The Philosophy of Zhuangzi

This post is inspired by reflections on Zhuangzi and philosophy in a reading group I participated in during Fall 2020 with three of my colleagues.

Oh no! A being, plopped into the world, forced to make sense of it, to choose how to live, act, think, and be. What to do?! What to pay attention to?! Where to look, where to turn the head, focus the eyes?! What in the world to do with this stream of informational input?! What is this world?! What is me?! What chaos! Can Zhuangzi help? Maybe he can’t help us sort out our mess of conceptual confusions and determine what is true, and what it is to make sense of things, and what it all means, and what we should do. But I think he might be able to point us in the right direction (or, away from the wrong one).

Introduction: Where should I begin?

We must begin at the beginning. Stories are like that, language is like that, we are like that. We simply must pick a place to start, if we want to say anything at all. So where should I begin? Nature itself doesn’t seem to provide clear and determinate boundary lines, so why should I? Perhaps I should just stay silent, since no starting point seems privileged. I am paralyzed by my indecision. And yet… I have stories to tell. Questions to ask. Things to say (I think). And even if no starting point for telling these stories is objectively correct, the place from which we choose to begin is not arbitrary - it makes sense to us.

Suppose, for example, that my passion is oak trees. I want to know everything there is to know about oak trees - their nature and function, their origins, their inner workings, their shape, their component parts, their interactive abilities. I want to know their past, I want to know their present, I want to know all the possibility spaces for their futures. Suppose, as a thought experiment, that I somehow succeeded in encoding all the possible information there is to know about oak trees. But suddenly, a mysterious plague hits every known oak tree in existence, and they are no more. No longer can humans born into this new world know an oak tree directly by acquaintance, no longer can they place their hands on its bark, no longer can they smell its aroma or marvel at its strength or listen to the way the wind filters through its leaves. They can only learn of the oak tree’s majesty through records and stories. And I, as the world’s resident expert on oak trees, am in a privileged place to tell these stories.

If my future child came to me, with a spark of passion in her eye, and asked me, “please, tell me the story of an oak tree,” I would be met with an overwhelming cacophony of information in my mind, unsure where to begin. First I might smile, pleased that she wanted to know. It may take me many lifetimes to tell the story she wanted to hear, and I may never be finished doing so, but I wouldn’t let this stop me from beginning. There are many places I may begin. I may begin outside the narrative frame, using metaphor to give her an idea of the shape and content of the kind of thing we are talking about. I would relate the multimodal experiences of oak trees to experiences she was more familiar with. This is all well and good, but she wants a story, with a temporal structure. She wants to know how and why oak trees, as individuals and kinds, came to be into existence. Stories have beginnings, birthings and dyings, origins, generations: geneses. 

One story I may tell her may begin and end with an acorn falling from a branch. Story begins: acorn falls, acorn hits ground, from acorn springs roots, burrowing into the ground in search of water. Spring arrives and soil moistens, acorn cracks open, sends up a young shoot, using energy stores its mother tree had left it with. Seedling emerges from soil, converts sunlight to energy, seedling grows taller, and stronger, and then, if it is lucky, seedling develops into tree. In spring, tree flowers, pollen fertilizes flower, flower swells, ripens, forms acorn. Tree nourishes acorn, provides it with food so that it may flourish when left to its own devices. Acorn ripens. Story begins again: Acorn falls. “This is the life cycle of an oak tree, darling,” I may say to her. At any point along this cycle I can provide more information, at increasing levels of specificity, since my hypothetical knowledge is complete, but I will wait to see what questions she asks.

I could have begun this cycle anywhere, and ended up at the same place. I simply chose to begin telling the story at the moment of separation between an acorn and its mother. But even this moment may be indeterminate, fuzzy. “Even if I were telling your story, darling,” I may say to her, “I may begin with your birth, or the time we cut your umbilical cord, as the moment of our physical separation, but notice that even before this moment there were senses in which we were separate and even after this moment there were senses in which we were not separate. So too with the oak tree. The acorn begins to develop as its own being while it is still attached to its mother-tree, and its mother-tree continues to nourish it even after its physical detachment.” The story could have started anywhere, it’s just about what we decide we want to focus on. This cyclical story has no real beginning or real ending, but it is still a story. 

As an aside, I then may interject to my child, not wanting her to think that I have a privileged perspective for telling any story but the oak tree’s, or perhaps not even that... not wanting her to think that her biological origin in my body implies a mental origination outside herself, wanting her to recognize the uniqueness of her very own perspective type, saying “But you, my darling, have something special about your story that the oak tree lacks. I may not know the best way to tell the oak tree’s story, where I should begin, what I should learn from it, what matters most, I can only simply gather information from where I stand. I can ask it and I can listen, but it has no mouth to speak with, it cannot tell me what I should pay attention to in my quest to understand it. So I run in circles around it, gathering all the information I can, but still I can only tell its story from my perspective. I may do this to you, sometimes too, you know. Forgive me for the times I write a story of your life as told through my mouth. These stories may be stories of you, like the stories of the oak, but they are not your stories. The oak may have real stories of his very own to tell, but we will never know because he has no mouth. But you, my dear, have a fantastically magical power to do what he cannot. You are growing older, you are learning to take ownership of your wants and needs, you are learning to listen and to speak from a position that only you can. You can tell your own story of who and what you are, where you begin and end, where you’ve been, where you are, where you are going. Your own story of what matters, a story that is uniquely yours, a story no one else can tell. You have a mind of your own that can think and speak for itself. And no one can ever take that away from you.” Keep to the center.

Subjective stories are a funny thing. The story of my life can take any form I choose. A linear temporally structured event-mapping that begins with my “birth” and ends with my “death” may be one of many stories of me… 

So, too, I may tell her a story that begins with an acorn’s “birth” and ends with an oak tree’s “death.” I would have to pick the point at which I wanted to say the acorn counted as “born” and the point at which it counted as “dead.” I would have to fix the referent of my terms. Is the acorn born when the flower is fertilized? When it takes on the shape of “acornness”? When it falls from the branch? When its roots spring out? When it sprouts? It isn’t clear, and we needn’t pick one. The acorn may have many birth-like moments, a continual process of becoming. What about its death? Is it dead after its leaves fall for the last time? Is it dead after a single branch is brittle and breaks? If most of them do? If all of them do? Is it dead when its bark becomes cold and flaky? When the innards of its trunk begin to rot? When its roots cease exchanging nutrients with soil? When they begin to emerge from the soil cold and hard? When it falls? When it disintegrates into the earth? It isn’t clear, and we needn’t pick one. The oak tree may have many death-like moments. It may at the same time be both being born and dying.

Another set of stories I may tell her may be phylogenetic ones, at varying levels of description and analysis. What was the “first” oak tree ever in existence? What is the genesis of the kind, “oak tree?” What nucleic structure makes an oak tree the thing that it is, and how did this nucleic structure come to be? What genetic mutation distinguishes this species from that which came before it? Was the moment of this mutation the origin of the kind? Or was it the moment when this mutation proved to be adaptive and the species went forth, flourished and reproduced? Or should we go further back, to determine the origin of trees in general, or plants in general, or life in general? No one of these starting points seems better than any other. Origin stories of kind terms have many possible starting points and temporal structures.

We may start with the acorn in one context, we may start with a nucleotide in another, and in yet another we may start with a primordial soup of atoms in a void. How we should tell the “story” of the oak tree, and where we should begin, depends on why we are telling the story. It depends what matters to us, about the oak tree. If we had a specific goal in mind, such as using the oak tree’s story to prevent future catastrophic species-eliminating blights in the future, our starting point and the path forward would be guided and filtered by that goal. If our goal was simply to know all there is to know about this thing called “oak tree,” we could start anywhere we liked, and take any path we liked, guided and filtered only by the goal of relating all received information back to the concept, being, or kind under investigation.

Beginning at the beginning doesn’t mean localizing a determinately correct starting point for saying what you want to say, learning what you want to learn, telling the story you want to tell. There is no one thing that it means - it depends. What is your goal? What is it that you seek to understand? How can this goal be used to direct your attention, and/or to filter and sort the content that falls under that attentional gaze? 

If we know our goal, know what we hope to achieve, where we might want to end up, we may not know how to start or how to get there, but we’ve got a frame to work with, we can make a map, we can just start walking and use our map and our relative distance from our goal to determine that we’re headed in the right direction. A map is comforting. A well defined cartography delineating where we stand, where we want to end up, and how we hope to get there. Maps are flexible. The shape of the space may change as we move in it. We encounter obstacles we didn’t foresee. But forward is forward no matter how slow, as long as there is just one thing you know, which is where it is you want to go. Pick a starting point, some are better than others but any will do, and start moving. Go from there.

But what if we have no clear goal, no clear place we want to end up? What if we don’t know what it is yet? What if we just have curiosity? What if, unlike the oak-tree enthusiast, our curiosity is domain-general, such that there is not even one clear “thing itself” to serve as any kind of starting point for our attentional focus? What if everything that fell under our gaze were to seem infinitely fascinating, spiralling our focus outward in a million directions simultaneously, a manifold of possibility for thought and action splayed before us? How could we possibly pick one to move in, walk through, live through, with no guidelines whatever? 

It would have been easier to not even have considered the question. Easier to keep eyes shut tight to possibility space, to “oughts,” to distinguishable concepts, of beginnings and endings, of right and wrong, better and worse, true and false, forward and backward, motion and stillness, self and other, signal and noise, of sense and nonsense. Easier to not have to ask “which direction is up again?” Easier to not have to choose, choose how to live, what to think, what to look at, how to look at it, choose what world to be in, choose how to be in it, what moves to make, what words to say, what feelings to feel, what maps to make, what spaces to build, where to go, who to be, who to love and how.

And yet here we are. And we must begin at the beginning. But when we don’t know where we’re going, any starting point will do. When no maps have been made yet, when forward motion hasn’t been defined yet, all you can do is move. All you can do is move, and wait, and watch, and listen, and learn. Like the infant before he finds his feet, wriggling about. He is open to learning what his experience has to teach him. He has no clear goal in mind, yet like the oak tree, he grows.  He doesn’t know what growth is or what direction forward is or exactly what it is he is supposed to be learning, yet he grows and he moves forward and he learns. Newborn brains are incredibly plastic, their minds soft and supple. We have a lot to learn from them.

The current curiosities are domain general, but our source is the writings in the Zhuangzi. Our attentional gaze can wander free and easy amongst the words in this text. There may not be a single endpoint that will render us as having a full and complete understanding of Zhuang Zhou’s intended meaning (if such a person even existed). Debates in the literature abound about the “correct” interpretation of Zhuangzi, and we needn’t settle on one. In fact, I say, if we choose to settle on one interpretive frame for understanding Zhuangzi’s intended meaning, then we will have missed the point entirely.

Zhuangzi’s Philosophical Style

今且有言於此，不知其與是類乎？其與是不類乎？類與不類，相與為類，則與彼無以異矣。雖然，請嘗言之。有始也者，有未始有始也者，有未始有夫未始有始也者。有有也者，有無也者，有未始有無也者，有未始有夫未始有無也者。俄而有無矣，而未知有無之果孰有孰無也。今我則已有謂矣，而未知吾所謂之其果有謂乎，其果無謂乎？[2.8]

“Now I am going to make a statement here. I don’t know whether or not it fits into the category of other people’s statements. But whether it fits into their category or whether it doesn’t, it obviously fits into some category. So in that respect, it is no different from their statements. However, let me try making my statement. 

There is a beginning. There is a not yet beginning to be a beginning. There is a not yet beginning to be a not yet beginning to be a beginning. There is being. There is nonbeing. There is a not yet beginning to be nonbeing. There is a not yet beginning to be a not yet beginning to be nonbeing. Suddenly there is being and nonbeing. But between this being and nonbeing, I don’t really know which is being and which is nonbeing. Now I have just said something. But I don’t know whether what I have said has really said something or whether it hasn’t said something.”

Historically, not much is known about the person Zhuang Zhou himself, if such a person existed. In a sense, it does not matter whether he was a real person, or a fantasy constructed by some collective imagination of writers and interpreters. This uncertainty makes his very being seem vague, elusive - and if he were a real person (and I will continue to speak as if he were), perhaps he would have wanted it this way. Zhuangzi’s philosophical style is riddled with fantastical musings and playful allegories. Hansen describes it as “philosophical fantasy,” in which Zhuangzi “seemingly dares us to say which voice is really his” (p. 255-6). A style that leaves us uncertain as to which perspective is speaking to us through the words on the page, and uncertain as to what might be the appropriate perspective for interpreting the meaning of these words, is crucial to making his “points.” The style and form through which he expresses meaning is inseparable from that meaning itself. There’s a convergence of structure and content, syntax and semantics, form and meaning, figure and ground.

Take the above passage, for example. I think one could write multiple book-length treatments of this passage alone, even on a single sentence within it. Zhuangzi jumps into rabbit holes that provide interpreters infinite opportunities for greater depth, greater clarity, further distinctions to be made and lessons to be drawn out. Yet he never stays inside of these rabbit holes that he points to, instead playfully skipping on the surface, noticing them, and moving on. He is like the flattest rock being skipped on a pond, and in following him to try and analyze the ripples he makes, we may fall in (*plunk*). He ends this passage unsure whether he has even said anything at all - but he must have meant something, else why would he have written it? Zhuangzi was not a silentist. Words can be meaningfully uttered, we can do things with them, things worth doing.

It is easy to read Zhuangzi and come away with a strong skeptical, mystic, or Daoist takeaway. It is tempting to think of him as advocating for withdrawal from the social world and the world of words entirely. It is also tempting to think of him as not advocating for anything, to think that prescriptive claims and normativity would make no sense in the picture he paints for us. But I think there are lessons to be learned, even if we cannot always encode these lessons into propositional content with determinate truth-conditional “meanings.” 

One reason there are so many different, non-mutually exclusive ways to understand Zhuangzi’s writings is because his style makes use of metaphor. Linguistic metaphors involve using words in a way that is not intended to be interpreted literally: a word is used metaphorically when the word is used to represent something in some way other than the literal “referent” of the term in public language. 

Zhuangzi’s Metaphysics:
​Worlds, Boundaries, Distinctions, Counting

天下莫大於秋豪之末，而大山為小；莫壽乎殤子，而彭祖為夭。天地與我並生，而萬物與我為一。既已為一矣，且得有言乎？既已謂之一矣，且得無言乎？一與言為二，二與一為三。自此以往，巧歷不能得，而況其凡乎！故自無適有，以至於三，而況自有適有乎！無適焉，因是已。[2.9]

“There is nothing in the world bigger than the tip of an autumn hair, and Mount Tai is little. No one has lived longer than a dead child, and Pengzu died young. Heaven and earth were born at the same time I was, and the ten thousand things are one with me.

We have already become one, so how can I say anything? But I have just said that we are one, so how can I not be saying something? The one and what I said about it make two, and two and the original one make three. If we go on this way, then even the cleverest mathematician, much less an ordinary man, can’t tell where we’ll end. If by moving from nonbeing to being, we get to three, how far will we get if we move from being to being? Better not to move but to let things be!”

Did Zhuangzi have an ontology? What was his theory of reality? When he talks about distinction making, it seems clear that there are no privileged distinctions. The existence of individuatable, countable objects and object-features is a matter of perspective. 

There are three questions: does Zhuangzi’s metaphysics allow for any perspective independent “truths”? Does it allow for degrees of perspective-dependency when it comes to truth-attribution? And finally, setting aside the question of truths, did Zhuangzi think there was a perspective independent world - one which, yes, we can only know through perspectival frames that vary along multiple dimensions, but still a shared world nonetheless, that the infinitely many possible perspective types are all accessing, yet carving up in different ways?

If truth is a property of statements, I think the answer to the first question is a resounding “no.” Whether there is or is not a perspective-independent reality, any statements about that reality must be perspectival in some sense or another.

The second question is less clear. Sturgeon seems to admit that there are when he explains Zhuangzi’s distinction between greater knowledge and lesser knowledge. Lesser knowledge is localized to a narrow perspective, and the statements uttered therein encode truth that is contingent on that perspective. Greater knowledge involves a degree of openness to a range of perspectives, and involves a type of truth that spans multiple perspectives. But Sturgeon also states that the greater/lesser knowledge distinction is itself a relative one. So if there are degrees of perspective-dependence when it comes to truth claims, these degrees are themselves perspective-dependent?

The third question is less clear still. Wong answers it in the affirmative, leading him to reject Hansen’s strong skeptical reading of Zhuangzi. I am inclined to agree. I think this is why greater knowledge is more valuable than lesser knowledge, even if there are epistemic worries that we may not be able to know whether the knowledge we are accessing is “greater” or “lesser” (or to what degree). The reason we should be open to seeing the world through other perspectives than the one we are in is because those other perspectives are accessing the same world we are attempting to access, so we can learn something from them. If we are confined to a narrow perspective, “the world” to us may just be the world encoded within our perspective. Such that we would not genuinely, in our minds, be able to learn anything about the world by broadening that perspective or questioning the truths within it. When we begin to see the world as something other than, bigger than, the world as-it-appears-to-us, we open the door to the possibility of greater knowledge. 

Zhuangzi may not offer us much in the way of metaphysics, since this does not seem to be his project. If I had to ascribe a metaphysics to him, to consider what is his theory of what is “really” or ultimately real? If he has such a theory it wouldn’t be sayable because the world as it is is not “thing-able” and when we say things about the world we “thing” the world. The world itself has no things, is not a thing, and has no determinate boundary lines. It is perspectives that thing things and carve lines and count things. The metaphysical status of these perspectives themselves is even indeterminate. So the real meat of Zhuangzi’s project, I think, is epistemological rather than metaphysical. We can’t really say anything metaphysical outside of perspectives, and perspectives are the epistemic frameworks by which we access and know and move in the “world” we find ourselves in. So let’s talk about them and what they do.

Zhuangzi’s Epistemology

夫道未始有封，言未始有常，為是而有畛也。請言其畛：有左，有右，有倫，有義，有分，有辯，有競，有爭，此之謂八德。六合之外，聖人存而不論；六合之內，聖人論而不議。春秋經世，先王之志，聖人議而不辯。故分也者，有不分也；辯也者，有不辯也。曰：何也？聖人懷之，眾人辯之以相示也。故曰：辯也者，有不見也。夫大道不稱，大辯不言，大仁不仁，大廉不嗛，大勇不忮。道昭而不道，言辯而不及，仁常而不成，廉清而不信，勇忮而不成。五者园而幾向方矣。故知止其所不知，至矣。孰知不言之辯，不道之道？若有能知，此之謂天府。注焉而不滿，酌焉而不竭，而不知其所由來，此之謂葆光。故昔者堯問於舜曰：「我欲伐宗、膾、胥敖，南面而不釋然。其故何也？」舜曰：「夫三子者，猶存乎蓬艾之間。若不釋然，何哉？昔者十日並出，萬物皆照，而況德之進乎日者乎！」[2.10]

“The Way has never known boundaries; speech has no constancy. But because of [the recognition of a] “this,” there came to be boundaries. Let me tell you what the boundaries are. There is left, there is right, there are theories, there are debates, there are divisions, there are discriminations, there are emulations, and there are contentions. These are called the Eight Virtues. As to what is beyond the Six Realms, the sage admits it exists but does not theorize. As to what is within the Six Realms, he theorizes but does not debate. In the case of the Spring and Autumn, the record of the former kings of past ages, the sage debates but does not discriminate. So [I say,] those who divide fail to divide; those who discriminate fail to discriminate. What does this mean, you ask? The sage embraces things. Ordinary men discriminate among them and parade their discriminations before others. So I say, those who discriminate fail to see.

The Great Way is not named; Great Discriminations are not spoken; Great Benevolence is not benevolent; Great Modesty is not humble; Great Daring does not attack. If the Way is made clear, it is not the Way. If dis- criminations are put into words, they do not suffice. If benevolence has a constant object, it cannot be universal. If modesty is fastidious, it cannot be trusted. If daring attacks, it cannot be complete. These five all are round, but they tend toward the square.

Therefore understanding that rests in what it does not understand is the finest. Who can understand discriminations that are not spoken, the Way that is not a way? If he can understand this, he may be called the Reservoir of Heaven. Pour into it and it is never full, dip from it and it never runs dry, and yet it does not know where the supply comes from. This is called the Shaded Light.

So it is that long ago Yao said to Shun, “I want to attack the rulers of Zong, Kuai, and Xuao. Even as I sit on my throne, this thought nags at me. Why is this?”

Shun replied, “These three rulers are only little dwellers in the weeds and brush. Why this nagging desire? Long ago, ten suns came out all at once, and the ten thou- sand things were all lighted up. And how much greater is virtue than these suns!”

What is a perspective? Perspectives enable distinction making. They allow consideration of sameness and difference, they allow us to carve things up, they allow us to say things. They involve not what is seen but what it is seen through. Perspectives are like filters. All knowledge is perspectival in some sense, and all experience too. We cannot step outside of perspective to see the world as it “actually” is, if we could there would not be anything to see (and it wouldn’t be us doing it anyway). We can see the world from perspectives, and sometimes we may be able to occupy perspectives that see the world from multiple perspectives simultaneously, or occupy perspectives that rapidly shift between the way in which they see the world.

Sturgeon distinguishes between two types of distinction-making. The first type is a kind of distinction that a perspective may make between things or types and further reify. This type is taken to be privileged, taken to describe things as they actually are, taken to mark a boundary that objectively exists in nature itself. This type of distinction making is like carving a line on a stone, such that once it is made it is taken to be the way the world is. Making distinctions in this way may close one off to seeing other forms of distinction-making. Narrow perspectives only do this type of distinction making because they are confined to their mode of classifying similarity and difference.

The second type of distinction-making is where someone marks a line between things that one simultaneously understands as provisional. One recognizes that the line-drawn is not part of nature as it is, but a function of their perspective-type and their current goals. This type of distinction-making is more like lines drawn in sand. One could wipe away these types of distinctions if contextual shifts called for it.

Interpreters emphasize that for Zhuangzi, no distinctions are objectively “better” than any others, but I think this is only in reference to the lines drawn. There are better and worse ways to draw those lines, though. Imagine two human beings in type-identical worlds with type-identical perspectives who make the very same distinctions, encode the very same ontological frame in their minds in moment M, taking the same things to be things, the same meanings for terms, having the same experience even. If the first human being’s (H1) distinctions in M were carved into stone, and the next human being’s (H2) distinctions in M were carved into sand, we wouldn’t be able to distinguish between the two while inside of that moment. But shift the context, such that different distinctions were better for the new context, and H1 would still be using the same distinctions in the new context whereas H2 would be able to shift the drawn-lines with ease. So while the lines-drawn inside of M were the very same, H2’s perspective-type is preferable. 

Sturgeon explains how Zhuangzi’s epistemology allows for “improvements” in our epistemic situation by means of opening our perspective up to other potential ways of seeing the world. Of “clustering similarity and difference” (Hansen). I think he is right but he doesn’t go far enough because of his claim that even these improvements are relative. I don’t think we can make sense of genuine improvement in our epistemic situation via opening up our perspective, if what it is for a perspective to be “more open” or “more closed” is itself perspectival. Our epistemic access to whether our perspective is open or closed is admittedly limited and perspectival. But these circles miss the point, I think, and result in full-scale relativism and skepticism that takes the wrong lesson out of the writings. There is a sense in which we may genuinely believe that there is no “better” and “worse” when it comes to perspective-type, in a way that gives us no reason to try to open our perspective, because our narrow perspective type is just as good as any other. But the claim that there are no “better” and “worse” narrow perspective types is, I think, instead supposed to function as a reason to open up our narrow perspective. It cannot and should not serve just as well as a reason to stay confined to it.

I agree with Wong when he says that Zhuangzi’s skeptical questioning allows a method of engagement that directs our attention to a present moment in a way that allows us to pay attention in ways we might not have been able to before, to notice things we might have missed, by questioning/abandoning preconceived notions. I also agree with Hansen when he endorses pluralism about distinction-making, saying: “External similarity and difference cannot provide a realist justification for any particular way of dividing things into types. That is not because reality justifies no distinctions, but because it justifies too many. All the distinctions we can actually draw have some basis in reality. Any two things are similar from some point of view and different from some other point of view” (270). He then writes “That there are infinitely many possible ways to classify things based on similarity and difference does not entail that none of them is correct. Far less does it entail that a specific one of them is correct, to wit, the one that makes no distinctions” (270). To this I agree and disagree, depending on which distinction-making type we are talking about. If we are just talking about ways of classifying similarity and difference, I agree, a perspective that has no frame for classifying similarity and difference and makes no distinctions is not most correct. But if distinctions are made in a way that is taken to be authoritative, classifying similarity and difference in a way that is deemed to reflect the world as it actually is, then yes I think the perspective-type that makes none of these is better. Because it will be open to contextual shifting of its distinction-making frame if called for.

Implications for a “Zhuangist” ethics

Zhuangzi doesn’t give us a clear ethic. Sturgeon endorses a kind of “pluralism,” as in any ethical framework of thought would be right in the context of its own perspective. This interpretation is faced immediately with a problem of how (or whether) a Zhuangist ethic could deal with genuine evil. If someone occupies a perspective type that deems it appropriate (whether explicitly or implicitly) to do the unthinkable, we want to be able to condemn this person. 

Sturgeon offers two responses to this problem. First, following these evil-Dao’s would be conventionally (rather than ultimately) incorrect. The vast majority of human perspective-types agree that certain act-types constitute evil; those who condone or perform these acts fail to conform to the conventional perspective type. This is unsatisfactory for obvious reasons. Zhuangzi doesn’t seem to give us reason to think that he endorses conventional/societal truths as any more reliable than individual-level perspectival ones. The next response is to say that while evil-Dao’s are not “incorrect” in some factual sense, they are rightly deemed inappropriate/foolish because endorsing a proposition like “It is morally right to torture innocent babies” constitutes a failing to see alternate perspectives. This is also unsatisfactory for two reasons, first being that if I endorse a proposition like “It is morally wrong to torture innocent babies,” am I similarly foolish? If so then we haven’t responded to the worry. If not then what is the difference? It is also unsatisfactory because following the Evil-Dao doesn’t necessarily involve endorsing a proposition like this. Someone may simply do the action, without taking any conceptual stance as to its rightness or wrongness, and we want to be able to condemn this too.

Should we throw up our hands, and say yeah “Evil” is not really evil, it’s a matter of perspective? 

I think we may have another option, though I haven’t seen it explored in the literature, I am curious whether there may be room here for a Zhuangist ethic based on empathy. I think the chief prescriptive claim we can get from Zhuangzi is that we shouldn’t close off our perspective and mark determinate boundary lines between things (including self and other). But this is not just a linguistic fact, but a perceptual-emotional one too - perspectives modulate not just how we “see” the world factually but how we see it through our literal eyes and how we feel. I think evil acts involve a genuine perspectival closing. The agent who tortures innocent babies has a closed perspective even if they do not endorse the proposition that it is right for them to do so. A more open perspective would have the ability to feel the pain of others who fall under their gaze as their own in a way that is intrinsically motivating. Baby may not themselves have a conceptual perspective with which they can judge that the harm being caused to them as wrong, but they are intrinsically motivated to move away from painful stimuli. If I am not also intrinsically motivated to keep them away from painful stimuli, I have a closed perspective and I am marking determinate boundary lines between my self and the other in that moment.

So, I wonder, if Zhuangist epistemology extended outside the linguistic frame, to perceptual/ emotional/ affective/ nociceptive frames, may be able to motivate an ethic of caring.

Neurocognitive Phenomenology

I’ve more to say about distinction making, how it is modulated in the brain, how the brain creates templates of “event-schema” to filter informational input, how infant baby brains are able to rapidly shift templates with ease and create new ones, how these templates become reified and after a certain age the brain is less able to see events outside the frames it has built for processing them (which is evolutionarily adaptive because it’s quicker and effective for survival/reproduction even if epistemically we may be filtering out information that is important), time perception, momentariness, object individuation, construction of similarity spaces, object invariance, information integration, individuation of perspective-types within and between persons, conception, unimodal and multimodal concepts, words, meaning-mapping, memory vs. in-the moment experience, but this is not the time.

Conclusion

Okay soo Zhuangzi doesn’t tell us to stop speaking and stop making distinctions. He just tells us to recognize that these words and distinctions are perspectival, and in recognizing this fact we may be able to recognize the existence of other narrow perspectives outside our own, which may allow us access to increase the degree to which we understand greater knowledge that can construct similarity spaces between (rather than only within) perspective-types. There’s no one right way to interpret Zhuangzi but there can be wrong ways. Same with being in the world, there’s no one right way to carve it up but there can be wrong ways. The wrong ways are the ways that are ineffective/not skillful/dissonant and/or closed-off to other ways of seeing/doing things. 

I don’t know the next steps. I think Zhuangist epistemology should be integrated into the philosophical canon, though. And the cognitive sciences as well. Cognitive sciences often consider Plato, Locke, and Kantian frameworks as primers for the human epistemologican situation. I think Zhuangzi should be in this mix: even though a precise framework for a "Zhuangist" epistemology is difficult to pin down, reflections on the notion of perspective that he plays with would, in my view, provide a fruitful avenue for progress in future work.

Sources

Cantor, Lea “Zhuangzi on ‘Happy Fish’ and the Limits of Human Knowledge”
Cheng, Kai-Yuan “Self and the Dream of the Butterfly in the Zhuangzi”
Hansen, Chad “Zhuangzi: Discriminating about Discriminating”
Hansen, Chad “The Relatively Happy Fish”
Perkins, Franklin “Beyond the Human in the Zhuāngzĭ”
Reimer, Marga & Camp, Elizabeth “Metaphor”
Sturgeon, Donald “Zhuangzi, "Perspectives," and "Greater" Knowledge”
Watson, Burton (trans) “The Complete Works of Zhuangzi”
Wong, David B. “Zhuangzi and the Obsession with Being Right”