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DAOIST THOUGHT

ACTION, LANGUAGE, AND

ETHICS IN ZHUANGZI

There has been a growing interest in Daoism in the West, not only in academia but also in the culture at large. This is the first work available in English which addresses Zhuangzi’s thought as a whole. It presents an inter-pretation of the Zhuangzi, a book in 33 chapters that is the most important collection of Daoist texts in early China. The author introduces a complex reading that shows the unity of Zhuangzi’s thought, in particular in his views of action, language, and ethics. By addressing methodological ques-tions that arise in reading Zhuangzi, a hermeneutics is developed which makes understanding Zhuangzi’s religious thought possible. The book is a theoretical contribution to comparative philosophy and the cross-cultural study of religious traditions. Additionally, it serves as an introduction to Daoism for graduate students in religion, philosophy, and East Asian studies. Eske Møllgaard received his PhD in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University. He currently is Assistant Professor in the Depart-ment of Philosophy at University of Rhode Island. His teaching interests include Asian philosophy, comparative philosophy and continental philo-sophy. He is particularly interested in the ways East Asian traditions of thought make us reconsider and rediscover salient features of Western philo-sophical traditions.

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AND PHILOSOPHY

1 Deconstruction and the Ethical in Asian Thought

Edited by Youru Wang

2 An Introduction to Daoist Thought

Action, language, and ethics in Zhuangzi

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AN INTRODUCTION

TO DAOIST

THOUGHT

Action, language, and

ethics in Zhuangzi

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by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Routledge

270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2007 Eske Møllgaard

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,

mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in

writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Møllgaard, Eske, 1954–

An introduction to Daoist thought : action, language, and ethics in Zhuangzi / Eske Møllgaard. p. cm. — (Routledge studies in Asian religion and philosophy)

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-415-42383-0 (alk. paper)

1. Zhuangzi. Nanhua jing. 2. Philosophy, Taoist. I. Title. BL1900.C576M66 2007 299.5′1482—dc22 2006100289 ISBN10: 0-415-42383-X (hbk) ISBN10: 0-203-94482-8 (ebk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-42383-0 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-94482-0 (ebk)

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2007. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”

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Ist wie die Wolke nicht, die Abends sich verlieret, Es zeiget sich mit einem goldnen Tage,

Und die Vollkommenheit ist ohne Klage. (The Earth round adorned with rocks Is not like clouds that disperse at night, It shows itself one luminous day, And the completion is without lament.)

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Acknowledgements ix

1 On reading Zhuangzi 1

Can we understand Zhuangzi? 1 What bothers the other? 3 Is Daoist thought philosophy? 5 The religious 9

The figure of Zhuangzi 11

2 Zhuangzi’s fundamental figures of thought 14

The view of the world 14 Life against completion 15 Human life 17

The life of Heaven 20 The Way 22

Two kinds of transcendence 24 Non-understanding 27

3 The drive towards completion 30

Technique negates the Way 30

The Confucian view of technical action 32 Totalitarianism and strategic thinking 36 The metaphysics of action 39

Form (eidos) and completion (cheng) 43

4 Unraveling the drive towards completion 47

Care for life 47

From potentiality to actuality 52 In-between Heaven and man 57 The occurrence of the ordinary 61

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5 Saying the unsayable 67 Indicative and logical discourses 67

Saying and disputation 70 The double-question 71 Shifting signifiers 72 The intended meaning 74 Language in itself 76 Impromptu words 80

6 Bungled discourse 85

Suddenly there is nothing 85 Just now something is born 89 Accept “this” for what it is 94 Is Zhuangzi a Sophist? 97 Zhuangzi and Socrates 101

7 Ethics 105

Confucian concern 105 Mutilation 109

Beyond the will to power 113 The moral law 117

The ethical subject 120

On Zhuangzi’s supposed naturalism 124

8 Spiritual exercise 126

Loss of self 126

Emotions are like music from empty spaces 130 Techniques of inner training 132

Completion without lament 137 To see the unique 138

Glossary 142

References 149

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A small part of Chapter 1 appeared in “Eclipse of Reading: On the ‘Philo-sophical Turn’ in American Sinology,” Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, 4(2) (Summer 2005), pp. 321–40. Parts of Chapter 2 and the last section of Chapter 7 appeared in “Zhuangzi’s Notion of Transcendental Life,” Asian Philosophy, 15(1) (March 2005), pp. 1–18 (http://tandf.co.uk/ journals). Chapter 5 contains some material that appeared in “Dialogue and Impromptu Words,” Social Identities 12(1) (2006), pp. 43–58 (http:// tandf.co.uk/journals). Parts of Chapter 7 appeared in “Zhuangzi’s Religious Ethics,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 71(2) (June 2003), pp. 347–70.

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1

ON READING ZHUANGZI

[Zhuangzi] contains both the very small and the very large. One half is like Kafka, but there’s another half as well – thus, he’s all the more complete.

Elias Canetti Above Zhuangzi wanders with the Creator of things, and below he is friend with those who are beyond life and death and have no beginning and end.

The Zhuangzi

Can we understand Zhuangzi?

The study of Asian thought occupies a strange position in the post-metaphysical climate of the modern West. As Peter Sloterdijk points out, the metaphysical enthusiasm that once characterized Western thought is now largely excluded from the academy, but it has survived in exile in predominantly philological disciplines like Indology and Sinology. Today it is in these disciplines that scholars consider metaphysical propositions such as “you are that” (tat tvam asi), or “the way that can be spoken is not the constant Way (dao ).” The orientalists, says Sloterdijk, are the “book-keepers of the ecstasies” imported from Persia, India, and China. Their day-to-day life as researchers and teachers at the universities may be prosaic, nevertheless “they can, as a matter of course, cite the thesis that not-knowing, avidya, is the matter from which reality is made” – or, as Zhuangzi says, that “not-knowing is profound, knowing is superficial” – and in their professional capacity “they handle the ‘great sayings’ of the East, like trusted Bank employees move gold bars around in the security vaults under the Bahnhofsstraße in Zurich” (Sloterdijk 1993: 218).

But what if we aspire, perhaps unreasonably so, to be more than book-keepers of ancient wisdom? What if we want to understand what is said in the entries made in our scholarly works? Here we, as scholars, run up against the limits of scientific understanding. For it seems to be true that, as

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Hans-Georg Gadamer writes, “the enigmatic statements of profundity and wisdom, which were developed in other cultures, especially in the Far East, stand in an ultimately incommensurable relation (nicht überprüfbaren Verhältnis) to what is Western philosophy, especially because science (Wissenschaft), in the name of which we ask, itself is a Western discovery” (1986b: 77).

Since our science is ours, a Western discovery, it has not been able to free itself from prejudice. In hindsight, as has been demonstrated with abundant evidence, the previous generations of orientalists were prejudiced to an almost comical degree, and it is not reasonable to expect that progress in our science will give us less to laugh about in the future. This is probably all for the better, for, contrary to the well-known saying, the one who laughs last does not laugh best. The last laugh (or the last word) is only conceivable in complete abstraction from our historical existence, and therefore it will sound rather hollow. Instead of such hollow laughter, we should have enough sense of humor to appreciate Gadamer’s point that our prejudices far from being an impediment to understanding are in fact the very source of understanding. For, says Gadamer (1986a: 302), we always “understand differently,” if we understand at all.

This does not mean that we entirely give up the notion of objectivity that is central to reading in the human sciences. For understanding is gained through a certain detachment from our prejudices that allows us to play out our prejudices against the other and so reach a more objective point of view. In the human sciences this detachment is codified in historical and philo-logical methodologies, but as Gadamer has emphasized, methodologies do not by themselves deliver truth. In the human sciences, says Gadamer, we are concerned with “the experience of truth that transcends the domain controlled by scientific method.” The exemplary texts we study in the human sciences embody “modes of experiences in which a truth announces itself that cannot be verified by the methodological means of science” (Gadamer 1986a: 1–2). In regard to Indology, Richard King points out that scholars have “tended to believe that a rigorous and detailed knowledge of the culture, language and tradition under consideration would yield the true import of the text,” but, King continues, “[i]n the light of Gadamer’s work, this can be seen to be hermeneutically naïve” (1999: 80). The same holds true in Sinology. Sinological methods are helpful tools in understanding ancient Chinese thought, but a thinker like Zhuangzi  cannot be understood within the confines of a Sinology that subscribes to a naive historical objectivism and has no speculative-hermeneutic dimension. To suppose that “what Zhuangzi meant” is deposited in the past context and ready to be sifted out by some appropriate methodology only shows an acute lack of hermeneutic ima-gination that hampers productive research. With some humor Martin Heidegger once remarked that suppose “there could be an explanation and

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representation of the poetry of Sophocles in itself and that it fell under the eyes of Sophocles, he could only find this interpretation utterly boring” (Clark 2002: 95). It would be even more comical to imagine what Zhuangzi would have thought if presented with a historicist reconstruction of “what he said.” For Zhuangzi explicitly says that he himself is not sure if he has really said something with what he has just said.

What bothers the other?

It is a well-known but under-appreciated fact of translation that we know that even our best translation is not adequate, but we do not know exactly what it is we know in knowing this. For instance, we know that the English word “humanity” does not quite cover the meaning of the Chinese ren , but we do not know precisely what it is we know when we know this (if we did the deficiency could easily be remedied). But Confucius  himself was not really sure what the word ren meant. For him, too, the word had an uncanny excess of meaning that he could not express. Furthermore, just like the modern translator, Confucius knew that he did not know the full mean-ing of the word, but he did not know precisely what he knew in knowmean-ing this. This uncertain and ambiguous knowing is not reducible to a linguistic or conceptual base, and it is not a definable “problem.” It is perhaps the mark of philosophy, but it is surely where universality and cross-cultural understanding come into play.

Referring to this “context-free” openness of language precisely where “words fail,” Slavoj figek makes the insightful observation that in trying to understand another culture

we should not focus on its specificity (on the peculiarity of “their customs,” etc.); we should rather endeavor to encircle that which eludes their grasp, the point at which the Other is in itself dislocated, not bound by its “specific context.” . . . I understand the Other when I become aware of how the very problem that was bothering me (the nature of the Other’s secret) is already bothering the Other itself. The dimension of the Universal thus emerges when the two lacks – mine and that of the Other – overlap.

(1997: 50) On the basis of figek’s insight Eric Santner proposes his notion of a “universal-in-becoming,” which is not the abstract universal of “global consciousness” but rather an existential, embodied universal based on the experience of “the agitation and turbulence immanent to any construction of identity, the Unheimlichkeit or uncanniness internal to any and every space we call home.” Santner writes:

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What makes the Other other is not his or her spatial exteriority with respect to my being but the fact that he or she is strange, is a stranger, and not only to me but also to him- or herself, is the bearer of an internal alterity, an enigmatic density of desire calling for response beyond any rulegoverned reciprocity; against this back-ground, the very opposition between “neighbor” and “stranger” begins to lose its force.

(2001: 9) The other, just like the self, is always also an other or a stranger to herself. Precisely in this split in the self and in the other lies the possibility for a concrete universality. For if the other is a stranger to herself, then the dichotomy between the familiar and the strange, the self and the other, is unsettled. What is important is that something bothers the other, something is beyond the grasp of the other, that is to say, beyond the possibilities inherent in her context. In reading the other this “beyond” is also what bothers us, and since both self and other are bothered by the same thing, there is the possibility of a “we.” In other words, linguistic, conceptual, spatial, and temporal differences are not essential; what makes the other “other” is her strangeness, not only to an other but also to herself, and this split in the other contains the possibility of a “we.”

The split in the other is also the condition for thought. Thought is pre-cisely what does not coincide with its own context (Deleuze and Guattari 1994), and therefore it necessarily has universal import. Since thought always exceeds its context, Daoist thought is not coextensive with Daoism. Furthermore, the extension of the term “Daoism” is hard to define. If we, with Russell Kirkland (2004), define Daoism broadly as the vast corpus of texts collected by self-identifying Daoists in the Daozang , then we find that this collection includes the Zhuangzi  but also the Mozi  and the Hanfeizi  , texts that today are not considered Daoist by any definition. If we, on the other hand, define Daoism narrowly as the so-called “philosophical Daoism” of the Laozi  and the Zhuangzi, then we find that these two “founding” texts of Daoist thought are very different, not just in their content but in the very nature of their thought. The Zhuangzi, and the first seven chapters in particular, is an eminent example of thought in the emphatic sense I use the term here. A. C. Graham says that in reading Zhuangzi we get “the sensation of a man thinking aloud, jotting the living thought at the moment of its inception” (1969/1970: 137). In the Laozi, on the other hand, there are, as Hans-Georg Moeller points out, no “individual thoughts,” no “unique insights,” no “dialogues,” and “no discernable issue at stake,” one simply has “to identify with its teachings” (2006: 3). The Laozi proclaims in voiceless anonymity, secure in its teachings and bothered by nothing: unlike Zhuangzi, the Laozi never interrupts itself to ask “what did I just say?” This unbothered anonymity is even more pronounced in the

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Neiye  (Inner Training), an early manual of self-cultivation that some scholars now consider to be “original Daoism,” that is to say, more original than the Laozi and the Zhuangzi and the real precursor for later Daoism (Roth 1999, Kirkland 2004). In light of these considerations, I suggest that no matter how one defines the scope of the term “Daoist,” Zhuangzi – who could not identify himself as a Daoist, since no such classification existed at his time – will be included, and if we look for an introduction to Daoist thought in the emphatic sense of this term, then the text that bears his name must be considered the best place to begin.

Is Daoist thought philosophy?

We witness today an increasing technification and professionalization of philosophy, and philosophy itself is about to dissolve into methodologism. Generally, technical philosophy adopts one of three methods in reading Chinese thought. The first method is to read Chinese thought in terms of universal “problems of philosophy.” Here the Chinese thinker is subjected to a purely formal questioning that can be applied to any thinker at any time. We ask, for instance, is Zhuangzi a relativist? Is he a realist, a pragmatist, or an antirationalist? But this formal questioning has little to do with what specifically motivates a particular thinker, and it has not been proved that the specific set of problems that constitutes modern philosophical discourse also constitutes philosophy as such. Furthermore, an essential ambiguity may be characteristic of all philosophy, just as it is characteristic of human existence itself, and his essential ambiguity cannot survive if it is objectified as a “problem” with some positive solution.

The second method by which technical philosophy reads Chinese thought emphasizes difference. It is claimed that the West and China rely on op-posed conceptual schemes: whereas the West values being, individuality, freedom, and rights (as in human rights), the Chinese value becoming, rela-tion, spontaneity, and rites (or ritual). To be sure, awareness of difference is important, but the construction of contrasting conceptual schemes comes at the price of interpretive reductionism. For the very moment we establish the difference between the two traditions, we homogenize difference within each of the traditions. All Chinese thinkers are now mere representatives of underlying linguistic and conceptual formations, and the same holds true for the Western interpreter. The result is that all unique (existential) features are abstracted as the other as well as the self is objectified in the manner of scientism. Furthermore, as Haun Saussy (2001: 91–117) has shown, these constructions of China as other are all rhetorical constructions that say more about the time and place they were made than about China itself. What does it really tell us about Chinese thought when we are told that the Chinese lack notions of objective truth, dialectics, and definition? It depends on your point of view. Not long ago it would have relegated Chinese thought

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to the densest substantiality without any development towards autonomy. In the present postmodern climate of the Western academy, Chinese thought is seen rather as an aesthetic expression liberated from all foundationalism. The third method technical philosophy adopts in reading Chinese thought is a standardized form of deconstruction that is inspired by but should not be confused with the notion of deconstruction developed by Derrida (which is not a methodology at all). This method deconstructs the first two methods and reveals how sameness and difference are produced historically and rhetor-ically. Deconstruction shows that we are all embedded in a web of signifiers from which we can never escape, and that the ethical demand to understand the other as other is likewise infinite and inescapable. This is a valuable lesson, but deconstruction too easily falls back into the bad infinity charac-teristic of positivistic historical research. Like construction, upon which it exercises its beneficial parasitic activity, deconstruction is an endless re-sponse to infinite complexity but never says anything about the thing itself. Haun Saussy, who engages in deconstruction understood as a reading that reveals the rhetorical means by which various comparative projects produce differences, says that his task of deconstruction situates him in “an infinite web of nonhierarchical distinctions to which any node (or particular signifier) provides an entry” (2001: 187). Similar to positivistic historical research, which, as Gadamer has shown, chases a “phantom object,” deconstructive readings oscillate in pious distance before the other.

Technical philosophy is a particular ritual performed in the academic world, “repeating the same structures over and over again in a quasi-obsessive manner” (Faure 2004: 47), and there is no reason why this particular obses-sion should be imposed on Zhuangzi, who employs prose poems, fables, satire, song, fictitious dialogue, spiritual exercise, didactic verse, aphorisms, and a number of other literary genres we have still not identified and under-stood, and who presents us with a series of striking images – in the first chapter alone, we have the darkness of the Northern Ocean, the bird Peng, the cicada and the dove, the giant gourd and the useless tree, a weasel, and a yak. This proliferation of genres and images suggests that literary reading, not philosophical analysis, is best suited to bring out the thought of Zhuangzi (Hoffmann 2001). For Zhuangzi employs what Pascal Quignard (1995) calls “speculative rhetoric,” a mode of thought that cannot be understood by philosophical analysis but only by reading. We elude the essential task of reading Zhuangzi by solving philosophical puzzles, chasing the phantom objects of historical reconstruction, constructing contrasting typologies, and playing with the infinite complexities of deconstruction.

There is another kind of philosophy that is not purely positivistic but accepts the essential ambiguity in metaphysical questioning; a philosophy that takes into account what is existentially at stake in reading, and where there is no clear division between philosophy and literature (or philology). This kind of philosophy is rather imprecisely called “continental philosophy.”

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Continental philosophy offers an abundance of figures of thought that con-ceptualize even the most ambiguous phenomena of human experience, and with its origin in the exegesis of religious texts, the hermeneutic tradition in continental philosophy remains close to the religious experience (which is alien to technical philosophy). Continental philosophy is also known for its emancipatory intent, its critique of power and its call for personal trans-formation, and such engagement, and not just detached scholarship, is essential if we want to understand Zhuangzi at all. Finally, but perhaps most importantly, continental philosophy has a view of language that is radically different from that of analytic philosophy. Whereas most modern philo-sophy of language has an objectified (scientific) view of language, continental philosophy has an experience with language (Critchley 2001: 103–4), and this is also true of Zhuangzi.

I suggest, then, that something like the way of reading characteristic of continental philosophy will be most appropriate in reading Zhuangzi, and in the following I will draw on continental philosophers when I find that they can help us understand what is at stake in Zhuangzi. Continental philosophy does not, however, entirely heal the split between knowledge and wisdom and remains tied to the idea that philosophy is exhausted in philosophical discourse, and this limits its heuristic value for our under-standing of Zhuangzi. For, as Pierre Hadot points out, in ancient philosophy, philosophical discourse does not have the dominant role it has in modern philosophy, and therefore to understand an ancient thinker like Zhuangzi entirely at the level of propositional discourse is to impose an anachronistic view of philosophy on his thought. In particular, Hadot advises that we should not “conflate language and cognitive functions,” because in reading ancient philosophy we continually “encounter situations in which philo-sophical activity continues to be carried out, even though discourse cannot express this activity” (2002: 5). This is good advice to heed in reading Zhuangzi. For in Zhuangzi the activity of philosophy goes on beyond dis-course in the pursuit of the Way.

In ancient philosophy, says Hadot, it is first of all a question of adopting a way of life, and theoretical discourse is only philosophical to the extent that it justifies and supports such a way of life. The most immediate expres-sion of the philosophical life is the set of spiritual exercises promoted and practiced by the philosopher. Zhuangzi too has a number of spiritual exer-cises that express his way of life. Among the most important are how to contemplate death so we can meet it without fear; how to analyze the dis-tinction between the inner (nei ) and the outer (wai ) so we know what is important for the spiritual life and what is not; how to relate to our emotions in such a way that we neither repress them nor indulge in them but let them unfold in a clarity that cannot be disturbed; how to treat all things as equal, which is the necessary step to attain the universal (cosmic) point of view; how to know the difference between the realm of man (ren ) and

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the realm of Heaven (tian ), which is the prerequisite for being a true human being; how to transcend the self and plunge into the infinite; and, above all, how to be aware in the present moment of self-emerging life (sheng ). In one form or another all these exercises are also found in ancient philosophy in the West, and in India as well, and Hadot’s descrip-tion of the goal of such exercises applies perfectly to Zhuangzi. The aim of spiritual exercises, says Hadot, is to “become aware of the splendor of exist-ence” and to perceive each moment of time “as if it were the first, in all the stupefying strangeness of its emergence” (2002: 196, 230).

When we see that in ancient philosophy spiritual exercise is the heart of philosophy, then we will avoid the interminable quarrels about epistemo-logical relativism and incommensurability between traditions that plague comparative philosophy. For these disputes make sense only if we consider theoretical discourse in isolation; from the point of view of philosophical practice the disputes are irrelevant. Hadot points out that

philosophical practice is relatively independent from philosophical discourse. The same spiritual exercise can be justified after the fact by widely different philosophical discourses, in order to describe and justify experiences whose existential density ultimately escapes all attempts at theoreticizing and systematizing. . . . Seen in this way, the practice of philosophy transcends the oppositions of particular philosophies.

(2002: 275–6) The theoretical discourse of Plato is very different from that of Zhuangzi (Plato talks about the Forms, Zhuangzi about the Way), but the practical goal of their philosophies may be the same, namely to attain the universal (cosmic) perspective. Therefore, if we wrongly assume that in Zhuangzi discourse is primary, and we try to make Zhuangzi’s thought conform to the technical requirements of modern philosophy, then we may become entangled in problems of incommensurability between his and our own conceptual schemes. If, on the other hand, we see that in Zhuangzi spiritual exercise is more important than discourse, then we will recognize the similarity between the attitudes adopted by Zhuangzi and those adopted by ourselves or some-one we know in our own tradition. Although cautious about making comparative claims, Hadot believes that the forms of life experimented with in ancient Greece and Rome “correspond to constant, universal models which are found, in various forms, in every civilization, throughout the various cultural zones of humanity” (2002: 278). Therefore Hadot can cite passages from Zhuangzi to exemplify the notions of indifference and tran-scendence that are so important in ancient philosophy in the West.

Today’s academy is not the place to experiment with such spiritual exer-cises. As Hadot points out, “[i]n modern university philosophy, philosophy

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is obviously no longer a way of life or form of life – unless it be the form of life of a professor of philosophy” (1995: 271). Today the experimentation that is essential for philosophy takes place outside the university in groups organized around various teachers and traditions. There is, however, still the possibility that the academic study of Zhuangzi may become more than historical reconstruction and philosophical analysis and become the spir-itual exercise that Zhuangzi calls for. For, as Hadot (2002: 175) points out, in ancient philosophy philosophical discourse not only justifies a way of life and explains the exercises we must adopt; philosophical discourse can also in itself be spiritual exercise, or a practice to transform our perception and being. In Plato, for instance, dialogue is such a discursive practice, and Plato invites the reader of his dialogues to take part in this practice. Zhuangzi’s discourse too is a spiritual exercise in which the reader is invited to take part. This means that even the academic reader – if he or she is able to muster enough hermeneutic imagination, and that requires above all the ability to question the science in the name of which we ask – will be able to understand Zhuangzi’s discourse as spiritual exercise. This understanding, however, cannot be expressed in a set of propositions (a theory); it is expressed rather in the actual practice of reading Zhuangzi as the understanding that first allows us to say anything true about Zhuangzi at all.

The religious

Zhuangzi rejects sage-knowledge (shengzhi ), and so he ultimately goes beyond the tradition of ancient philosophy elaborated by Hadot and enters a realm we can only call the religious. The religious, however, is notoriously difficult to define. Instead of discussing the competing definitions we may follow Jonathan Z. Smith (1998: 281) and define religion formally as a “disciplinary horizon” projected by scholars of religion. But here again we face the question: what is this science in the name of which we ask? Paul J. Griffiths (1999: x) provocatively answers that it is a science that is incapable of reading its subject. Even worse, scholars of religion actually destroy the very traditions they study: “Indologists and anthropologists have done more to destroy traditional Sanskrit learning than ever Christian missionaries could” (Griffiths 1999: 185). For, according to Griffiths, religious studies and the academy at large has succumbed to “consumerist reading”:

The university treats what comes within its grasp with the same unnuanced deadness that McDonald’s and Exxon give to what comes within theirs: the former consumes in the service of witty display, and requires the same of its acolytes; the latter consumes in the service of profit, and requires the same of its servants.

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Perhaps the religious is not that easy to obliterate. A distinction must be made between the religious, or religion in the singular, and the various religious traditions, or religion in the plural. Borrowing a distinction from Heidegger, Derrida (1998: 16–21) says that all revelation (Offenbarung) con-ceals a more originary revealability (Offenbarkeit), unless it is the other way around, and one particular revelation (Christianity) has revealed revealability itself, and therefore this particular revelation is more originary than revealability itself. Derrida further suggests that a “new ‘tolerance’ ” could issue from the respect for this “indecisive oscillation” between revelation and revealability. In other words, the properly religious can come into view only if we keep open the possibility that besides the various religions there is religion in the singular. This is particular important to emphasize today when the so-called “turn to religion” in the academy privileges the position of the Christian revelation.

When Zhuangzi says that the Way (dao ) is more originary than the highest god, does that not mean, in Derrida’s terms, that the Way is revealability as such, and not this or that revelation? Or, in more formal terms that owe less to Christianity – but then perhaps owe too much to the Greeks (as if we could only escape the one by fleeing to the other) – is the Way not pure appearance (no-thing) as opposed to the appearance of this or that thing? And is it not precisely the recognition of this difference that, for Zhuangzi, is the religious? We must postpone answers until the follow-ing chapters, but we can already suggest that it is from this oscillatfollow-ing difference between what appears (revelation) and appearance as such (revealabilty) that Zhuangzi’s religious thought emerges.

Where does this leave our science? Like Griffiths, Hent de Vries notes that “relentless historicization and conceptual reduction” and “the conscientious and methodological study of religion” have “undermined the very object of its inquiry” (1999: 1). Unlike Griffiths, however, de Vries (2002: 236) believes that this nearly obliterated object of inquiry (religion) may return and decisively affect conceptualization in the human sciences, especially in the field of cultural analysis. Hent de Vries says that there are embedded in the religious traditions figures of thought that, if we turn to them with proper conceptual seriousness, may return and recast our conceptual schemes. Surely, we find figures of thought in Zhuangzi that can stand side by side with any of the “philosophemes” around which the turn to religion turns, such as, to mention just one, Levinas’ notion of adieu, which de Vries thematizes infinitely.

Perhaps the turn to and return of religion does not curb the desire that Griffiths sees as the bane of the scholars of religion, namely “the desire to mention (but never to use) the vocabulary, the conceptual tools, and the practices of what they study” (1999: 184). And yet, there may be a genuine humbleness in the turn to religion. There may be a sense that philosophy

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(science) should be practiced within the limits of the religious alone – as if the religious placed conceptual boundaries for thought. Fundamentalists and postmodernists agree that truth is generated by and confined to particular practices. Science, however, is the practice that lets truth emerge from the particular, not in the light of natural reason, but through that crack in the other that opens because the other is also an other to itself. A science that itself is fragile detects a slight trembling in the other, and a light (an aura perhaps) appears when the particular passes into the universal without being cancelled out. Science can do this if it does not fall into scientism, or, worse, consumerism, but takes its own historicity into account, and above all if it becomes what it was originally (and therefore still is essentially): spiritual exercise.

The figure of Zhuangzi

Zhuangzi flourished in the late fourth century , and like Socrates he is known to be atopos, “strange, extravagant, absurd, unclassifiable, disturb-ing” (Hadot 2002: 30). The earliest assessment of Zhuangzi is contained in the last chapter of the collection of texts that bears his name. It recognizes that Zhuangzi is unique (du ): “unique he came and went with the spirits of Heaven and Earth” (33/65 – 6) (references are to chapter and lines in Zhuangzi yinde). This recognition is, however, quickly displaced by the disapproval of Zhuangzi’s “absurd,” “extravagant,” and “bizarre” language and unease with his unrestrained freedom and “liberation from things” ( jie yuwu  ). Ultimately, in the judgment of these early scholars, Zhuangzi is incomprehensible (33/62–9).

In his “biography” of Zhuangzi, the historian Sima Qian  (c.145– 86 ) also singles out Zhuangzi’s language as a central characteristic: “His saying surpassed all bounds and followed his whim.” To this Sima Qian adds, “therefore the men in power could not utilize him” (1959: 2144). As Jean François Billeter points out, this remark by Sima Qian should be allowed its full weight. Sima Qian, who himself was a victim of imperial power, saw in Zhuangzi a man who could not be appropriated by the rulers but would always remain the site of a radical critique of power (Billeter 1996: 876–877).

The early testimony is sparse, but we gather these essential facts about Zhuangzi: he is unique and therefore unclassifiable; he is one of those remarkable people who are liberated from things; his use of language is astonishing and disconcerting; and he puts forward a critique of power so radical that it cannot be assimilated by the tradition. As a historical person Zhuangzi hardly exists, but his unique and uncanny cognition can be clearly recognized. As Billeter rightly points out, the strangeness of many of the passages in the Zhuangzi

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is not primarily due, as one might be inclined to think, to their being Chinese or ancient, but to their being creations of minds that had a sharp sense of the intrinsic strangeness of human existence, with the consequence that we can only grasp their truth by discover-ing, or rediscoverdiscover-ing, this underlying strangeness for ourselves.

(1995: 23–4) Zhuangzi’s essential cognition can be recognized today – differently but just as well as in the past. (As Kierkegaard pointed out, hearing the Gospel does not depend on historical proximity but on being truly provoked by the word.) In the first decade of the twentieth century, in the midst of Central-European bourgeois culture, Martin Buber heard in Zhuangzi a call for the “truthful life” (Herman 1996: 70–1). In the midst the chinoiserie of the Victorian period, Oscar Wilde read in Zhuangzi a critique of a culture where we are “always trying to be somebody else” and so miss our “own exist-ence” (1969: 223). In London in the late 1970s, after the rise and fall of the counterculture, A. C. Graham saw in Zhuangzi a “man so much himself that, rather than rebelling against conventional modes of thinking, he seems free of them by birthright” (1981: 4). It is precisely because everything depends on such recognition that anybody who seriously engages Zhuangzi must begin with the claim that Zhuangzi is as yet not understood.

The Zhuangzi is divided into thirty-three chapters. The first seven chapters, the “Inner Chapters,” are generally considered to be the work of Zhuangzi himself. The rest of the book contains texts that are consistent with and in many cases develop and elucidate the thought of the “Inner Chapters.” Some of these texts may well be by Zhuangzi himself. There are, however, also texts that do not agree with the “Inner Chapters.” How one distin-guishes between these two strands depends, at least to some extent, on one’s interpretation of Zhuangzi’s thought. The following reading of Zhuangzi is based mainly on the “Inner Chapters.” When I quote from the “Outer Chapters” and the “Mixed Chapters,” I introduce the quotation with “the Zhuangzi says” as opposed to “Zhuangzi says.” I do believe, however, that all the passages I use from the later chapters elucidate Zhuangzi’s thought from a position identical with or very close to his own. In these cases the Zhuangzi is the first and best commentary on Zhuangzi. (For textual studies of the Zhuangzi, see Rand 1983, Graham 1990a, Liu 1994, Roth 1991, and Roth 1993.)

The thirty-three chapters of the Zhuangzi extant today were edited by Guo Xiang  (d. 312). This edition together with Guo Xiang’s com-mentary became very influential among the Chinese literati, who, especially in times when they had to retreat from their positions of power, found con-solation in Zhuangzi. The Chinese literati were, however, tied to their ideology of social and aesthetic harmony, and François Jullien (2000: 321) rightly questions if they could fully understand and accept Zhuangzi’s transcendent

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freedom. Jean François Billeter says that Guo Xiang’s commentary trans-formed Zhuangzi’s thought of radical autonomy into an apology for dis-engagement that served the literati’s “natural conservatism by offering an imaginary counterpart to their servitude” (2002: 133). The emphasis on harmony and adaptation in recent Western aesthetic-pragmatic inter-pretations of Zhuangzi is in line with this traditional Chinese view.

The Zhuangzi is of such immense scope, polymorphic thought, and bound-less variety of expression, and it shows such disdain for our attempts to make sense, that some scholars declare it beyond unified comprehension. This judgment, however, only reflects our failure to gain a thematic focus for our reading. Once we collect ourselves and ask the right questions, the unity of Zhuangzi’s thought will become apparent. Billeter correctly points out that beyond Zhuangzi’s “disconcerting imagination” we find “a well determined philosophical position and an intellectual coherence without faults. Zhuangzi expresses simple things that are difficult to say, not obscure things that it is permissible to say any old way” (1990: 165). In order to discover the conceptual coherence in Zhuangzi, we should follow the advice of the early interpreters of the Bible, who recognized that in order to under-stand a text we must first consider its scopus, the central thought of the text, “its inexplicit logos” or “the view with respect to which the book was composed” (Grodin 1994: 43). I will, therefore, before the specific textual analysis and the arguments that follow, first consider Zhuangzi’s funda-mental figures of thought.

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2

ZHUANGZI’S FUNDAMENTAL

FIGURES OF THOUGHT

Wir suchen überall das Unbedingte, und finden immer nur Dinge.

Novalis What things things is not a thing.

Zhuangzi

The view of the world

It is a metaphysical tendency in human beings to enclose themselves in a world of their own making and neglect the experience of the world qua world. The neglect of the world through technical mastery is a universal problem. It may be particularly pronounced today in the age of technology, but, as Pierre Hadot points out, it was already evident in antiquity:

People in antiquity were unfamiliar with modern science, and did not live in an industrial, technological society; yet the ancients didn’t look at the world any more than we usually do. Such is the human condition. In order to live, mankind must “humanize” the world; in other words transform it, by action as well as by his perception, into an ensemble of things useful for life. Thus, we fabricate the objects of our worry, quarrels, social rituals, and conventional values. That is what our world is like; we no longer see the world qua world.

(1995: 258) The world qua world is not an object extended in space – it is not a thing – but the ceaseless into-being of things, and we neglect the coming-into-being of things when we fabricate our world of things. Zhuangzi brings to view the world qua world before it is humanized and turned into the world of man (ren ), which is Zhuangzi’s technical term for humanity fallen into the realm of things.

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Zhuangzi’s essential experience is of the moment just when ( fang ) something appears or comes forth (chu ). This coming-into-being is not yet a thing (wu ), but it is also not the absence of things (as when things remain absorbed in a primordial unity). Zhuangzi acknowledges the simple, almost banal fact that there is something rather than nothing, or as Isabelle Robinet says, that “ ‘there is’ world” (‘il y a’ du monde). Zhuangzi’s thought, says Robinet, is entirely oriented towards the “coming of the world” (l’avènement du monde) and “coming into existence” (advenir à l’ex-sistence): the moment when something begins to emerge from nothing (wu ) into being (you ) – or, from “there is not” to “there is” – without as yet being a positive, differentiated, and identifiable thing. This moment – Robinet calls it the “birth of beings” and the “origin of the world” – is ceaseless, but it is not a fact in the world, it is “a hole in time, an atemporal forgetfulness” (un trou dans les temps, oubli atemporal ). When we experience this moment of emergence, we feel the force of the spontaneously self-so (ziran ), or the force of nature as self-emerging being (Robinet 1996: 115–16). In order to regain this sense of self-emerging being, Zhuangzi develops his discourse as spiritual exercise, through which, to borrow the words of Hadot,

the world then seems to come into being and be born before our eyes. We then perceive the world as a “nature” in the etymological sense of the word: physis, that movement of growth and birth by which things manifest themselves. We experience ourselves as a moment or instant of this movement; this immense event which reaches beyond us, is always already there before us, and is always beyond us. We are born along with the world.

(1995: 260) Or, as Zhuangzi says, “Heaven and Earth are born together with us” (2/52). For we too are born of the ceaseless movement of self-emerging life, and in experiencing ourselves as being born of this movement we live engendered by Heaven (tianersheng  ).

Life against completion

Normally, however, we do not experience self-emerging life (sheng ), for we are too preoccupied with bringing things to completion (cheng ). Zhuangzi’s most important rhetorical gesture, the opposition between life and completion, captures the human predicament. Life is the spontaneously emerging life generated by Heaven; completion, with connotations of “forma-tion” and “fulfillment,” “accomplishment” and “achievement,” is what human beings add to life (yisheng ), when they enclose themselves in a world of their own making. This opposition structures Zhuangzi’s thought on action, ethics, and language:

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life (sheng) is engendered by Heaven; completion (cheng) is fashioned by man (ren).

Technical action – skill ( ji ), method (shu ), and making (wei ) – serves the drive for completion (cheng); non-technical action, or non-action (wuwei ), does not aim at completion, but cares for life ( yangsheng ).

Technical language, completed, conclusive, and valid discourse (chengyan ) imposes a completion (cheng) on the world; Zhuangzi’s own saying, in particular his impromptu words (zhiyan ), are exposed to life (sheng) itself.

This opposition between life (sheng) and completion (cheng) must be under-stood in its full psychological and metaphysical depth. The completion that human beings add to life is a defense against the inevitable (budeyi  ) course of life ending in death, and the remarkable acceptance of death in Zhuangzi, which Graham (1981: 23–4) in particular has emphas-ized, is due to the fact that Zhuangzi is free from what I call the drive towards completion. As Zhuangzi sees it, the real human tragedy is that the very drive that tries to avoid death withdraws from life itself.

But what exactly is this drive towards completion, this excess human beings add to life? Here we can take our cue from Eric Santner’s analysis of the Jewish-German philosopher and religious thinker Franz Rosenzweig. At the center of Rosenzweig’s philosophy is the attempt to break with meta-physical thinking and return to the experience of being “in the midst of life.” According to Santner, here “metaphysical thinking” should not only be understood as philosophy (German Idealism) but as a tendency inherent in everyday life itself, namely “a kind of withdrawal from, a kind of fantasmatic defense against, our being in the midst of the flow of life” (2001: 21). Santner explains:

We are dealing here with a paradoxical kind of mental energy that constrains by means of excess, that leaves us stuck and paralyzed precisely by way of a certain kind of intensification and amplifica-tion, by a “too much” of pressure that is unable to be assumed, taken up into the flow of living.

(2001: 22) Paradoxically, everyday life gives rise to fantasmatic defense structures that “keep us from opening to the temporal flow of life even though they are in some fundamental way immanent to, constitutive of, everyday life” (Santner 2001: 23). Santner says that these defense structures are the

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fantasies that effect “social adaptation” and the “the social bond”; they are “the fantasies that underlie our political and ideological captivation, that sustain our psychic entanglement with regimes of power and authority, our psychic attachment to existing social reality” (2001: 24). They are “the fantasies that keep us in the thrall of some sort of exceptional ‘beyond’,” for we are “captured” by social relations and this hinders “our openness to the world, our being in the midst of life” (Santner 2001: 31, 100). This is a psychoanalytic formulation of what Hadot describes as the humanization of the world that results in the neglect of the world qua world. In Zhuangzi’s terms it is the drive towards completion (cheng) that results in the neglect of life (sheng). To this Santner adds the important point that, strangely enough, it is precisely our absorption in the fantasmatic structures of social relations that prevents the ethical experience, or the true encounter with the other. The truly ethical encounter with the other can only happen through an unbinding of the fantasmatic structures so we again inhabit the “midst of life.” “I am suggesting,” writes Santner, “that the task of truly inhabiting the ‘midst of life’ involves the risk of an unbinding or loosening of this fantasy as well as the social bond effectuated in it” (2001: 33). As we will see, precisely such risky unbinding ( jie ) of the drive towards completion (cheng) is at the core of Zhuangzi’s ethics.

Human life

What is most evident in Zhuangzi is dark despair and a pitiless wisdom that at times seems unbearable. It is strange, therefore, that so many scholars find in Zhuangzi mainly sunny optimism, playful aestheticism, happy immer-sion in know-how, and an apparent ability to entertain everyone to no end. In a recent comparative work on Zhuangzi and Kierkegaard, we learn that Zhuangzi’s vision is “remarkably optimistic,” and that Zhuangzi assures us that “[t]hings are fine – and we too are just things among things – just as they are” (Carr and Ivanhoe 2000: 120). One may perhaps have expected that the comparison with Kierkegaard would have precluded this misunder-standing. For Zhuangzi despairs precisely at the fact that we have become things among things and treat each other as things, that is to say, as objects that can be manipulated, mutilated, killed, and discarded. To be sure, Zhuangzi also celebrates our freedom, but as Chen Guying (2005a) rightly points out, Zhuangzi’s “free and easy wandering” must be seen against the background of a “tragic consciousness”. In the Zhuangzi we read the following chilling description of the human condition.

Intellectuals are not happy without the permutations of thoughts and ideas. Disputers are not happy without well-ordered arguments. Investigators are not happy without the task of making accusations. All of them are confined by things. . . . Farmers are uneasy without

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the busyness of plowing and planting; merchants are uneasy without the busyness of buying and selling. The common people exert them-selves diligently when they have occupations from dawn to dusk; the various artisans are full of vigor when they exercise their skills with tools and machines. If their money and goods do not accumu-late the greedy worry; if their power and influence do not increase the ambitious are sad. Those who go for power and material things delight in changes – the moment something can be put to use, they cannot but act. They all follow the times and change with things. They rush their physical forms and their natures and are submerged in the thousand things. All their life they never turn back. How sad! (24/33–8) We should easily recognize ourselves in this description. The Zhuangzi precisely describes what happens when we, as Hadot says, “humanize” the world by transforming it “into an ensemble of ‘things’ useful for life.” When we turn the world into a realm of things (wu), the various objects of our concern, then we are “confined by things” (you yuwu  ) like animals in a pen. Once enclosed in a world of our own making, we are unable to be happy unless we are engaged with our own thoughts, arguments, and technical abilities, and we feel uneasy without this constant busyness. Pre-occupied with things, we learn timely action and how to change along with things. The Zhuangzi laments: “How sad that human beings are only inns for things! They understand what they encounter [as a thing] and do not understand what they do not encounter [as a thing]” (22/82). In other words, human understanding has become a mere container for the transit of things and does not understand anything beyond this commerce. “Now that we have already become things,” says the Zhuangzi, “if we wish to return to the root [the Way], will it not be difficult?” (22/10).

It is a pervasive theme in the Zhuangzi that human life (renzhisheng  ) is a life of misery and a sad delusion. Human life, says Zhuangzi, is tied to our form (xing ), that is to say, to our body and self, both of which are visible in the outer (wai) realm. The body, obviously, is visible, but the self ( ji ) too is visible in names (ming ) and achievements (gong ). As long as we identify with this outer body/self we exhaust ourselves in competition with others and in pursuit of imaginary goals. Zhuangzi writes:

Once we have received the completed physical form, we do not forget it while we wait for extinction. Cutting into and grinding together with things we rush on to the end like a galloping horse no one can stop. Is it not sad? All life we labor and do not see any results. We exhaust ourselves in tiresome labor and do not know where it comes to rest. Is it not lamentable?

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Furthermore, the human heart-and-mind (xin ) has become mechanical, swift and deadly in its judgments, and right (shi ) and wrong ( fei ) fly from it like arrows from the crossbow trigger. Such mechanical hearts-and-minds, says Zhuangzi, decline day by day, until they can hardly be made to recover life (2/11–13).

In the view of Zhuangzi, human life is a dream. We think that we are awake and with dense, stubborn confidence we say: “Ah, there is a ruler! Oh, that is a shepherd!” (2/83). For we know our way around in our world, and we take it for real. But this absorption in the symbolic order, which is characteristic of human life, is a defense against the inevitable (budeyi) course of life ending in death. Zhuangzi wants us to overcome this defense mech-anism, and therefore he repeats again and again that we must give up our love and lust for human life, and that the perfected person views life and death as one unity and is not affected by the transformation of one into the other (2/73, 4/44, 5/5, 5/30, 6/1, 6/8, 6/24, and 6/69). This release from human life into the life of Heaven, the life beyond “life and death,” is like a great awakening.

Because human life is a miserable delusion, Zhuangzi’s sage does not identify with the states and activities that define human life. The sage, says Zhuangzi, sees “knowledge as a curse, social bonds as glue, virtue as making connections, and skill as peddling. The sage does not scheme, so what use does he have for knowledge. He does not split things up, so what use does he have for glue. He is deprived of nothing, so what use does he have for making connections? He has nothing to sell, so what use has he for peddling” (5/52–3). But if the sage does not take part in the commerce of human life how does the sage sustain himself ? The sage, says Zhuangzi, “receives food from Heaven, so what use does he have for man?” (5/53– 4). To be sure, the sage has the form of a human being, and so in the outer realm the sage “groups together with humans” (5/54), but the sage does not have the essence (qing ) of a human being, that is to say, he does not issue nor is he affected by value judgments in terms of right and wrong (the deadly arrows from the crossbow). The key point is that for the sage the center of gravity has shifted from human life to the life of Heaven: “How tiny and small is that which categorizes him as a human being, how huge and great is the way he uniquely completes his Heaven” (5/54 –5).

In the immediately following passage, Zhuangzi elaborates on what it means to be without the essence (qing) of the human. It means, says Zhuangzi, that “human beings do not harm themselves inside with [value judgments in terms of ] good and bad, but rather always follow the spontaneously self-so ( yinziran  ) and not add to life” (5/57–8). Zhuangzi’s friend and inter-locutor, Hui Shi , is obviously shocked at Zhuangzi’s proposal and asks: “If human beings do not add to life how can they even maintain themselves [as humans]?” (5/58). In other words, if nothing essentially human is added to life, how can there be human life at all? Zhuangzi answers that

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the appearance and form of human beings have been given us by the Way and by Heaven. It is our fate to have the form of a human being, but the form is merely something outer, it is not our true being. Unfortunately we do not recognize this but get lost in appearances and entangled with things. Look at yourself, says Zhuangzi to his friend, you wear yourself out with your sophistic logic and disputation, and in the process you harm your inner (nei): you “push your spirit (shen ) into the outer realm and wear out your vital essence (qing )” (5/58–60).

It may seem that Zhuangzi totally strips the human subject of all that is quintessentially human – the ability to impose values on the world, the exercise of skill, logic, virtue, and even wisdom – and that he is rightly criticized, as he was early on, for being absorbed in Heaven and neglecting the human. But Zhuangzi’s meditations on human life are spiritual exercise, where it is not a question of providing information but rather of provoking transformation. Zhuangzi wants to liberate human existence from the false values and views we have added to it; above all he wants us to see through the human form to the ceaseless emergence of life itself. Therefore, when Zhuangzi negates human life he at the same time affirms that very life as being engendered by Heaven. Furthermore, when Zhuangzi negates the human, then it is not an outlandish proposition but a view shared by many ancient philosophers. In regard to the ancient Greek philosophers, Hadot writes:

Doesn’t “stripping off man” mean that the philosopher completely transforms his vision of the universe, transcending the limited view-point of what is human, all-too-human, in order to elevate himself to a superior point of view? Such a perspective is in a way inhuman; it reveals the nudity of existence, beyond the partial oppositions and false values which human beings add to it, in order, perhaps, to attain a state of simplicity prior to all distinctions. . . . This tendency to strip ourselves of “the human” is constant throughout the most diverse schools – from Pyrrho, who remarked on how hard it is to strip ourselves of the human, to Aristotle, for whom life according to the mind is super-human, and as far as Plotinus, who believed that in mystical experience we cease to be “human.”

(2002: 113, 211)

The life of Heaven

The word tian , which I translate as “Heaven,” is sometimes translated as “nature,” but in Zhuangzi tian does not mean “nature” in our modern sense of a natural world understood in terms of biological evolution, nor in the seventeenth-century sense of matter extended in space and governed by a set of mechanical laws, nor in the Christian medieval sense of God’s creation

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subservient to His purpose. If we must translate tian as “nature” the word should be understood rather in the ancient Greek sense of an alive, intel-ligent, ceaseless movement of coming-into-being (Collingwood 1960: 3–13). In this sense nature is not an outer object but rather an inner experience. As Pierre Hadot writes, according to ancient Greek philosophy nature ( phusis) is “that movement of growth and birth by which things manifest them-selves,” and it is “within ourselves that we can experience the coming-into-being of reality and the presence of coming-into-being” (1995: 260).

Zhuangzi says that perfected human beings rely on Heaven’s texture (tianli ) (3/6), draw on their Heavenly mechanism (tianji ) (6/7), equalize things within the bounds of Heaven (tianni ) (6/90), rest in the potter’s wheel of Heaven (tianjun ) (2/40), illuminate things in the light of Heaven (zhaozhi yutian  !) (2/29), and ultimately they enter into unity with vast Heaven (ruyu liaotian yi  !") (6/82) and live engendered by Heaven (tianersheng  ) (6/1). This inner experience of Heaven (tian), should be distinguished from the common experience of heaven and earth (tiandi ), that is to say, physical nature, or the experience of things as things. Physical nature can, of course, give us intimations of the transcendent. In Zhuangzi tian often means “sky” in the concrete sense of the sky above us, and since the vast blue sky above us seems to be infinite, Zhuangzi wonders: “Is the deep blue of the sky (tian) its true color? Or is it that it is so distant that it reaches no limit?” (1/4 –5). Here the sky, part of physical nature, comes to represent the infinite (wuqiong ) associated with Heaven.

Heaven is opposed to the realm below Heaven (tianxia ), that is to say, the world in general and the world of human beings in particular. According to A. C. Graham (1989: 107–11), this split between Heaven (tian) and the realm of man (ren) caused a “metaphysical crisis” in the fourth century . Zhuangzi’s thought is a response to this crisis, but it should be emphasized that for Zhuangzi the split between Heaven and man does not preclude the experience of Heaven; on the contrary, the split is the very condition for this experience. For only by breaking with the natural, pre-reflexive unity with Heaven, which is proper only to animals, do human beings attain the experience of Heaven.

The crucial point is that, according to Zhuangzi, we can transform our human life and experience that this life is moved by Heaven, or, better, that it is the movement of Heaven. “The life of the sage,” says the Zhuangzi, “is the movement of Heaven” (15/10), and “when he [the sage] moves he is moved by Heaven” (15/18). Zhuangzi’s experience of wandering ( you ), which is his spiritual exercise par excellence, is precisely this experience of being moved by Heaven. Wandering is not a technique or a method, but the simple release of human life into its pure coming-into-being, which is the inner experience of being engendered by Heaven. Victor Mair says that in Zhuangzi “’wandering implies a ‘laid-back’ attitude towards life in which one takes things as they come and flows along with the Tao [Dao]

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unconcernedly” (1994: 385). A. C. Graham, for his part, says that in Zhuangzi the term you (wandering) is “used rather like the ‘trip’ of psychedelic slang in the 1960s” (1981: 8). We should follow rather Fukunaga Mitsuji (1946), who understands Zhuangzi’s wandering in terms of the profound religious experience of surrendering to the chaos of self-emerging life, entering Heaven and becoming a friend of the Creator of Things. For Zhuangzi uses the term you (wandering) in a very precise sense that can only be understood against the background of Zhuangzi’s crucial distinction between human life (renzhisheng  ) and the life of Heaven (tianzhisheng  ). Human life is engendered by Heaven, but usually we are so immersed in human life that we have no sense of being engendered by Heaven. Wandering ( you) happens when we do experience ourselves as being engendered by Heaven and experience a freedom and joy that is not found within the confines of human life. Far from simply going along with the flow of things and the events of human life, which is precisely what prevents us from experiencing the life of Heaven, the person who is wandering is liberated from things.

The Way

In Zhuangzi the Way (dao) and Heaven (tian) are closely connected. The Way is, as Isabelle Robinet says, “the essence of life” (2002: 80), and Heaven engenders life. The Way is the pure self-emergence of beings, but it is not itself a being. Things flourish and decay, but the Way, which is the move-ment of this flourishing and decay, does not itself flourish and decay (22/51). Things complete and destruct, but the Way, which is the movement of this completion and destruction, does not itself complete and destruct (2/35–6). Like Heaven, the Way is the transcendental life that gives life to the living but does not itself live and die. Like Heaven, the Way is an inner experience. As Izutsu Toshihiko says, the Way is the absolute, beyond being and non-being, but “man alone is in a position to grasp the Way from the inside, so to speak. He can be conscious of himself as a manifestation of the Way. He can feel and touch within himself the palpitating life of the Absolute as it is actively working there” (1984: 53). Similarly, Livia Kohn explains that “one always participates in the Tao [Dao], the absolute, the One. The absolute is the now; it is right here to be participated in absolutely” (1992: 55). A. C. Graham remarks that in Zhuangzi the Way is an “inner experience,” it is an “unformulable path” and an “unnamable whole.” The Way, says Graham, is entirely beyond any distinctions we can draw, it is “nothing less than the universe flowing from its ultimate source (not just the course of its flow, which would be to draw a distinction)” (1989: 188). Chen Guying (2005b), for his part, explains, that for Zhuangzi the Way is the inner expe-rience of the totality of things after we break out of the confinement of the

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completed mind and the objectified self and attain cosmic consciousness. These scholars come close to explaining Zhuangzi’s Way, but ultimately the Way is supra-discursive, and any discourse on the Way can only be an exercise in saying the unsayable. Zhuangzi says:

The Way is real and true. It has no action and no form. It can be handed down but not received. It can be apprehended but not seen. Rooted in itself, founded in itself, before there were Heaven and Earth, from ancient times assuredly existing. It divinizes the ghosts and the highest god. It engenders Heaven and Earth. It is above the highest point without being high, it is below the world without being low; it is prior to Heaven and Earth without being long-lasting, it is senior to high antiquity without being old.

(6/29–31) It is a widely held opinion among Western scholars that for the ancient Chinese thinkers the real is one homogeneous process, a continuity of being without ontologically different levels of being. François Jullien (2000: 280), for instance, argues that unlike the Greek tradition with its difference be-tween being and becoming, the intelligible and the sensible, in the Chinese tradition “the difference introduced within the real operates between two stages” and there are not different ontological levels of being. To be sure, the Way (dao) is invisible and escapes the senses, but, according to Jullien, in China the invisible “does not constitute another level, such as another world . . . The invisible is indeed beyond the visible but as an extension of it; it is of the order of the evanescent and not the unintelligible (noeton). . . . This invisible is rather the diffuse basis of the visible from which the latter ceaselessly actualizes itself. In short, this invisible lacks metaphysical consistency.” Therefore, although the Chinese stages of the visible and the invisible constitute “an original dialectic that can be seen as parallel to Western ontology,” they do not imply “an ontological rift” (Jullien 2000: 290–1). In China, says Jullien, “there is no metaphysical rupture between the phenomenal and its foundation,” and in reading Chinese texts “we quit Greek ontology for the Chinese conception of the process of the real” (2000: 280 –1), which instead of ontological levels operates with stages between the not yet actualized and the actualized.

The Zhuangzi, however, explicitly says that the Way is beyond the dicho-tomies of full and empty, root and branch, to accumulate and to disperse (22/51–2), that is to say, the Way is beyond the continuum that according to Jullien constitutes the totality of the ancient Chinese philosophy of process. The Zhuangzi also explicitly says that the Way cannot be attained through meditation, reflection, knowing, abiding, submission, following, or by any method in general (22/1–28). Therefore it is highly questionable if in Zhuangzi,

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as Jullien says, the Way “is of the order of the evanescent and not the unintelligible.” When the Zhuangzi speaks of the Way as the real (qing ) beyond form, color, name, and sound (13/67), then it is not thinking of a Platonic form (eidos). Nevertheless, in these discussions the Zhuangzi does, as Christoph Harbsmeier says, enter “a higher metaphysical realm” (1998: 236), and it is unnecessary to insist with Jullien that Zhuangzi’s conception of the Way “lacks metaphysical consistency.”

Zhuangzi’s categorical distinction between the realm of things and the Way makes the transcendence of the Way especially clear. In Zhuangzi the realm of things, including human beings (as things), is the totality of facts that make up our world as every thing we perceive, name, and use. All these facts are relative, they are all a this as opposed to a that, and this opposition gives rise to disputes, strife, and general insecurity. Therefore, according to Zhuangzi, the highest attainment of the ancients was to realize that there is “a realm [or state] before there are things” (2/40). The realm before there are things is the Way, which “things things” (wuwu ) but is “not a thing” (22/75), and so, strictly speaking, is nothing.

Zhuangzi says that the realm “before there are things,” namely the Way, is posited at a different level from things, distinctions, and the ensuing value judgments (2/40–2). There is no continuity between these two realms: “what things things,” the Way, “has no border with things,” for borders are only found in the realm of things (22/50–1), and the outer (wai), or the realm of things, and the inner (nei), or the realm of the Way, “do not touch upon each other” (6/66 –7). In this way, Zhuangzi makes a categorical if not ontological distinction between the realm of things and the Way. Western Zhuangzi scholars generally disregard this crucial difference between the realm of things and the Way, but Chinese and Japanese scholars often treat it as central to Zhuangzi’s thought. Ikeda Tomohisa (1996: 143 –52), for instance, places early Daoist thought squarely in the fields of ontology and metaphysics, and he says that in Laozi and Zhuangzi there are two distinct realms: the realm of things (wu), which is under the constraint of time and space, and the realm of the Way (dao), which transcends beings and forms in time and space.

Two kinds of transcendence

On November 12, 1210, some followers of Amalric of Bena were burnt at the stake, because Amalric had interpreted the claim of the Apostle that “God is all in all” to mean that, as Giorgio Agamben writes, “God is in every thing as the place in which every thing is, or rather as the determina-tion and the ‘topia’ of every entity” (1993: 13). Agamben adds that the consequence of this heretical view is that the transcendent “is not a supreme entity above all things; rather, the pure transcendent is the taking-place

References

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