The “happy fish” passage in the Zhuangzi 莊子 is often interpreted as endorsing some form of perspectivism which precludes objective claims of knowledge and displaces the significance of human perspectives. Relativism has gained particular currency in contemporary readings. However, this essay aims to show the limited explanatory power of such relativist positions, with focus on Chad Hansen’s “perspectival relativism” and Lea Cantor’s “species relativism.” I will also offer a new, “transitional contextualist” reading, which intends to demonstrate that Zhuangzi’s utterance is (...) grounded in his epistemic context and that Huizi’s 惠子 disputation arises from his changing of the epistemic context, from one with quotidian “low standards” to one with “high-standards” skeptical demands. I further argue that when “wandering” (you 遊) is understood as a freedom from one’s partial perspective, it becomes clear how Zhuangzi analogizes a parallel with the fish’s “wandering” through a continuity between his “world” and that of the fish. (shrink)

The article explores the inner logic and defining features of Daoist freedom. It argues that Daoist freedom can be meaningfully understood as psychological hygiene, and it suggests that Daoist xuan-jie (懸解) can be rendered possible only if one can rid oneself of intensional suffering—an idea ultimately inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche. This comparative approach enables the article to contribute to the received way of understanding Daoist freedom by stressing its dialectics: by being at ease with one’s social and political environment, Daoist (...) freedom demands social criticism, calling for room for people to be able to act spontaneously so that all can nurture their distinctive natures and have a full and free exercise of their natural abilities. The article aims to achieve two objectives at once: it aims to argue for the understanding of Daoist freedom as psychological hygiene, and it defends this reading by bringing two dimensions of Daoist freedom into a consistent whole. In a constantly changing and increasingly pluralistic world, psychological hygiene and social criticism are both necessary for leading a robust and healthy human life. (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)

This essay examines the concept of the wandering heart-mind in the Inner Chapters of the Zhuangzi 莊子. This essay examines the problems caused by a collection of behaviors in the heart-mind: the ability to make distinctions, the tendency to fix distinctions and language, and the need to act for the sake of fixed ends. Zhuangzi treats these problems with emptying, wandering, and mirroring. These techniques release the heart-mind from fixation and conflict, enabling the heart-mind to respond to conditions without acting (...) for fixed ends. Letting the heart-mind wander provides the receptivity and creativity necessary for responding to a complex world of constant change. Letting the heart-mind wander also opens the possibility of an intrinsically beneficial moral psychology, one where the heart-mind not only adapts to but enjoys a world of transformation and uncertainty. This interpretation of the heart-mind has important consequences for psychology, language, and ethics. In terms of psychology this interpretation diagnoses the limitations of knowledge and proposes therapeutic techniques to treat uncertainty and fixation. In terms of language this interpretation reveals different linguistic attitudes in the text, such as usefulness and play. In terms of ethics this interpretation provides a basis for Zhuangzi’s ethical vision of nourishing living and free-and-easy wandering. (shrink)

In this chapter, I explicate several general views and arguments that bear on the notion and contemporary theories of human welfare, as found in two foundational Daoist texts, the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi. Ideas drawn from the Daodejing include its objections to desire theories of human welfare and its distinction between natural and acquired desires. Insights drawn from the Zhuangzi include its arguments against the view that death is bad for the dead, its attempt to develop a workable theory of (...) well-being for those who are skeptical about such theories, and the prudential benefits of what I call "philosophical double-vision.". (shrink)

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)

This paper examines and defends a conception of the education of emotions found in the Zhuang-Zi. I begin by exploring four principal features of Zhuang Zi’s philosophy as it relates to the emotions: his epistemological perspectivism, his view of the self, his ethics of wandering and natural spontaneity, and his playful non-seriousness. Together these four features allow us to discern a general orientation to the education of the emotions, including a normative account of a good emotional life as well some (...) suggestions for a pedagogy for the development of such a life. (shrink)

This paper explores a few of the ways that the Zhuang-Zi can inform contemporary analytic epistemology. I begin, in section 1, by briefly outlining and summarizing the case for my fictionalist interpretation of the text. In section 2, I discuss how the Zhuang-Zi can be brought into productive dialogue with the question of how we should respond to skeptical arguments. Specifically, I argue that the Zhuang-Zi can be reasonably interpreted as exemplifying an approach that is different from dominant contemporary responses (...) to skeptical arguments in three ways: it is fictionalist; it motivates a skeptical perspective rather than a claim; and it accomplishes its aims in an atypical, but nonetheless contextually appropriate, way. However, the Zhuang-Zi is relevant to contemporary debates about skeptical arguments because it can be used: to respond to the same sorts of skeptical arguments that occupy contemporary commentators; to address a number of questions that arise in connection with such arguments; and to suggest important new questions for epistemologists to pursue. (shrink)

In this monograph-length article, which inaugurates a multipart symposium titled “Fuzzy Studies,” the significance and virtues of blur are investigated through the whole history of Chinese intellectual tradition. In the Western tradition, the blur of becoming seems to disqualify an object for knowledge; nothing can be an object of knowledge until the blur is resolved and clarity attained. Chinese tradition offers suggestive examples of the thought that blur, so far from being incompatible with knowledge, might be its condition of possibility (...) and the explanation of its value. This article traces the development of this thought (the compatibility of knowledge and original becoming) in the work of the classical Confucian and Daoist thinkers, the art-of-war literature, Chan Buddhism, and medieval Neoconfucianism, with an eye to its usefulness for Western philosophy of knowledge. (shrink)

A perspectivist theory is usually taken to mean that (1) our knowledge of the world is inevitably shaped by our particular perspectives, (2) any one of these perspectives is as good as any other, and (3) any claims to objective or authoritative knowledge are consequently without ground. Recent scholarship on Nietzsche, however, has challenged the prevalent view that the philosopher holds (2) and (3), arguing instead that his perspectivism aims at attaining a greater level of objectivity. In this essay, I (...) attempt a structurally similar reinterpretation of Zhuangzi’s perspectivism. I argue that while the Chinese thinker sees all knowledge as perspective-dependent, he thinks that some perspectives are broader and more accurate than others. He utilizes shifts in perspective precisely in order to attain these superior perspectives, which constitute what he calls da zhi 大知, or “greater knowledge.” Whereas Nietzsche sees his perspectivism as methodologically continuous with the sciences, Zhuangzi’s “greater knowledge” has the goal of ensuring our survival and well-being in the everyday world. (shrink)

Offers the first focused study of the shifei debates of the Warring States period in ancient China and challenges the imposition of Western conceptual categories onto these debates. In recent decades, a growing concern in studies in Chinese intellectual history is that Chinese classics have been forced into systems of classification prevalent in Western philosophy and thus imperceptibly transformed into examples that echo Western philosophy. Lin Ma and Jaap van Brakel offer a methodology to counter this approach, and illustrate their (...) method by carrying out a transcultural inquiry into the complexities involved in understanding shi and fei and their cognate phrases in the Warring States texts, the Zhuangzi in particular. The authors discuss important features of Zhuangzi’s stance with regard to language-meaning, knowledge-doubt, questioning, equalizing, and his well-known deconstruction of the discourse in ancient China on shifei. Ma and van Brakel suggest that shi and fei apply to both descriptive and prescriptive languages and do not presuppose any fact/value dichotomy, and thus cannot be translated as either true/false or right/wrong. Instead, shi and feican be grasped in terms of a pre-philosophical notion of fitting. Ma and van Brakel also highlight Zhuangzi’s idea of “walking-two-roads” as the most significant component of his stance. In addition, they argue that all of Zhuangzi’s positive recommendations are presented in a language whose meaning is not fixed and that every stance he is committed to remains subject to fundamental questioning as a way of life. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Luc Faucher and others have argued for the existence of deep cultural differences between ‘Chinese’ and ‘East Asian’ ways of understanding the world and those of ‘ancient Greeks’ and ‘Americans’. Rejecting Alison Gopnik’s speculation that the development of modern science was driven by the increasing availability of leisure and information in the late Renaissance, they claim instead—following Richard Nisbett—that the birth of mathematical science was aided by ‘Greek’, or ‘Western’, cultural norms that encouraged analytic, abstract and (...) rational theorizing. They argue that ‘Chinese’ and ‘East Asian’ cultural norms favoured, by contrast, holistic, concrete and dialectical modes of thinking. After clarifying some of the things that can be meant by ‘culture’ and ‘mentality’, the present paper shows that Faucher and his colleagues make a number of appeals—to the authority of comparative studies and history of science, to the psychological studies of Nisbett and his colleagues, and to a hidden assumption of strong cultural continuity in the West. It is argued that every one of these appeals is misguided, and, further, that the psychological findings of Nisbett and others have little bearing on questions concerning the origins of modern science. Finally, it is suggested that the ‘Needham question’ about why the birth of modern science occurred in Europe rather than anywhere else is itself multiply confused to the extent that it may express no significant query.Author Keywords: Nisbett; Needham; Gopnik; Modern science; Chinese science. (shrink)

Paul Gewirtz has suggested that contemporary Chinese society lacks a shared framework. A Rortian might describe this by saying that China lacks a “final vocabulary” of “thick terms” with which to resolve ethical disagreements. I briefly examine the strengths and weaknesses of Confucianism and Legalism as potential sources of such a final vocabulary, but most of this essay focuses on Zhuangzian Daoism. Zhuangzi 莊子 provides many stories and metaphors that can inspire advocates of political pluralism. However, I suggest that Zhuangzi (...) is ultimately an “ironist” in Rorty’s sense. Many intellectuals assume there is something progressive and liberating about broadly ironic stances like relativism and skepticism. Ethically, though, irony is “the night in which all cows are black”: since it regards all positions as equally undermined, an ironic stance cannot be enlisted in support of tolerance or humanitarianism or in opposition to absolutism or cruelty. (shrink)

Humour in the Zhuangzi is used to question the priority that human beings bestow upon language and thought, revealing both its limitations and its possibilities. Hierarchies and conventions are overturned and both the sense and senselessness of language are celebrated. Humour also opens up a world in which a plethora of perspectives is acknowledged and the purpose of purposelessness is underscored. Encouraging us to take laughter seriously also allows us to view the seeming gravity of the human condition with increased (...) levity. (shrink)

Chad Hansen is one of the strongest proponents of the view that the important second chapter of Zhuangzi's Inner Chapters (The Qi Wu Lun) reveals Zhuangzi to be a relativistic sceptidst. Hansen argues that Zhuangzi is a sceptic because he is first and foremost a relativist. Hansen's argument is essentially that Zhuangzi's perspectivism, his belief that one's linguistic and conceptual perspective determines what one claims to know, makes him a thorough going relativist and sceptic. I agree that Zhuangzi is a (...) perspectivist, but disagree with Hansen's portrayal of him as a relativistic sceptic. I first show that there is an important ambiguity in Hansen's argument. I then proceed to argue that important passages in the Qi Wu Lun (in particular the butterfly dream passage,) reveal serious problems with Hansen's interpretation of Zhuangzi's philosophical stance, I maintain that Zhuangzi is neither a sceptic nor a perspectival relativist. He is rather a perspectival realist. (shrink)

Moral relativism familiar in the Western philosophical tradition, according to David Lyons, is either agent relativism or appraiser relativism or appraiser group). As Lyons has convincingly argued, they are both problematic. However, in the ancient Chinese Daoist classic, the Zhuangzi, we can find a different type of moral relativism, which I call patient relativism. In the essay, I aim to argue in what sense Zhuangzi is a patient relativist and how patient relativism can avoid the problem of agent relativism and (...) appraiser relativism. (shrink)

In recent years, interpreters of the fourth century BCE Chinese Daoist text, the Zhuangzi, have increasingly appropriated the term, 'skepticism' as a label for the philosophical contribution of that text to classical Chinese philosophy. Despite their terminological agreement, these authors differ significantly in what they take to be the substance of this philosophical term, especially in its context as an interpretive device for understanding the Zhuangzi. This dissertation aims to understand the philosophy of the Zhuangzi by reference to the Greek (...) tradition of Pyrrhonian skepticism transmitted to the modern age by Sextus Empiricus. ;I illustrate the limitations of interpreting skepticism merely as negative dogmatism and illuminate the virtues of understanding it as the recommendation of a philosophical attitude of non-assertion and open-mindedness. Robert E. Allinson, Philip J. Ivanhoe, Bryan W. Van Norden, and Chad Hansen interpret skepticism as an anti-intellectual negative dogmatism, and I take issue with the appropriateness of such an interpretation. In so doing, I examine the work of A.C. Graham, Paul Kjellberg, and Lisa Raphals, who understand the skeptical sections of the Zhuangzi as recommendations for living a fulfilling life. These thinkers offer more coherent interpretations in so far as their readings construe Zhuangzi's skepticism as supporting rather than conflicting with the passages that advocate a variety of spiritual practices designed to bring about peace of mind and harmony. While these interpreters have drawn attention to the importance of Zhuangzi's spiritual and moral recommendations for living a productive life, my analysis, in suggesting that Zhuangzi moves from non-dogmatic or aporetic skepticism to way-making , develops this positive result of Zhuangzi's non-dogmatic skepticism further. This positive result is explored in connection with the extent to which non-dogmatic skepticism can serve as a foundation for the adoption of an attitude of philosophical pluralism, which suggests that there are a plurality of different standpoints, attitudes, approaches, perspectives, and 'positions' each of which may be valid in some sense and in some degree, and yet none of which is immune from criticism. I also address the criticism of aporetic skepticism that living a life without dogmatic commitments is impossible. (shrink)

This article explores how aspects of traditional Chinese thought regarding creativity can influence and enrich contemporary thought about related topics: specifically, how creativity can be construed as an epistemic or intellectual virtue, and the benefits of considering it as such. It proceeds in three parts. First, I review a conception of creativity suggested by aspects of the Zhuangzi that centrally involves forms of spontaneity and adaptivity engendered by embracing you 遊, or “wandering”, contrasting it with more conventional conceptions of creativity (...) that emphasize novelty or originality. Second, I explain how this conception of creativity illuminates how creativity can be an epistemic virtue of a surprising sort: one that concerns a disposition to—borrowing an expression from Chris Fraser—“ride along with things”. This “riding along” is ironically engendered by letting go of what David Wong has characterized as “the obsession with being right”, about which the Zhuangzi expresses concern. I argue that, while this conception of creativity eschews fixed goals, including epistemically-oriented goals like apprehending truth or developing knowledge, there are nevertheless good reasons to count creativity (so understood) as an epistemic virtue. Third, I connect these explorations with current conversations (begun by Matthew Kieran and C. Thi Nguyen) that already treat creativity or, relatedly, play as an epistemic or intellectual virtue, and explore how engaging the Zhuangzi in the manner outlined promises to help extend them. (shrink)