Essays on Skepticism, Relativism, and Ethics in the Zhuangzi

Dan Robins

China Review International, Volume 4, Number 2, Fall 1997, pp.458-464 (Article)

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458 China Review International: Vol. 4, No. 2, Fall 1997

Paul Kjellberg and Philip J. Ivanhoe, editors. Essays on Skepticism, Relativ-ism, and Ethics in the Zhuangzi. SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy andCulture. Albany: State University ofNew York Press, 1996. xx, 240 pp. Hard-cover $59.50, isbn 0-7914-2891-5. Paperback $19.95, jsbn 0-7914-2892-3.

Or am I the only stupid one?—Zhuangzi, "Qiwulun"

The introduction to this volume figures Zhuangzi's text' as engaging the problemof interpretation. We cannot come to it empty of all preconception, and time andagain Zhuangzi seems to make an issue of our hermeneutic circling. It is for himin particular a problem of ethics, of a life lived well. How can we act spontane-ously and in full adequacy when we come to any situation loaded down with fore-knowledge?

The answer many have attributed to Zhuangzi is that we should somehowdiscard this knowledge. In our subsequent emptiness, we would be able to reflectthe world as it really is, and would thus achieve a new certainly in die dao iM,"Way." The difficulty here lies in marking off a spontaneity that would not in-volve knowing, and thus would not be touched by Zhuangzi's critique. This is un-likely to work: Zhuangzi is suspicious of nothing if not of the founding distinc-tions of ethical systems; it seems unlikely he would propose his own such distinc-tion (spontaneity/knowing, for example). That such interpretative strategies areso common suggests a profound refusal to take seriously Zhuangzi's confessionsof (and arguments for) uncertainly. Essays on Skepticism, Relativism, and Ethics inthe Zhuangzi (hereafter known as "Essays") performs an important service inforegrounding this issue. The nine essays collected here are at their best when ex-amining the nature of Zhuangzi's critical project. They are less instructive, how-ever, when subordinating that critique to an ethic understood to be mystical andin its own way certain.

The book opens with essays that try to understand Zhuangzi's skepticism notas a philosophical position ("knowledge is impossible") but as a way of life. PaulKjellberg starts with a discussion of Sextus Empiricus, a Greek skeptic who wasexplicitly uninterested in proving the impossibility of knowledge. Instead, hethought people would live more satisfying lives if they merely suspended judg-ment on matters going beyond appearance. Kjellberg suggests a similar reading ofZhuangzi: what is important is not the skeptical conclusions, but rather the moti-© 1997 by Universityb r r

rjr ·<· ? vations. Zhuangzi thinks mat if people are less dogmatic, they will be more opento intuition and lead more natural lives.2

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Lisa Raphals sets Zhuangzi's "Qiwulun"3 alongside Plato's Theaetetus. Shedistinguishes between skepticism as a thesis, a recommendation, and a method.The thesis is the apparendy self-refuting "I know that I can know nothing,"4 andshe suggests that Zhuangzi never presents such a thesis. His skeptical argumentsconclude with questions, not answers (for example, "How do I know that what Icall knowing isn't not-knowing? How do I know that what I call not-knowingisn't knowing?" [6/2/66] 5). Instead she argues that he uses skeptical methods andcan be understood as giving a skeptical recommendation. In all cases, she arguesfor a similar reading of Plato, concluding that ancient Chinese and Greek skepti-cisms weren't so different as might be supposed.

Eric Schwitzgebel, on the other hand, does read some of Zhuangzi's claims asassertions ofwhat he calls "radical skepticism." He nonetheless does not want toattribute such a position to Zhuangzi, for the simple reason that elsewhere Zhuang-zi seems to advocate some styles of living over others. His essay is an attempt tounderstand why Zhuangzi would advocate a position he doesn't honestly hold.He argues that the answer lies in the point of Zhuangzi's text: to provoke thereader to take words less seriously. If words are to be taken less seriously, Schwitz-gebel suggests, Zhuangzi may not feel committed to presenting only those argu-ments whose conclusions he accepts. He would be more interested in producingan effect, and he would be right to expect that no argument for radical skepticismis likely to produce very many radical skeptics. Instead, Zhuangzi is, and provokesthe reader to be, an "everyday skeptic": he takes words and beliefs less seriously.

The issue between Raphals and Schwitzgebel is whetiier or not Zhuangzi as-serts a skeptical thesis, and this is a fruitful disagreement. I think Raphals is cor-rect to say that he never claims that knowledge is impossible, but his critical argu-ments do make positive claims that seem neither to make recommendations norto be methodological in character. For example, in undermining the possibility ofattaining the utmost (M) in knowing he writes: "Only when knowing has what itdepends on does it fit. The problem is that what it depends on is never fixed" (15/6/2-3). How do we understand such claims? What is it that knowing depends on,and what does it mean to claim that it isn't fixed? Should we accept Kjellberg'sand Schwitzgebel's arguments that the conclusion isn't what is important in un-derstanding Zhuangzi, and instead attend to its motivation and intended effect?

It is refreshing that none of these three essays indulges in loose talk of abso-lute spontaneity or unmediated experience of reality. The impression they leave isthat Zhuangzi was mostly interested in more flexible, open-minded styles of liv-ing. Other contributors to Essays, however, seem to think this flexibility can itselfbe certain: Zhuangzi's sage always knows the right way to cope with a world intransformation, and doesn't need knowledge ("preconceptions") to do it.

Mark Berkson presents the most jarring attribution of certainty. He sets out acomparison with Jacques Derrida, arguing that the two share similar negative

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projects, but that Zhuangzi goes further than Derrida in having a positive projectas well. The comparison of "negative" projects is instructive, and I wish Berksonhad taken it more seriously. He attributes to Zhuangzi a belief tiiat sages have un-mediated access to "the true pattern of reality" once they discard language (that'sthe negative project). But if the comparison with Derrida is at all illustrative, thenthis move can't be right. Deconstruction is neither a negative project in Berkson'ssense nor one limited to "linguistic skepticism." Limiting Zhuangzi's target tolanguage assumes that only spoken distinctions are really distinctions, and ignoresskeptical claims involving such nonlinguistic things as completion (/?£), daos,what knowing depends on, and what language languages. In fact, Berkson is un-able to provide any evidence for his attribution of a radical "positive" project toZhuangzi. He cites the question, "Wherever we walk, how can the Way be ab-sent?" (4/2/25, cited at 102-103),6 and suggests that this entails that dao, "Way," isZhuangzi's word for an accessible "true nature of reality." Of course, there is nosuch entailment, and Berkson provides no other evidence.

More nuanced attempts to mark the limits of Zhuangzi's uncertainty are pro-vided by Lee Yearley and Robert Eno. Both focus on the nature of skill as opposedto discursive knowledge. The Zhuangzi presents a number of stories of skilled in-dividuals who seem to have achieved a sort of transcendence through skill-mas-tery. Only one of these stories, that of Cook Ding, is within the Inner Chapters.Ding7 is so good at carving up oxen that for nineteen years he hasn't needed tosharpen his knife. His lord is impressed with his skill, and Ding explains that afterlong years of practice he no longer operates according to ordinary faculties. In-stead, he is overcome by shen jji$, "daemonic energy," and goes by the ox's tianlizRM., "natural articulations." In describing his ability he prefers the word "dao"to skill, suggesting that in cutting up bovines he isn't all that different from thesages invoked as ideals by the philosophers of his time.

Yearley reads this story as a clue to Zhuangzi's more mysterious descriptionsof "the ultimate spiritual state," which involves the coexistence of opposites ("athome where it intrudes"), mirrorlike minds, and total emptiness. Yearley suggestsa tripartite division of the self into dispositional, reflective, and transcendentdrives, with the last arising from skilled behavior. He gives a detailed account ofthe experience of skill, and suggests that the sage is one who is skilled at life ingeneral—someone who never stops operating according to transcendent drives.The problem is finding the point where Zhuangzi posits sagehood as such a gen-eralized skillfulness. Even if we accept that he privileges skilled behavior,8 this byno means entails that he holds the unlikely view that one can achieve perfect skillin life as a whole.

Eno agrees with much of Yearley' s assessment, arguing furthermore that thepoint of Zhuangzi's critique is to defuse attempts to defend one skill-repertoireover another. That is, the Confucian dao consisted in one set of skills (the rites),

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and Cook Ding's in another, but argument over which is better is pointless andgets in the way of actual skilled living. The problem here is that arguing over whichskill is better itself takes skill, as Chad Hansen has argued. There is no reason tosuppose that the joys of a good game of chess cannot also be experienced in agood argument. The distinction Eno attributes to Zhuangzi is not a good one.

But he derives it from another distinction that may be more useful. He ar-gues that Zhuangzi's problem is with behavior that presupposes a fixed ontology,for the simple reason that Zhuangzi doesn't believe any such thing is available.We must always be open to transformation, or we'll end up frustrated and introuble. This suggests that the problem with argumentation is not that it isn'tskilled, but that it generally involves the claim that it leads to (or at least shouldlead to) the one right answer: the dao. But skilled behavior can involve just such aclaim, as it did for the Confucians. They believed that their rituals were the onlyway to secure harmony in the social world. Their defense of the rites over otherskill-repertoires was essential to their conception of these skills, not an accidentalinauthenticity. This suggests that Zhuangzi's ethic might have less to do with skillas such than a (limited) coping with a lack of fixity. Indeed, this is how David Loyand Joel Kupperman approach the text.

Loy attempts a comparison with Nägärjuna, the second- (or so) century Bud-dhist theorist, in order to suggest that Zhuangzi thinks we get into a lot of troublewhen we understand the world as a collection of independent things with our-selves looking on as thing-like selves. Instead, Zhuangzi presents a view of thingsinterrelated in complicated ways, and in constant transformation. Things andselves are not self-existent entities, and we should stop acting as if they were.What is interesting is that this figures Daoism as inevitable: while we may not rec-ognize the world's instability, we do in fact cope with it all the time. The question,then, is what difference does Zhuangzi's recognition of instability (transforma-tion) make?

In an excellent essay, Joel Kupperman approaches this question by consider-ing different senses in which people are spontaneous. On the one hand, everyoneis spontaneous: one's thoughts and acts are never fully determined by priorthoughts and acts. At die same time, though, some people are more spontaneousthan others, and this is where Kupperman locates Zhuangzi's project. He takes hisclue from artistic spontaneity, which, he suggests, consists in an attentiveness to"open structures." He mentions Mozart's remark that his ideas just happened,paralleling it with Zhuangzi's "no one knows from what soil they spring." 9 He ar-gues that Zhuangzi wants to come to terms with "psychic chaos"—the variousimpulses of dreams and inclination mat are often ruled outside the boundary of self.

Loy goes further than Kupperman, and this is a mistake. At the beginning ofhis essay he suggests we can understand Zhuangzi's skepticism or relativism bet-ter if we understand what it is that most of us expect from knowledge. He then

462 China Review International: Vol. 4, No. 2, Fall 1997

argues that, for Zhuangzi, we cannot get this certainty from knowledge—and heconcludes that we can get it from ignorance and a transcendence of self. He sug-gests that certainty can be grounded in an identification with transformation, in aspontaneity (ziran ¡Éî^) of non-action (wuwei MJEi). It is suspicious enough thatthese are terms that Zhuangzi hardly ever uses, but we might also ask how, havingabandoned self, we are supposed to identify with anything, much less transforma-tions that are presumably not themselves self-identical.

Both Loy and Kupperman invoke a certain degree of relativism, and PhilipIvanhoe aims to limit this relativism by attributing to Zhuangzi a belief that hu-man nature is benign. Left alone, a person will pretty much leave other peoplealone, too. He presents tins reading by arguing against two interpretations ofZhuangzi as a relativist. Against Chad Hansen, he argues that Zhuangzi does havea view of human nature. Against David Wong, he argues that this view is not thathuman nature is compassionate. Ivanhoe's misreading of Hansen is importanthere. He suggests that Hansen derives his "hard relativism" from a "heaven's-eyeview," or "view from nowhere," from which all human talk is equally true be-cause equally irrelevant. Hansen, however, explicitly denies such a perspective:"Any attempt to talk about a real or absolute perspective is incoherent."10 It is onthis denial that he bases his relativist reading of Zhuangzi: if there is no absoluteperspective, then we cannot attain authoritative knowledge.

What, then, for human nature? Ivanhoe argues that Zhuangzi advocates an"ethical promiscuity" based in the belief that human nature is essentially benign.He argues against Wong's belief that human nature must be pictured "without aface" in order to preserve the principle of equal worth; Ivanhoe's promiscuityconsists in a nature with many faces. But it is unclear how this pluralization al-lows a singular statement of nature. At the very least, Zhuangzi seems reluctant tomake such a statement. At one point he asks, "Or am I the only stupid one andamong others there are indeed those who are not stupid?" (4/2/20-21). The ques-tion is a strange backflip of a remark: the preceding passage suggests that peopleare essentially incomplete—no matter how stable they seem, they are always sub-ject to further transformation in form and heart-mind. If Zhuangzi thinks humannature is essentially incomplete, he doesn't seem to think his perspective allowshim to assert even that much on behalf of everybody.

In fact, Zhuangzi asserts very little. A great deal of the Inner Chapters con-sists of stories, and even when a character offers an assertion, we cannot auto-matically attribute it to Zhuangzi. When he presents arguments apparently in hisown voice, he often ends with questions in the place of conclusions. When hedoes make assertions, they can fairly naturally be read as assertions of the indeter-minacy of interpretation or communication—and, if we follow Kjellberg orSchwitzgebel, we might not even want to attribute those assertions to Zhuangzi.He is certainly explicit that he doesn't know ifwhat he asserts is right for every-

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body. Perhaps it is a mistake to assume we can turn to Zhuangzi for a statementof human nature."

I think we have to say something like this: Zhuangzi does not assume a per-spective shared by all humans. He may, however, believe that his analysis of theuncertainty of communication will secure the assent of some readers, and so con-stitute something of a shared position—but a position that recognizes the incom-pleteness of all positioning and all communication. Which is just to say that whatinterpretation depends on is never fixed.

The issues raised in Essays are frequently both important and suggestive forthose of us trying to read Zhuangzi. In particular the problematic they engage—the articulation of uncertainty and ethics in Zhuangzi—is a crucial one that hasoften been ignored or simply assumed not to be a problem. Alongside what oftenstrike me as bizarre dogmatisms, interesting questions are raised and a few inter-esting answers suggested. I hope the trend signaled by this book continues.

I should also mention the book's bibliography, which is a treasure. Compiledby Edward Slingerland, it is billed as a comprehensive survey ofworks devoted toZhuangzi in Western languages, with a few key works in Chinese and Japanesethrown in for good measure. It might never stop being useful.

Dan Robins

University ofHong KongDan Robins is a doctoral candidate whose research focuses on Warring States thought.

NOTES1. 1 refer primarily to the Inner Chapters of the Zhuangzi, which is a composite work usu-ally dated to the fourth and third centuries b.c. The Inner Chapters are widely considered its au-thentic core. They may or may not have been written by the historical Zhuangzi; regardless,"Zhuangzi" is generally taken to name whatever person or persons are responsible for puttingthe Inner Chapters in their present shape. I will follow this usage here, although I doubt it canbe justified.

2.Kjellberg ends his essay with a reading ofXunzi's criticism that Zhuangzi "was obsessedby the natural and didn't know the human." He argues that this is best understood as disagree-ing with Zhuangzi's purpose in offering skeptical arguments, rather than as a criticism of the ar-guments themselves. For Xunzi, living a more natural life is not a worthwhile goal.

3.The translation of this title is controversial, and I will not propose one here. A. C. Gra-ham suggests "The sorting which evens things out."

4.This isn't the only possible skeptical thesis. Kjellberg ends his essay with another: "Wesaid in the beginning that the only thing we can say with confidence is that we are not reallysure what the answer is. If our reasoning here is correct, however, then the unfortunate conclu-sion is that we cannot even say that" (p. 21).

5.In citing Zhuangzi, I will reference the page, chapter, and line number in the Harvard-Yenching Concordance.

6.Berkson uses A. C. Graham's translation from the latter's Chuang-tzu: The Inner Chap-ters (London and Boston: Unwin Paperbacks, 1981), p. 52. One could replace "the Way" here by

464 China Review International: Vol. 4, No. 2, Fall 1997

"a way." Zhuangzi would then be making the pluralist point that any way of acting would con-stitute a dao, or way.

7.Ding"f may be an indication of low rank rather than a proper name.8.Perhaps we should be skeptical even of this: elsewhere skill is apparently described as

both a completion and an injury (5/2/43).9.Graham, Chuang-tzu: The Inner Chapters, p. 50.10.Chad Hansen, "A Tao of Tao in Chuang-Tzu," in Experimental Essays on Chuang-tzu,

ed. Victor Mair (Honolulu: Center for Asian and Pacific Studies, University of Hawaii, 1983), p. 47.11.Ivanhoe suggests that attributing a belief in a benign human nature inserts Zhuangzi

into the philosophical debates of his time—but attributing to one a presupposition that onedoesn't make explicit, much less defend, hardly inserts one into any debates.

Paul R. Kleindorfer, Howard C. Kunreuther, and David S. Hong, editors.Energy, Environment and the Economy: Asian Perspectives. New Horizonsin Environmental Economics. Cheltenham, England, and Brookfield, Ver-mont: Edward Elgar, 1996. xiv, 292 pp. Hardcover $69.95, 1SBN 1-85898-391-6.

Energy, Environment and the Economy: Asian Perspectives is a collection of paperspresented in Taipei in 1994 at a conference of the same title jointly organized bythe Wharton Center for Risk Management and Decision Process and the TaiwanInstitute of Economic Research. The contributors include specialists from Austra-lia, Austria, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand,and the United States. The volume is part of the publisher's impressive New Ho-rizons in Environmental Economics series published under the distinguished gen-eral editorship of Professor Wallace E. Oates.

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