Zhuangzi
c. 369–286 BCE, state of Meng, China
Daoism
Every standpoint looks obvious from inside it, including yours.
“Once I dreamt I was a butterfly. Suddenly I awoke. Now I do not know whether I was a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.”
The life
A minor official in a lacquer garden in the state of Meng, by the only account we have. The stories in the book, which may be about him or may be literary invention, show him refusing high office on the grounds that he would rather drag his tail in the mud like a tortoise than be honoured as a dead one in a temple, and drumming on a pot and singing after his wife's death, on the grounds that grief would show he did not understand what had happened.
The first seven chapters, the Inner Chapters, are generally accepted as his. The remaining twenty-six accumulated later from his school and from other hands, and some of them argue with the first seven.
What shaped the ideas
Same Warring States crisis, same market for philosophical advice, and Zhuangzi's response is to refuse to participate. Where the Daodejing offers counsel to rulers, Zhuangzi is largely uninterested in governing anything, and the book is full of characters who succeed by being too useless to be exploited: the gnarled tree nobody cuts down.
His main philosophical target is the disputation culture of the period, particularly the logicians and the Confucian-Mohist arguments about right and wrong. His counter is not a better position but a demonstration that the disputants cannot get outside their own standpoints far enough to settle anything.
Core arguments
- 01
Perspectival relativity
Judgements of right and wrong are made from within a standpoint that cannot validate itself.
Fish live in water that would kill a man. A beautiful woman makes fish dive and birds fly off. If you and I disagree and call in a third party, they either agree with one of us or with neither, so who settles it? The argument does not conclude that nothing is true; it dislodges the assumption that our own vantage point is the neutral one.
- 02
The butterfly dream
The boundary between perspectives is less secure than it feels.
He dreams he is a butterfly, wakes, and cannot say which is dreaming which. The passage deliberately does not resolve. Its closing phrase (the transformation of things) suggests the question is malformed rather than open: there is no fixed self on either side of the boundary to be mistaken about.
- 03
Useless usefulness
What has no use to others is what survives.
A tree with knotted wood and foul-smelling leaves is passed over by every carpenter and grows to enormous age. A man deformed enough to be exempt from conscription outlives everyone. The point is partly political (under a murderous state, being of value is dangerous) and partly a challenge to the assumption that a thing's worth is its utility to someone else.
- 04
Skill as absorption
Mastery is a loss of deliberation, not an increase in it.
The cook has carved oxen for nineteen years without blunting his blade, because he no longer looks. He meets the ox with his spirit and finds the openings that are already there. Skill of this kind is not applied theory; it is a state in which the distinction between the agent and the task has thinned out.
Commonly got wrong
- The butterfly dream is not a proof that life is an illusion. It refuses to conclude anything, and the refusal is the argument.
- He is not a relativist who thinks all views are equally good. He thinks no view can validate itself from inside, which is a different and more unsettling claim.
- The humour is not decoration. Argument by anecdote and absurdity is the method, because a systematic refutation of systems would be self-defeating.
- 'Useless' is not an ideal of laziness. It is a survival strategy under a state that consumed useful people, and a challenge to instrumental valuation.
Works
Zhuangzi, Inner Chapters (1–7) c. 300 BCE
The part generally accepted as his. 'Free and Easy Wandering' and 'On the Equality of Things' are the core.
Outer and Miscellaneous Chapters 3rd–2nd century BCE
Later accretions from his school and others, sometimes in tension with the Inner Chapters.
Guo Xiang's edition c. 300 CE
The received text is his: he cut it from fifty-two chapters to thirty-three and commented throughout.
The Inner Chapters, in Brook Ziporyn's translation. Read chapter two twice; the first time is meant to be confusing.
Why they still get taught
The most literarily brilliant text in Chinese philosophy, the tradition's major source for thinking about skill, absorption and the limits of argument, and the reason Daoism has a sense of humour.
Chapters
- Wu Wei and the Uncarved Block · The Other Half of the World