RE-SEEING THE WORLD VII

This argument turns on an appreciation of the subjective, perspectival nature of all knowing and discriminating. “This” is a perspective that of necessity chooses one point of view to the exclusion of others. But every “this” is also everyone else’s “that”, and that is their “this” (perspective). How we deem things, whether right or wrong, beneficial or harmful, is determined by our perspective. This is most easily appreciated when seen in inter-species differences of perspective:

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“When human beings sleep in the cold and damp they wake up in pain—but is this also true of eels? When human beings climb trees, they tremble with fear—but is this also true of monkeys? Which of these three knows the best place to be? . . . . Male monkeys like female monkeys, bucks mate with does, male fish play with female fish, and humans think certain women are great beauties—yet when fish see them they take to the depths, when birds see them they take to the skies, and when deer see them they take to the woods. Which of these four knows what it truly beautiful? From my perspective, all definitions of humaneness and correctness, and of right and wrong, are all hopelessly tangled and confused. How could I figure out which is the ‘best’ one among them” (2:49)?

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Eels like it cold and clammy; humans like it warm and cozy. We wouldn’t suggest that eels have got it wrong, while humans have got it right. There is no one “right” dao among these infinite daos. This is easily appreciated, though still it challenges us to broaden its implications. Can we say the same of the different daos which humans follow? This is more difficult to envision. We might start by understanding how it is true in our individual experience, how over the passage of time we change our perspectives and yet unite them in the experience of a single “me”.

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“When Lady Yi was first captured and brought to Qin she wept copiously, but after some time sharing the king’s bed and eating fine foods she wondered that she had wept at all” (2:55).

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“Zhuangzi said to Huizi, ‘Confucius went along for sixty years and transformed sixty times. What he first considered right he later considered wrong. He could never know whether what he presently considered right was not fifty-nine times wrong’” (27; Ziporyn, p 115).

RE-SEEING THE WORLD VI

“Only someone who experiences this uniting into oneness can ‘understand’ it. Such a person does not impose her definition of ‘rightness’ on the world and its ‘things’ but rather affirms them all just as they are and allows them to be just as they are. Seen from the point of view of Dao, their ordinary reality is understood as united with every other ordinary reality and this enables the affirmation of all things. This view from Dao is also just a point of view, and not an imposition of a definition of ‘rightness’ or ‘correctness’ upon the world. Viewing things thusly, as a matter of course, and not because you consider it the ‘right dao’, is Dao”(2:24).

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This idea of Dao as the Convergence of daos is only just another dao, albeit a helpful one. It can however become a negating of other daos, unless it becomes more than just an idea. It must become our natural, spontaneous interface with the world.

RE-SEEING THE WORLD V

Our judgments are a result of our perspectives (daos); different perspectives lead to different daos. In recognizing this, reason naturally wishes to unite them in a new category. Yet such a movement must overcome our deep attachment to right and wrong and ultimately, self and other. If accomplished, however, this unity becomes a new dao, Zhuangzi’s view from Dao:

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“When we are able to see that sense in which they are no longer opposites, this can be called Dao as Convergence, the point of view (dao) that allows all daos to converge into a oneness” (2:19).

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This is an idea, a product of the reasoning mind, even though it overturns reason’s claim that what it knows is fixed and “true”. We remain in the realm of reason, but it has now reached its limit; it has come to that frontier, the end of its world, where it can only imaginatively and vertiginously consider what lies beyond. This imagining invites a further movement, one that we can only describe as mystical and transformative.

RE-SEEING THE WORLD IV

“We think of our theory as ‘this’, as right, and the other’s theory as ‘that’, as wrong. But everyone and everything is clearly both a ‘this’ and a ‘that’, so in this sense they are the same. But we cannot easily see another’s ‘that’ as a ‘this’ being bound as we are by our own subjectivity, by our own ‘this’”(1:17).

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“This” and “that” also imply self and other. “This” is the subjective self and “that” is its objectified other. Yet, every “this” is someone else’s “that”. Everyone is thus both “this” and “that”. This being the “obvious” case, we are invited to move to the next level and unify them into a oneness.

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“Thus, every individual thing can be said to be ‘right’ and ‘acceptable’. If we say that this thing is a ‘beam’ and not a ‘pillar’, or that a leper is ugly and the famous beauty Xishi is beautiful, there is still a perspective from which someone can say that the opposite is true. Thus, there is yet another dao that allows these two perspectives (daos) to open up into each other, and to thereby combine to form a oneness” (2:22).

RE-SEEING THE WORLD III

“Thus, we have the competing rights and wrongs of the Confucians and Mohists who affirm what the other negates and negate what the other affirms. But if we want to affirm what they both negate (that both can be right) and negate what they both affirm (that one must be right and the other wrong) then nothing works so well as shining the light of the obvious upon them” (2:16).

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What is “obvious” to Zhuangzi, in the light of their being equally expressions of Nature and thus in that sense on a par with the chirping of baby birds, is that they are both right and both wrong. Their mutual this-ing and that-ing, moreover, cancels out that of the other and this renders them both an affirmable “This”. The chirping of a sparrow is as affirmable as the scream of a hawk. All expressions are affirmable. But here we already have made use of a broadening perspective to recontextualize ourselves so as to see the world in a different way. This speaks to that level at which all things can be deemed as of equal value. Zhuangzi is fully aware of how difficult this perspective is to envision, given how counter-habitual it is. That it is even more difficult to realize in experience once envisioned speaks to our bondage to the ideas of right and wrong, truth and falsity. Yet, these are precisely the bonds from which he would release us—not by means of their annihilation, but by their mutual affirmability.

RE-SEEING THE WORLD II

ZHUANGZIAN PERSECTIVISM

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We have saved a most important aspect of Zhuangzi’s critique of reason, his perspectivism, for consideration in the context of his implied methodology of imaginative meditation, specifically, the envisioning of new, broadening and mind-opening perspectives with a view to a transformative recontextualization. His perspectivism and its application are knit together in one piece.

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He begins by critiquing the bifurcating terms “this” and “that”. These were much in use among the debaters of his time, the Confucians and especially the Later Mohists. We needn’t concern ourselves with the specific doctrines that led to the use of these categories, however, since the one thing they both had in common was the one that Zhuangzi sought to overturn. This was their belief that “this” (which also means “right”) must negate “that” (which also means “wrong”). Our differences of opinion must mean that one of us is right and the other wrong. Zhuangzi did not concern himself with the validity of the content of their respective points of view—that would have been to enter the debate at their level. Instead, he questioned the validity of their premise that there was one “right” dao, and thus that differing daos must oppose and therefore negate each other.

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“Thus, we have the competing rights and wrongs of the Confucians and Mohists who affirm what the other negates and negate what the other affirms. But if we want to affirm what they both negate (that both can be right) and negate what they both affirm (that one must be right and the other wrong) then nothing works so well as shining the light of the obvious upon them” (2:16).

AS THE COOKIE CRUMBLES / 5 / RE-SEEING THE WORLD I

We have seen that Zhuangzi fully appreciates the distinctly human faculties of reason and language while also appreciating their limitations. These limitations are themselves positively affirmed as an invitation to a pre- and post-cognitive experience of our being in the world. Limitations are, in fact, the necessary precondition to a sense of limitlessness and freedom. Zhuangzi uses the metaphor of “soaring” to describe this unbounded sense of freedom, and we are only able to accomplish this because air is a source of resistance. We “chariot upon whatever seems true of the cosmos and everything and anything that happens” (1:11). The daily stuff of living with all its demands is the very occasion for our soaring.

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Why would we want to soar? Because we experience ourselves as a lack, an emptiness that reason cannot fill. Fullness, freedom, makes use of emptiness, the “useless”. Here again we see that philosophical Daoism negates nothing of the human experience, but rather embraces it all. Not only is what we perceive as useless essential to the useful, but the usefulness of the useless is in direct proportion to the degree of its uselessness. The greater the obstacle, the greater is our possible soaring.

ZHUANGZI WAS A BULL-SHIT ARTIST

If the traditional paragons of virtuosity were great successes, says Zhuangzi, then so is he and everyone else. They were, and so is he and so are we. They were not, and neither is he and neither are we. Whenever we take something as “fully formed” (cheng), as complete and finished, then we have left something out, and that is missing the most important thing of all. What is it? The sage holds it in her embrace and does not say, answers Zhuangzi. But let us be poor disciples and say: What is left out is success if we think anything a failure, and failure if we think anything a success. This understanding is what the sage embraces and what cannot be said. For to say it, is to “fully form” it and leave out the most important something once again.

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No one has lived a fuller life than a dead infant, and the long-lived Pengzu died too young. Everything is complete and perfect. Everything is a total mess. Everything is empty. Everything is full.

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Zhuangzi was a great Master. Zhuangzi was a bull-shit artist just like me.

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We often hear and read of great Zen or Daoist masters, but seldom of great Zen and Daoist bull-shit artists. Why? Because we hunger for the “fully formed”; we are chronically inclined to the comfort of the religious mind. We want the great Answer, the True Way, the Sure Anchor. We want to be other than human, and if someone else has managed it, then perhaps so can we. Indeed, they have already managed it for us.

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Words must choose a side; they must make a statement. When all the world chooses the “fully formed”, we would do best to speak of adriftedness and doubt. When the human mind defaults to the belief that any of these bull-shit artists were great “masters”, we would do best to affirm the former. Zhuangzi was no different than you or I. He had a vision of a happier way to live his existential dangle and he found some joy in attempting to realize it and in sharing it. Because he knew this, because he embraced this in his heart, he was a great master. He was a great master because he knew there is no such thing, or rather, that there is no one who is not. Or both. Or neither.

ZHUANGZI WAS NOT A DAOIST

Scholars like to point out that none of the so-called Daoist masters were Daoists. I would similarly assert that neither were they “masters”, but that’s a topic for another post. It was not until the Western Han historian Sima Tan (c. 165–110 BCE) organized the various strains of philosophy that emerged during the Warring States era (480-222 BCE) into “schools”. The daojia designates the School of Daoism. Zhuangzi wrote two hundred years prior to this ex facto classification.
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I have never had any real problem with this designation, and have seen the issue as yet another occasion for scholarship to get lost in minutiae rather than actually engaging with the philosophies themselves. There is, however, a serious problem that arises from this classification when the philosophies themselves are interpreted in the context of a larger understanding of “Daoism”. The philosophies lose their distinctiveness in being made to conform to what supposedly describes them all. This is glaringly the case in Livia Kohn’s Zhuangzi: Text and Context, yet another interpretation of Zhuangzi that ignores his radical departure from other so-called Daoists in making him part of a larger imagined and fabricated whole.
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One supposed solution to this problem is to understand daojia as a lineage, an evolving philosophy rather than a fixed school. This suggests that Daoism was improved over time. Fung Yu-lan (A Taoist Classic: Chuang-Tzu, p 117) makes this assertion. But this is again a means of dismissing the unique character of each philosophy in favor of a now fuller Daoism. This very need for a “perfected” view is itself indicative of a human inclination that Zhuangzi sought to overturn. Religious Daoism especially feels the need to “prove” itself through its lineage. Yet none of this has even a remote place in Zhuangzi’s philosophy though he is nonetheless subsumed into that lineage.
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Fung Yu-lan sometimes seems to discern the spirit of Zhuangzi’s philosophy, especially as it pertains to the ability to walk two roads at once, but then he undermines it by making him a “Daoist” and telling us that Daoism (and therefore Zhuangzi) “opposed” all human institutions as artificial and “despised” all knowledge (p 19). This is not the position of Zhuangzi.
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For this reason it seems necessary to declare that Zhuangzi was not a Daoist. His message is a radical departure from the already religiously inclined projects of his proto-Daoist contemporaries and cannot be subsumed in those that followed. He is not part of a Daoist lineage. He stands alone—not as a “great master”, but as a great non-master. And that means that worrying about any of this is to have missed the point of his philosophy.

RE-THINKING THINKING XXII

It is very likely that the Commander of the Right lost his leg through the actions of man, but even this, he assures us, is also of Nature. Humanity is both of Nature and not of Nature, though the former trumps the latter. Language, its words and ideas are all of Nature, though they are incapable of fathoming Mystery, where everything is in effect mystery—“Mystery upon mystery”. This again is the fundamental though paradoxical principle of walking two roads at once that informs all of Zhuangzi’s philosophy.

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All this has been simply to establish the usefulness of ideas in the transformation of our interface with the world and ourselves. Philosophical Daoism, especially the Zhuangzian version, does not dismiss words or the ideas they convey, but rather suggests their fullest realization in pointing us to where words cannot go. We will next consider Zhuangzi’s use of imaginative meditation which necessarily uses language and reason to affect a transformative recontextualization of our being in the world.