It has often been said that the Zhuangzi 莊子 advocates political abstention, and that its putative skepticism prevents it from contributing in any meaningful way to political thinking: at best the Zhuangzi espouses a sort of anarchism, at worst it is “the night in which all cows are black,” a stance that one scholar has charged is ultimately immoral. This article tracks possible political allusions within the text, and, by reading these against details of social, political, and historical context, sheds (...) light on another strand of the Zhuangzi—one that questions prevailing normative values because it is fiercely critical of scholarly complicity with violent imperial territorial consolidation. (shrink)

On a prima facia reading, Zhuangzi seems to endorse some form of skepticism or relativism. This seems at odds with Zhuangzi as one of the two main sources of classical Daoism, considering the ideals of virtue and self-development promoted by that philosophy. However, Zhuangzi’s metaphorical and allegorical style lends itself to a number of interpretations of his epistemology, as well as the kind of self-knowledge and ethical development it might allow. A survey of the relevant literature shows that the epistemological (...) debate is not easily solvable, but by narrowing the range of interpretations, a coherent picture of his ethics begins to emerge, one in which some form of knowledge, especially self-knowledge, is still possible, as is an ethics of self-actualization. (shrink)