The Tao of Zhuangzi

Zhuangzi is a Taoist philosopher from 4th-century BCE China as well as the name given to the text containing his writings. It’s a lovely—and highly quotable—book, in which he argues (among other things) that everything is relative. He writes, “From the point of view of the Way, no thing is more valuable than any other.”

Zhuangzi is a famous Taoist philosopher from fourth-century-BCE China, known for his brilliance, his paradoxes, and his pithy aphorisms. Here’s one: 

“When people sleep in a damp place, they wake up deathly ill. But what about eels?
If people live in trees, they tremble with fear and worry. But how about monkeys?
Of these three, which knows what is the ‘right’ place to live?” 

Zhuangzi’s Confucian contemporaries thought there was a single good way to be a human being: respect your elders, uphold order, perform all the proper rituals, be benevolent and responsible, and perfectly inhabit your social role. But Zhuangzi profoundly disagreed. There’s no such thing as the one good way to be, he thought, since each of us has different needs. (“From the point of view of the Way, no thing is more valuable than any other.”) And as for our social roles, who says it’s good to be useful?

Zhuangzi’s key example was a useless tree, really bad at performing its social role—so gnarly and twisted that no carpenter could use it for anything. So it survived, while all the other trees got cut down and turned into lumber. “Everyone knows how useful usefulness is,” quipped Zhuangzi, “but no one seems to know how useful uselessness is.”

Meanwhile, even if we are trying to figure out what is good and what is bad for us, we shouldn’t do that by listening to authority figures. Zhuangzi tells of a man swimming in a raging waterfall. Someone asks how he got so good at swimming, and he says nobody taught him; he just followed his inborn nature. A good reminder, thinks Zhuangzi, that there’s no point listening to teachers.

So we have a sage telling us not to listen to sages; his advice is not to listen to advice; there’s a practice, but it doesn’t involve practice; and it’s good for us, except that nothing is good or bad. Does that all make sense?

Well, the whole point of Zhuangzi is to get beyond questions like that. As he himself puts it, “What man knows is far less than what he does not know. It is because he tries to exhaust this vastness with this meagerness that he bewilders and frustrates himself.” We need to stop trying to encompass everything with those feeble minds of ours. And more generally, we need to calm down and stop striving. If everyone did that, there would be no war, or greed, or oppression.

On the other hand, it’s not clear there would be a ton of joy, either. The universe, says Zhuangzi, “burdens me with a physical form, labors me with life, eases me with old age, rests me with death.” If death is a relief, Zhuangzi’s way of life doesn’t sound like a particularly cheerful existence. Confucians might add that it’s a recipe for confusion, apathy, or even bad behavior. And philosophers like us might say it deprives us of the fun we have in thinking hard about the world.

But we’re going to have fun being talked out of all that by our guest: Paul Kjellberg from Whittier College, editor of Essays on Skepticism, Relativism, and Ethics in The Zhuangzi. He’s an excellent teacher. Wait—does that mean we shouldn’t listen to him?