if one has a Ruist sensibility—when one will be moved to do what one can and must in order to improve the social situation.
Zhuangzi thinks that such a motivation, while admirable, is ultimately misguided. There is little to nothing one can do to change things in a corrupt world.
But if you really have to try, then you should be aware of the dangers, be aware of the natures of things, and of how they transform and develop.
In the presence of danger, do not confront it: always dance to one side, redirect it through skilled and subtle manipulations, that do not take control, but by adding their own weight appropriately, redirect the momentum of the situation.
One must treat all dangerous social undertakings as a Daoist adept: one must perform xinzhai, fasting of the heart-mind. Perhaps some of these are moralistic advisors, like those of chapter 4, who were unsuccessful in bringing virtue and harmony to a corrupt state, and instead received the harsh punishment of their offended ruler.
At any rate, this out of the ordinary appearance, this extraordinary physical form, is a sign of something deeper: a potency and a power de that connects them more closely to the ancestral source.
These are the sages that Zhuangzi admires: those whose virtue de is beyond the ordinary, and whose signs of virtue indicate that they have gone beyond. But what goes beyond is also the source of life. To hold fast to that which is beyond both living and dying, is perhaps also to hold fast to something more primordial that is beyond human and inhuman. To identify with and nurture this source is to nurture that which is at the root of our humanity. If so, then one does not necessarily become inhuman.
Thus, to be forced to choose between being natural or being human is a mistake. A genuinely flourishing human life cannot be separated from the natural, but nor can it on that account deny its own humanity. Genuine humanity is natural humanity. There are several sections devoted to explicating this genuine humanity. We find that the genuinely human person, the zhen ren, is in tune with the cycles of nature, and is not upset by the vicissitudes of life.
The zhenren is in tune with the cycles of nature, and with the cycles of yin yang, and is not disturbed or harmed by them. In fact, the zhenren is not harmed by them either in what appears to us to be their negative phases, nor are their most extreme phases able to upset the balance of the zhenren.
This is sometimes expressed with what I take to be the hyperbole that the sage or zhenren can never be drowned by the ocean, nor burned by fire. In the second part of the chapter, Zhuangzi hints at the process by which we are to cultivate our genuine and natural humanity. These key terms in language illustrate the claim that it does not have any rigid, naming relation to an external reality. Language traces our changing position relative to reality. This perspectival pluralism differs from Western subjectivity in that Chuang Tzu does not highlight the perspectives of individual consciousness or internal representations--subjectivity.
Arguably Chinese thinkers did not generate anything comparable to Western folk psychology. In fact, Chuang Tzu seems as fascinated with the shifting perspectives of even the same person at different times and in different moods as he is in the difference of perspective between different individuals. His main theoretical focus, however, is on the kinds of perspective arising from using language differently, i. Chuang Tzu does reflect briefly on the perspective of "self.
They "alternate day and night" and not knowing where they come from we give up and merely accept that they come.
Without them there would be no "self" and without "self," no "choosing of one thing over another. Chuang Tzu wonders how the heart can be any more natural than the other "hundred joints, nine openings and six viscera. Can't each rule itself? Or take turns. The identification of one organ as supreme seems to conflict with the implicit intention to offer a natural basis for morality. Chuang Tzu implies that all of the organs of the body grow together in encountering and adapting to life.
As it does it is ch'eng completed --a term that Chuang Tzu uses somewhat ironically as suggesting that any completion leaves in its wake some defect. Translators frequently render it as "biased. The translation, however, abandons the implicit irony-- ch'eng is 'success', 'accomplishment' something we all aim for. Chuang Tzu's use suggests that our natural and common goal is not possible without some kind of skewing and loss. Thus all hearts equally achieve ch'eng.
They grow up just as the rest of the body does. For the heart, this amounts to acquiring a pattern of tendencies to shih-fei judgment. So if it is this heart, the one that 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 ch'eng completion is really right. They advocate a program of cultivation so the hsin heart-mind will give the correct shih-fei judgments.
Without it, they imply, the heart's natural potential will be lost. The sage's heart-mind is the ultimate Mencian standard for rightness of judgment. He is one who has allegedly fully cultivated his natural moral potential. Chuang Tzu wonders, from what perspective can we distinguish sage's heart-mind from a fool's?
Both have a heart-mind and make shih-fei judgments. If we use A's judgments 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 common to all existing heart-minds. The intuitionists beg another question in favor of their acquired perspective when they advocate cultivation. The appeal to the judgment of a "natural ruler" would leave everyone acting however they do act. Chuang Tzu's analysis of the ch'eng hsin completed heart-mind echoes Lao Tzu's analysis of knowledge as unconsciously acquired in the very process of learning language.
Attitudes that seem natural and spontaneous may simply reflect early upbringing and experiential attitudes that have become "second nature.
The linguistic nature of perspectives comes more to the fore when Chuang Tzu responds to the Later Mohists. He notes that the Mohists' term of analysis, ke assertable , is obviously relative to conventional, linguistic perspective. Different and changing conventions of usage and principles still constitute conventions and generate a language and a perspective. Single schools of thought may split and disputing factions may combine again.
Any language that actually is spoken is assertable. Any moral language for which there is a rival is from its point of view not assertable. Chuang Tzu 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 effectively we can continue on with our way of speaking. We argue for a point of view mainly by spelling it out in greater detail. The seemingly endless disputes between Mohists and Confucians arise from their respectively elaborated ways of assigning 'is this' and 'not this'.
As we saw, each can build elaborate hierarchies of standards that seem to guide their different choices and considers the errors of their opponents to be "obvious. Chuang Tzu, wary of Hui Shih's error, generally avoided contrasting our limited perspectives to any cosmic or total one.
He contrasted them mainly with each other. His 'perspective' on the relativity of language Chuang Tzu calls ming clarity. It is tempting and common to suppose ming is some absolute standpoint.
Chuang Tzu extrapolates in imagination what would happen if we reversed our course back to the 'axis' from which all guiding discourse begins. From that 'axis,' he says, no limit can be drawn on what could be treated as 'is this' or 'is not this'.
All shih-fei patterns are possible, none actual. From that axis, therefore, we make no judgments. It is not a relevant alternative to the disputing perspectives. If we succumb to the interpretive temptation, we fall back into the anti-language abyss. The absolute viewpoint cannot advocate or forbid any dao. From the perspective of ming, it is not even a point of view. Any practical guide is an actual path of judgment making that takes one from that axis down one particular indefinitely elaboratable way of making distinctions.
Even if thing-kinds are made 'so' by our classifications, we can't conclude they are 'not-this'. Chuang Tzu emphasizes the infinite possibility of these standpoints.
Occasionally, however, he presents it as almost a tragic inevitability. Once we have started on a tao, we seem doomed to elaborate and develop it in a kind of race to death. Youth is the state of being comparatively open to almost any possibility and as we grow and gain knowledge, we close-off the possibilities in a rush toward old-age and death. The inflexibility of intellectual commitment to a conceptual perspecive that is so rigid that any thing we encounter already has a classification.
Nothing can free us from the headlong rush to complete our initial committments to shih and fei as if they were oaths or treaties. We rush through life clining to the alternative we judge as winning. Or is it that I am the only stupid one and there are others not so stupid. Lacking any theoretical limit on possible perspectives, guiding systems of naming, we lack any limit on schemes of practical knowledge.
No matter how much we advance and promote a practical guide, a way of dealing with things, there are things we will be deficient at. To have any developed viewpoint is to leave something out. This, however, is not a reason to avoid language and a perspective; it is the simple result of the limitless knowledge and limited lives.
So-called 'sages' project their point of view and prejudices on nature, which they then treat as an authority. Chuang Tzu does not recommend we emulate that attitude. Instead of trying to transcend and abandon our usual or conventional ways of speaking, Chuang Tzu recommends that we learn to treat them as pragmatically useful. They enable us to communicate and get things done.
That is all it is sensible to ask of them. Beyond what is implied in the fact that our language is useful from the standards of our perspective , we don't know the way things are in themselves. We signal our lack of that pure metaphysical knowledge by calling reality ' tao '. Treating metaphysical ultimate as 'one' differs from saying nothing about it only in attitudinal ways. In the end, neither skepticism nor monistic mysticism says anything about ultimate reality.
They are characterized by the different attitudes one takes in saying essentially nothing. Chuang Tzu's balance between 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 shih-fei.
In another notoriously obscure passage, Chuang Tzu is skeptical about skepticism. However, he does not appeal to our familiar sentential grounds. He does not ask how he knows that he doesn't know. He does ask how he can know what he does not know. His question centers on distinction grounds. He wonders if he knows how to distinguish between knowing and ignorance. Chuang Tzu's philosophical writings highlight his different approach to skepticism by their treatment of dreams.
He does not use dreaming to motivate skepticism. He takes it as already motivated on semantic grounds. 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.
True freedom, he maintained, came from escaping the distractions of worldly affairs. Chuang Tzu's writings have been particularly praised for their combination of humor and wisdom. His parables and stories are classics of Chinese literature. Chuang Tzu was one day fishing, when the Prince of Ch'u sent two high officials to interview him, saying that his Highness would be glad of Chuang Tzu's assistance in the administration of his government.
The Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu ca. Not much is known of the life of Chuang Tzu. Thus Chuang Tzu seems to have been a contemporary of Mencius , but neither was mentioned by the other in his extant writings. However, he seems to have lived most of his life as a recluse, "to be intoxicated in the wonder and the power of Nature.
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