Zhuangzi: Being One with Ten Thousand Things

Josh Landy
Could you be a butterfly dreaming you’re a person?

Ray Briggs
Is anything objectively good or bad?

Josh Landy
What does Zhuangzi have to tell us about the way to live?

Ray Briggs
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. We’re coming to you from the studios of KALW San Francisco Bay Area.

Josh Landy
Continuing conversations that begin at Philosophers Corner on the Stanford campus, where Ray teaches philosophy. And I direct the philosophy in that stream initiative.

Ray Briggs
Today we’re thinking about Zhuangzi.

Josh Landy
Zhuangzi, fantastic Taoist philosopher from fourth century BCE China—he’s so great.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, I just love the book of his writings, where he argues that everything is relative. He writes, “From the point of view of the way, no thing is more valuable than any other.” What a great idea!

Josh Landy
That doesn’t sound so great to me, Ray. It sounds like it could be a recipe for confusion and apathy, maybe even bad behavior.

Ray Briggs
Well, who’s to say whether a behavior is good or bad? I mean, Zhuangzi doesn’t even think that makes sense. He says, “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 worries. But how about monkeys? Of these three, which knows what is the right place to live?”

Josh Landy
I love that quote so much. Maybe it’s partly because I’m such a big fan of eels and monkeys,  but I still think it kind of suggests the opposite of what you want to be saying. I mean, look, I don’t want to sleep in the river like an eel. He’s right about that. And I don’t really feel like sleeping up in a tree like a monkey. But doesn’t that precisely mean there is something that’s good for a human being, it’s good for him being to sleep in a bed under a roof.

Ray Briggs
You sound just like this Confucian philosophers from Zhuangzi’s time. They also think there’s a single good way to be a human being.

Josh Landy
Right, they said it’s really important to respect your elders, uphold order,do all the proper rituals, be benevolent and responsible, and you know, perfectly inhabit your social role.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, and Zhuangzi realized they were totally wrong. He gave this great example of a useless tree. It’s really bad at performing its social role. It’s so gnarly and twisted that no carpenter can use it for anything. So it survives while all the other trees get cut down and turned into lumber.

Josh Landy
But that’s exactly my point, Ray. For a tree, presumably, it’s good not to get cut down. And in the same way, for a human being, it’s good to have a roof over your head. Some things are good, some things are bad.

Ray Briggs
Okay, but even if some things are good, and some things are bad, you’re not going to figure out which is which, just by listening to authority. chunks, A has the story about a guy who’s going for a swim in the middle of a raging waterfall. Somebody asks him how he got so good at swimming. And he says, Nobody taught him he just followed his inborn nature. So that just goes to show you should listen to your nature. You shouldn’t listen to teachers.

Josh Landy
Don’t listen to teachers? Who’s telling me that?

Ray Briggs
Zhuangzi!

Josh Landy
Okay, so let me see if I have you right here. The sage tells me not to listen to sages. The 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. Did I miss anything?

Ray Briggs
Josh, you and your logic. The whole point of Zhuangzi is to get beyond these pointless arguments that don’t give us any insight. He says, “What man knows is far less than what he does not know. It is because he tries to exhaust this vastness with his eagerness that he’d be wilderness and frustrates himself.”

Josh Landy
That’s really nice and everything but aren’t you supposed to be a philosopher? Are you seriously trying to tell me we should give up trying to know things?

Ray Briggs
Oh, I’m not trying to tell you anything. How could I possibly know?

Josh Landy
Nice one. But seriously, okay, I get that giving up on knowledge would help me to stay calm. But it wouldn’t bring me that much joy. Remember what trongsa says about what he calls the the great clump right nature of the universe or what have you. He says, it burdens me with a physical form. Labor’s me with life you eases me with old age rests me with death. That doesn’t sound like a very cheerful existence.

Ray Briggs
You’re missing the point. If everyone would just calm down and stop striving, the world would be so much better. We wouldn’t have wars or greed or oppression. Come on, Josh, wouldn’t that be the greatest thing ever?

Josh Landy
I thought you said nothing is better than anything else!

Ray Briggs
Okay, I don’t have a great way out of that one. But I bet our guest does. It’s Paul Kjellberg from Whittier College, editor of a volume of essays on the Zhuangzi.

Josh Landy
But first, we sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Holly J. McDede, to talk to people who’ve taken Zhuangzi’s writings to interesting places. She files this report.

Holly McDede
Picture a man with a chin stuck down in his navel, shoulders up above his head, pigtail pointing to the sky, five internal organs on display. The man is Splay-Limb Shu; his creator is Zhuangzi. And it may not seem ideal to have five organs, but the man is out there living his best life.

Zhuangzi
By sewing and washing, he gets enough to fill his mouth. By handling a window and sifting out the good grain. He makes enough to feed ten people.

Bryan Van Norden
Both in ancient China and in the world today, we tend to describe this person as disabled and as unfortunate because they’re not like other people.

Holly McDede
That’s Bryan Van Norden, a professor of philosophy at Vassar College. He co-wrote a New York Times op-ed about how Zhuangzi pushed back against the idea that normal is good and different is bad. And he did it more than 2500 years ago.

Bryan Van Norden
The reality is that their disabilities in some way open up other opportunities to them.

John Altmann
This is why Zhuangzi says so radical.

Holly McDede
Norden’s co author was John Altmann, who studies and writes about philosophy and disabilities.

John Altmann
There’s so much just to Zhuangzi.

Holly McDede
Altmann says the way people think about disabilities still needs to catch up with Zhuangzi. Altmann loves how he infuses dignity on these awesome characters.

John Altmann
He gives the parable of the knotted tree, the tree that can’t be anything,

Holly McDede
But the tree is great!

John Altmann
And because he gives up on his instrumental calculations for the tree, you know the means-ends, efficient kind of thinking of the tree, the tree is able to live out its years.

Zhuangzi
So for your big tree—no use? Then plant it in the wasteland, in emptiness. Walk it around, rest under its shadow. No axe or bill prepares its end. No one will ever cut it down. Useless? You should worry.

Holly McDede
Ancient philosophers have often been cruel to people with disabilities. For example, Aristotle argues that “deformed kids” should be left to die. In another Zhuangzi writing, Confucius means an amputee named Shushan No-Toes. Confucius judges him. But Shushan No-Toes knows there are more important things in life than toes.

Zhuangzi
But I’ve come now because I still have something that is worth more than a foot. And I want to try to hold on to it. There is nothing that haven’t doesn’t cover nothing that Earth doesn’t bear out.

John Altmann
There’s so much hostility to what philosophy would call alterity—you know, another way of saying difference. And Zhuangzi was one of the earliest voices to say it doesn’t need to be that way. I just think there’s an immense beauty in that.

Holly McDede
A lot of Zhuangzi’s ideas are just really nice, like how he writes about being one with 10,000 things.

Shin Yu Pai
You know, a lot of Buddhist thinking and worldview are really about looking at notions of duality, and how that exists alongside the notion that we are not separate from the world that we are one.

Holly McDede
That’s Shin YuPai, host of the “Ten Thousand Things” podcast all about modern day artifacts of Asian-American Life.

Ten Thousand Things
In many Chinese sayings and in classical poetry. The number 10,000 is used in a lyrical sense to convey something infinite, vast, and unfathomable.

Holly McDede
There’s an episode about a now historical blue suit worn by a Korea- American lawmaker cleaning up after the January 6 insurrection.

Ten Thousand Things
I bought the blue suit initially to be something that I wear to President Biden’s inauguration. And I wanted to wear it that day on January 6, because that was the day that we were going to certify the election results.

Holly McDede
Other episodes are about bikes a book, an episode on voices featuring Alice Wong who lost her physical voice after a catastrophic medical event.

Zhuangzi
Ideas of what is considered a good voice gate-keep marginalize people, making them feel they can’t take up space and sound. And the reality is there is space and sound for all of us.

Shin Yu Pai
There are so many expressions and permutations of Asian-American identity—10,000 of them, you know, infinite and vast, right. And this series was really an effort towards narrative change and humanizing stories of the Asian-American experience and maybe also bringing some insight into Asian cultures and identity.

Holly McDede
Zhuangzi would appreciate that. He says: Do not struggle. Go with the flow of things and you will find yourself at one with the mysterious unity of the universe. Let’s end there. For Philosophy Talk, I’m Holly J. Dede

Josh Landy
Thanks so much for that fascinating report, Holly. I’m Josh Landy, with me is my Stanford colleague Ray Briggs, and today we’re thinking about Zhuangzi.

Ray Briggs
And we’re joined now by Paul Kjellberg. He’s professor of philosophy at Whittier College, and editor of “Essays on Skepticism, Relativism, and Ethics in the Zhuangzi.” Paul, welcome back to Philosophy Talk.

Paul Kjellberg
Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Josh Landy
So Paul, Zhuangzi, talks a lot about the importance of doing nothing. And I’ve got to say, I kind of like the sound of that, does it? Does it resonate with anything in your own life?

Paul Kjellberg
I do quite a bit of nothing. And I’m looking forward to retiring and doing even more in the near future.

Ray Briggs
Okay, so that sounds pretty great. But I want to hear more about Zhuangzi’s idea of doing nothing. So what does that actually amount to?

Paul Kjellberg
What it’s difficult to describe, it’s certainly not sitting still with your arms crossed. Doing nothing means more like doing nothing on purpose or doing nothing intentional. Rather like having a conversation. You don’t go into with a plan, you just respond to the situation as it arises and let things happen to something you do something you let.

Ray Briggs
Does it make sense to advise people to do nothing like if you advise somebody to do something, don’t they have to do it?

Paul Kjellberg
They don’t have to do it. But there are other ways of other ways of encouraging people who are leading people than just telling them

Josh Landy
I find this really interesting and it goes along with a couple of things. A couple of quotes, I really like in the Zhuangzi—that line about drifting uncommitted in the great work of doing nothing in particular, so you doing something, but nothing in particular, and lines about not planning your affairs in advance, I wanted to ask you about a particular quote, I find really beautiful, which is attributed to someone called chewy, the artists and the forgetting of the foot means the shoe fits comfortably. The forgetting of the waist means the belt fits comfortably. And when the understanding forgets right and wrong. The mind fits comfortably. Can you explain that to us it is the thought here is supposed to be that you do some you basically you act without a plan, you do nothing in particular, you don’t think too much about it, but you somehow end up doing good things.

Paul Kjellberg
But doing something and doing nothing are not necessarily incompatible. You know, I like doing yard work. There’s a lot of thinking to be involved in figuring out how to follow a tree. Which best way to split a log, things like that. There’s a lot of rationality and planning. But when my son comes home and ask what I did today, I tell him, nothing. I was just hanging around. When you go on a trip, you make plans and procedures, but you aren’t really doing anything. You’re just seeing what’s out there.

Ray Briggs
So Zhuangzi really thinks that doing nothing is valuable. What is so valuable about it?

Paul Kjellberg
I think it’s what’s important about doing nothing is again, this idea of not doing anything intentionally. And that was valuable about doing nothing is what’s on valuable or potentially struck destructive about doing something. Because when you do things intentionally and stubbornly, it’s easy to make mistakes, and to go in wrong directions, and to persist in wrong directions.

Josh Landy
But you might worry what uh, what about things that need doing so obviously Zhuangzi is living in a time of great civil strife. And as I understand it, the Confucian tradition says, the role of the philosopher among other things is to help out and try to, you know, set things straight as much as possible, and trying to say no, no retreat. Couldn’t a Confucian say, there’s something a little irresponsible about doing nothing, why not set an intention, a good intention, intention to help out and set things right.

Paul Kjellberg
We do a lot of damage in our efforts to help out. And a lot of times, we’re misguided about what we think needs to be done. If something needs to be done, it needs to be done without anybody telling us needs to be done. So by responding to that situation, by being open minded. You’ll discover that on your own without needing to be taught.

Ray Briggs
I can tell when I’m trying to do things, and when I’m not. Can I tell when I look at other people, whether they’re doing things sort of in the way that Zhuangzi thinks is best or whether they’re striving? How do I know? Do you need to? Well, maybe if I’m trying to give them advice or encourage them in the right direction. Maybe I shouldn’t try to give them advice or encourage them in the right direction, I’m not sure.

Paul Kjellberg
Probably depends on the situation.

Josh Landy
We’re gonna get back to things depending on a situation and moment, but you’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about Zhuangzi with Paul Kjellberg from Whittier College

Ray Briggs
Is the good life for you the same as the good life for me. Is there anything that’s objectively true? How could we even know

Josh Landy
Dinding the way to serenity—along with your comments and questions, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Bruno Mars
Today I swear I’m not doing anything, nothing at all.

Josh Landy
If you don’t feel like doing anything, could that be the best thing you could possibly do? I’m Josh Landy. And this is Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs. And we’re thinking about Kwanzaa with Paul jailbird from Whittier College.

Josh Landy
Got questions about Zhuangzi and Taoism? Email us at comments@philosophytalk.org, or commens on our website. And while you’re there, you can also become a subscriber and find something useful—or useless—in our library of more than 500 episodes.

Ray Briggs
So Paul, earlier Josh and I were arguing about whether anything is really better than anything else. Josh said yes. And I said no, absolutely not. So Zhuangzi would back me up, right?

Paul Kjellberg
That’s a difficult question. The things are different things are good to different people are the very least thing different things seem good to different people. But there’s an underlying question there. A skeptical question about how you know exactly who and what you really are. You quoted the butterfly story earlier, he woke from a nap and wasn’t sure whether he was a butterfly dreaming, he was a person or a person who dreamt he’s a butterfly. I’m not sure that story is really so much about either butterflies or dreams, but about our identities, and how sure we are who and what we are.

Ray Briggs
So I definitely see that there’s this distinction between there being no facts about what is true, and it being really hard to know what is true. So it sounds like on at least one interpretation of Zhuangzi. He’s just saying it’s really hard to know what things are like and what your nature is. So is that the interpretation that we should prefer?

Paul Kjellberg
Either before or after the fact it’s hard to know. So I think the question of what we really are becomes kind of irrelevant once you confront the fact that you’re not really sure of what it is. In any case, what difference would it make?

Josh Landy
Well, okay, so tell me if I’m wrong about this, I’m trying to think about this question of what difference it would make because some of some of my favorite lines in the twang, sir, are these lines about different beings have different having different kinds of needs. So Ray quoted one earlier about eels, and monkeys and people. And there’s another lovely one about ducks and swans, ducks have have short necks and Swans have long necks, but you don’t want to make the swans neck shorter, and you don’t want to make the ducks neck longer. Each one has its own kind of way to be and its own kind of needs. And so what’s good for a duck is not what’s good. First one. So why not think that’s true of individual people? You know, what’s good for you, Paul might be bad for me and vice versa? If that’s the case, doesn’t it matter that we have a rudimentary sense of who we each are so we can try to do things that you know that match what we need individually?

Paul Kjellberg
But that’s the question trying to come to that rudimentary conception. There’s another story about Lady Lee who was the daughter of a Barbera a border kingdom, referred to as barbarians. And she was traded in the hostage swap with the Duke of gin. And when she left her life on the border, she was so sad she so demoralized that she wept until the tears drenched the color of her room. But then when she went to the state of Jen, she was made a concubine and then then the Queen’s concert. And she ate the food of his table and slept in the king’s bed and wondered why she’d ever wept. We can we can change our mind about who we think we are, we could find out that our self conceptions identities before were narrow or or completely mistaken. Those things will change either internally or as external situations change.

Ray Briggs
Okay, so I see that, in that case, like, it seems like there is a kind of fact of the matter that Lady Lee does end up being happy and that kind of that’s important. It’s a fact of the matter that she in fact, gets to learn even, but I was less sure about whether there are facts of the matter about good and bad the way Josh seems to think. So there’s this kind of conversation in the inner chapter, and it’s between two characters not neither of whom is necessarily expressing the point of view of shunga. But one of them sort of is talking about sort of beauty and how different animals have really different ideas about beauty. So men claim that Maokong and Lady Lee were beautiful, but a fish saw them, they would dive to the bottom of the stream. And if bird saw them, they would fly away. And if deer saw them, they would break into a rung if Of these four, who knows how to fix the standard of beauty in the world. So my way of reading that has always been well, just nobody’s right or wrong about beauty. There’s just no fact there. So that’s, that’s not about what somebody would like. But about like, what really is likable? And I’m not sure that there is any fact according to Zhuangzi.

Paul Kjellberg
You doesn’t say there’s no fact I think the the effect of the story is just to get you to cool your jets a little bit. The story about Lady Lee you mentioned before with the happy ending, it’s not clear at all, that story has a happy ending. Lady Lee got in good with the king and alienated him against his his firstborn son and put her own child on the throne, and cause decades of warfare. She’s notorious villain, probably, how do I do that? A happy ending, but not very many other people. So the question whether it’s a happy ending or not, time will tell and even time will tell it will remain a question.

Josh Landy
That’s a really good point. So we’ve talked about a couple of really cool features of the Zhuangzi position. So first, what looks potentially like, relativism, like different beings have different needs, maybe even different individuals have different needs. We’ve talked about change across time, and the need to be a little flexible, and not sort of lock yourself into one mode of conduct or or one sort of mechanism for making decisions. But let’s think a little bit about the skepticism a little bit more about the skepticism, because it seems at various points in the twang says, though, of us being expressed, according to which we could be radically deceived about things. Right. So that’s one, at least one way of reading the butterfly story. And, and, you know, one of the characters Chung Ooza says, while dreaming, you don’t know it’s a dream, and perhaps a great awakening would reveal all of this to be a vast dream. Right? So there, you know, long before Descartes and other you know, early modern European philosophers. That’s the dream argument. How far do you think chunks it goes in the direction of skepticism of worries about what it is possible for us to know?

Paul Kjellberg
Well, you can take this, you can read these things in a lot of different ways. I, personally, I don’t worry a whole lot about dreams, or different handles or things like that. But you can change a lot in your life, you can you can go to bed thinking you’re happily married, and wake up finding yourself divorced it alone, or thinking you’re a great parent and finding out you’re a failure, all kinds of things like that. So there’s plenty to be skeptical about without going as far as dreams or things like that. And I think the concern is given those level of uncertainty and the tendency towards unpredictability and change, you just don’t want to get too far ahead over ahead of your skis. And recognize the fact that these can look very different in the morning and not invest too much in your current conceptions, because they’re liable to change.

Ray Briggs
The way that the Zhuangzi is written seems like it supports this idea of not holding on to any one picture of reality too long. Like there’s a lot of like funny little stories, a lot of characters express philosophical views. There’s a lot of parables, but I’m not sure that I find like a single coherent argument in there is is that accurate? And do you think if so that it’s doing something?

Paul Kjellberg
I agree entirely. I’ve looked for those lessons carefully for years and never found them. And in fact, I’ve become kind of convinced. Usually when you think you’ve got something you think you’ve got some lesson or coherent message, the digger you deep, it kind of dissolves in your hands. And my feeling is the stories rather than trying to convey a lesson are themselves kind of an exercise in the unpredictability and the traceability of human existence.

Ray Briggs
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi with Paul Kjellberg from Whittier College. So I shouldn’t be reading Zhuangzi for a moral message or a view about what the world is like. What should I be doing instead? Like, why should I be reading Zhuangzi?

Paul Kjellberg
I think the stories are confusing in the way that life is confusing. And that by sort of immersing yourself into confusion by becoming more confused, you understand better The way in which our experiences can is confusing, if that makes sense.

Josh Landy
It does. I mean, hopefully not too much sense. One of my, one of my favorite lines is Chun Musa saying, if you were to agree with these words, I would name that nothing more than a way of offering condolences for the demise of their strangeness. So here’s at least one character who wants his words not to be totally intelligible. And you have other lines in the trunks about, you know, if you got some wisdom, don’t say it. So that I think it’s a fascinating case of a work of philosophy. That, as you’re suggesting, doing something other than transmitting propositional content, transmitting beliefs, here’s what you need to know, here’s what you need to think it’s more of an exercise for us. It almost starts to me to sound like it’s in the model of the philosophy as an art of living strand of philosophy that Pierre Hadot talked about, Does that seem right to you that this is rather than philosophy as a set of beliefs about life? Rather, it’s a set of skills of, of habits of mind ways of coping with a very complicated world. And somehow This book helps us develop those skills. Does that seem about right?

Paul Kjellberg
And maybe tolerance for ambiguity? One interesting puzzle is you as you read these different parables, unlike, say, a Socratic dialogue, where you know, pretty clearly who the hero is. It’s often very hard to tell in one of Zhuangzi’s stories who is the hero and who’s the fool, or if either of them on and one of the fun things about reading the commentaries, if you want to go that route, is the commentators themselves up and pick out different characters as the heroes in the fools in any given story. And again, I find myself asking the same question in life all the time.

Ray Briggs
That’s kind of beautifully balanced. So I, it’s one of the things that I kind of dislike about some of the Socratic dialogues is that there, there’s somebody who’s like, is just an idiot. And we’re all supposed to think this person is an idiot. It doesn’t help to introduce a moderator. So there’s like philosophical dialogues with a moderator. And we have the smart person, the fool, and then the moderator, who, as objective moderator has got aside with a smart person. So why did we bother adding that person in the first place?

Josh Landy
Which raises the question for me about the role of the master thinker, the role of the leader, so someone like Zhuangzi. Should we say that this is because of course, you know, within the Confucian tradition, there’s nothing wrong with having a role model with having a teacher. But should we say of Zhuangzi that part of the point of writing this, this book, where you don’t always know who the hero is, is to kind of nudge people away from that mode of thinking?

Paul Kjellberg
I wouldn’t have said that before. But now that you said, it sounds perfectly right to me.

Josh Landy
I’m relieved.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, so I would maybe like to hear more about Zhuangzi’s rivals or interlocutors. So my understanding of this time period is that you’ve got the confusions. And you’ve also got the Moists who are something like the early Chinese versions of what I think of as like utilitarian or consequentialist, where they’re they’re thinking, how can we just prevent suffering as much as possible for as many people as possible? Is, is Zhuangzi sort of disagreeing with with both of those groups. How do I think about about Zhuangzi in that context?

Paul Kjellberg
Zhuangzi’s best friend was this guy flay shirt, who appears to have been trained as immodest, and was one of many people who left the most school later in life but retain some of their habits. One of the ideas of Moism, Jan I, frequently translated as universal love. We just said, Let your love wash over all things. Heaven and earth are one body. Jones also says Heaven and Earth are a tribute to characters the phrase Heaven and Earth are one body. But whereas wait two tries to use kind of Zeno like paradoxes to undermine distinctions till you arrive at Unity by default. Zhuangzi seems to reject his logical approach. Nonetheless, one of the most compelling things about danza for me, at least I’ll see if you feel the same way is his overwhelming tenderness. He tells stories are all different kinds of people, some very successful ones, some very socially unsuccessful ones. But his sense of compassion is, as we just said, overwhelming and washes over all things. I find that very beautiful and inspiring. And I wonder a lot about its connection to these other logical and skeptical arguments we’ve been discussing.

Josh Landy
It’s i i totally agree. I love that point. I mean, and you know, as we heard from Holly earlier, there’s this astonishingly prescient ahead of its time way of thinking about disability. There’s an enlightened woman in the text And so yeah, it does seem like especially for the time, this sense of compassion, this sense of not just tolerance, but even love expands about as far as it can possibly go. But here’s a question for you a slightly more, you know, Zhuangzi skeptical question. Why, you know, to come back to the politics? Why not? Try, right? I mean, we did I know you gave it out earlier that we sometimes mess up. But surely, if we don’t try it all, doesn’t that mean, we’re inevitably gonna be messing up? Because yeah, so you know that one of the characters Rose says, a person of great wisdom doesn’t find the Crampton nearby to be in need of improvement for he knows the temporal changes of things are endless. So basically, don’t do anything. Are you satisfied with that poll? Or would you prefer a twang so who every now and again, you know, picks up a hammer and builds a house for somebody?

Paul Kjellberg
I’m not particularly satisfied with anything. It’s not clear to me at all, that our sum total of efforts to help have outweighed our our work harming the world. It’s a pretty, it’s a pretty even bet. As far as that goes. But I think the idea is to think of your existence to address your existence as something that simply is not. He would very much I think, reject kind of the notion of progress, either material or spiritual or political progress that we embrace as being liable to mislead us and better off being able to accept existence as a useless tree.

Ray Briggs
Right. So I’m a little bit tempted to summarize this idea as well it’s just better to be a useless tree, or at least we have reason to think it’s better to be useless tree. But we’ve been talking about how, at least it’s it’s really hard to know whether it’s better to be a useless tree, like seems like for all I know, trying could be strictly better than not being useless tree or maybe there’s no fact of the matter, although that’s a kind of contestable interpretation. So how can I hold on to both of those ideas at once?

Paul Kjellberg
Zhuangzi doesn’t actually tell you to be a useless tree. He just shows you all the bad results and become from being a useful train, you can decide what to do on your own. I similarly, I don’t think it’s a question of doing nothing just sort of recognizing and responding to the harms that can be done by doing the wrong something. And you’ll find your own way to your appropriate combination of doing and not doing.

Josh Landy
I mean, it’s a very attractive position, I’m assuming it works out, right. I mean, I imagine that for some people that could go awry, and that they could think that they were sort of following the flow and going where their inner nature takes them and an embracing the useless and not trying too much and doing the right kind of something which is close to nothing. But couldn’t it failed to work out? Couldn’t people be deceived about what sort of going to conduce to happiness and an end up end up miserable?

Paul Kjellberg
Couldn’t anything not work out? The jury’s still out on all the options as far as I can tell. Rhere’s a legitimate concern, but like I say the jury’s out on all the alternatives. Because we’re still waiting to see and some of the things that we thought were great bets have turned out to be very unfortunate.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about Zhuangzi with Paul Kjellberg from Whittier College.

Ray Briggs
Could reading Zhuangzi help us take ourselves less seriously? Does his Taoist philosophy offer good ideas for ending war and depression? Should we all try to be a little more useless?

Josh Landy
Doing more by doing less—plus commentary from Ian Shoals, The 62nd philosopher when Philosophy Talk continues.

Billy Preston
Nothing from nothing leaves nothing, you gotta have something if you wanna be with me.

Josh Landy
Nothing from nothing leaves nothing—is that a good thing? I’m Josh Landy, and this is Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs. Our guest is Paul Kjellberg from Whittier College. And we’re thinking about the Taoist philosopher Zhuangzi.

Josh Landy
So Paul, Zhuangzi obviously made perfect sense within his own time in place, but he’s continued to be an influence ever since. What do you think makes his wisdom so relevant to us today?

Paul Kjellberg
Personally, in my own life, I find that even more helpful going forward that has been in the past. I think we live in very unpredictable times. And we’re going to be called upon to solve problems we haven’t seen before and to think about The things we had to become things we haven’t been before, and to be able to be comfortable with that. And to be able to do that, intelligently, responsibly and responsibly. It’s something that it’s gonna be hard for us in the coming decades, I think, and we’re gonna need to embrace a philosophy of change, because it’s going to be our only option.

Ray Briggs
So I’m particularly interested in what Zhuangzi says ideas about avoiding war, because that seems like a an important kind of ongoing challenge for the 21st century. I’m not sure that trongsa would agree to give anybody advice. But if I could possibly get Zhuangzi to tell me something helpful about avoiding war, what do you think I should take away?

Paul Kjellberg
That’s interesting, because a lot of the other philosophers around him talked about war a lot more directly, and that the confusions, had a very carefully defined notion of adjust to war, the most rejected offense of warfare or aggressive warfare. jaunted doesn’t actually talk about it all that much. But I think, you know, if you think about the problems that oppress us, wars, of course, one of them, where does war come from? And one of the underlying ones is our sort of underlying greed or need for more than that, and I think John’s is more addressed to that, sort of the underpinnings of war than to war directly. widespread poverty, and depression and cruelty in so many forms, is indicative of there being something damaging about our general approach to life.

Ray Briggs
I agree with that, I think but given that most of the population doesn’t agree with me or aren’t Taoists, does trying to give up on striving still give me useful advice for the actual world.

Paul Kjellberg
That’s going to be an ongoing problem for anybody, I think. And, you know, how influential has Philosophy Talk been in solving world peace? I know you want to.

Ray Briggs
We haven’t gotten there yet.

Paul Kjellberg
But it doesn’t work that well. However, I think in general, Zhuangzi’s approach, like Confucius’s although not necessarily later Confucians, is really more geared towards leading by example, or leading by inspiration, rather than, you know, telling people what to do. I mean, many of our most important figures have led by example, and would be inspiration, but how to do that is something we’re still working on. As far as I can tell.

Josh Landy
That’s a really good point, it gets back to the notion of philosophy as an art of living. And also philosophy is something individualized, because if part of your philosophy is, well, you know, what, there are actually different good strategies for different people and at different times in their life will you can’t just write a treatise like Aristotle or something like that, right? This is a point Alexander Nehamas makes instead, what do you got to do? You got to write something like the Zhuangzi that is difficult and complicated and, and puts people through their mental paces so that it trains them in certain kinds of capacities and set a really good example and seems like Zhuangzi did both brilliantly. I still have a question that that sort of lingering from the, the disagreement that Ray and I were having right at the beginning, which has to do with the kind of upshot of this I, I definitely see it as being a world like imagine a world where everyone, almost everyone is Taoist. So I think you’re going to have less oppression, you’re gonna have less poverty, you’re going to have less war, you’re going to have more peace of mind. Where’s joy going to be though? Are we going to have joy? There are a bunch of quotes in the Zhuangzi that kind of troubled me a little bit where, you know, for example, “the consummate person uses his mind like a mirror: rejecting nothing, welcoming nothing.” Can I have my welcoming? Can I have a little bit of joy?

Paul Kjellberg
Define joy. I think a lot of what we take is joy, relief from the pain, that our desire for exuberance is expresses of our discomfort with the other five days. But it’s a good question. And other things. I don’t think Zhuangzi sat down to write a book. He wrote some things over the course of his life, there were probably different authors involved, but he probably changed himself. And with luck over the course of his wiping quite a few of his stories seem to memorialize the sort of turning points for him. So it’s hard to know, you know which stories came first and which came later? Or what was the trajectory of his thought, or where he ended up if that’s the right place or anything like that? It’s not clear at all. And there’s a single coherent vision, but more of a process of change are kind of like a piece of music underlying it all.

Josh Landy
Yeah, that’s of course very much in keeping with the overall philosophy, right. We are different from each other and we also change over life and we have to take those changes into account is that is there anything that stays relatively stable, but you know, some piece of advice that’s going to apply to most people at most times? So they’re like one example that leapt out for me has to do with moderation, right? So there’s that story early in the Zhuangzi about Shuyo, who is offered an emperor ship and rejects it saying, when the beaver drinks from the river, it takes only enough to fill its belly. Don’t drink more than you are thirsty, don’t eat more than you’re hungry. Does that seem like a piece of wisdom applies broadly to you know, pretty much everybody at any time?

Paul Kjellberg
Depends on who you ask. Another classic example of a story where there’s quite a bit of debate about who’s the hero of that story. Shuyo was talking to this confusion, Sage Emperor Yao, who wants to give up his kingdom is I want to just do nothing. And one reading of the story is that shoe yields responding to him is Yao, your yell for you doing? Nothing is being Yeah. So give up giving up and go back to doing your job. Maybe there’s a there’s a time and a place for excess? Perhaps.

Ray Briggs
So I want to come back to like all of these other participants in the dialogue, who I gather were like real people that Zhuangzi knew and talk to and was responding to. And might some of them might have had a hand in writing this. Do you think that having multiple people in this dialogue helps sort of Zhuangzi or the text of the Zhuangzi like, have more perspectives and be more open? Is there something better about having a conversation between a bunch of people than just talking to yourself?

Paul Kjellberg
That’s perfectly likely that he was playing out conversations in his head. I actually talked to him to a fifth grade class. And one of them we were describing a story about pulling the fish turning to the bird Pong in the first chapter. And one of the little girl said that she thought he was trying to think through something with it. But I think they might almost be internal dialogues between characters. That said, not all of them are real people. On his friend waits, it was a real person. But plenty of the other characters are clearly fictional. Sometimes they have obviously fictional names, sometimes not, like out of step woman or something like that. But then Zhuangzi will also—I only recently discovered this—he made up characters. I don’t mean made up characters like people, he made up Chinese characters. There are words that aren’t used anywhere else in all of ancient Chinese literature. There’s so many of them I’m convinced he was just making some of them up.

Josh Landy
That’s fantastic.

Paul Kjellberg
No one knows how they’re pronounced, no one knows what they mean. He was just making up noises. Which goes back to his, you know, we think language is different from the twittering of sparrows, because words mean something. But if they don’t mean anything, what’s the difference?

Josh Landy
Yeah. What is it that Zhuangzi says, “Where can I find a man who has forgotten words, so I can have a few words with him?” It’s such a great little joke. Can I ask you a question about the social arrangements? Because we’ve been talking quite a bit about individuals finding their way not to make a ton of it. But what about views? We’re assuming that we leave a social arrangement more or less as it is, is there a better or worse social arrangement as far as trunkshow is concerned? And if there’s a worst one, is it even possible to be sort of full blown Dallas and sort of make things work out?

Paul Kjellberg
There were a few groups kind of radically questioning the social order at the time, but not very many, not very much. dongs response more was to flee it to reject it. There’s some stories about him being asked to serve in government and refusing to, I think, you know, the tiny lived in was called the Warring States. And it was getting worse and worse and worse. And I think it seems plausible, not certain, but possible, that both louds and Jones are kind of figured, if they’re good, people are gonna tear themselves apart, and it doesn’t look like we’re gonna be able to stop them. So we can just choose not to do that. So it might be not a question of either saving the world or not, but just escaping with your life from a world it’s not going to pull itself out of this nosedive.

Josh Landy
Right. But that do seem to be some moments at which a world is envisaged almost kind of Rousseau-ist back to nature kind of picture. You know, tear everything down, destroy treasure, get rid of musical instruments, no carpentry, and let’s live really simply, but maybe that’s just one voice in the Zhuangzi.

Paul Kjellberg
Yeah,there are a lot of different voices and we’ve some of them are almost surely different authors. But it he overblow that because Zhuangzi himself surely went through many different phases, and doubtless had many different moods. I don’t think he would have been shy about indulging them.

Josh Landy
Paul, it has been far from useless, this conversation. I don’t mean that as an insult, I mean as a compliment. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Paul Kjellberg
My pleasure. Thank you very much.

Josh Landy
Our guest has been Paul Kjellberg, professor of philosophy at Whittier College and editor of “Skepticism, Relativism, and Ethics in the Zhuangzi. So Ray, what are you thinking now?

Ray Briggs
Well, I’m thinking that birds gotta fly and fish gotta swim. And I gotta enjoy making Philosophy Talk because it’s in my nature.

Josh Landy
Yeah. Even if we don’t get the Nobel Peace Prize for having Yeah, the doors. We’ll put links to everything we’ve mentioned today on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you can also become a subscriber and dive into our library of more than 500 episodes.

Ray Briggs
And if you have a question that wasn’t addressed in today’s show, we’d love to hear from you. Send it to us at comments@philosophytalk.org and we may feature it on the blog.

Josh Landy
Now, a man so fast he makes everyone else look useless—it’s Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales… The Zhuangzi is like a really deep joke book.  Chock full of little anecdotes designed to deny everything you know.  Which people enjoy, so long as they don’t REALLY have to deny everything they know.  It’s like college kids, back when I was a college kid, blaming things on karma, which we thought meant “tragic flaw,” but was really just a thing that happens.  Karma could apply to the fall of Ozymandias, whoever he was, or going steady, passing a midterm, running out of gas.  Zhuangzi was a real person, but it’s also the umbrella name for all those who contributed to the output over many many years.  Kind of like the writers who put out Nancy Drew, who were less like ghost writers, and more like employees making product for the syndicate.  Or, if you will, followers of the Dao of Drew.  The little tome, called THE Zhuangzi, of his/their writings arose in a time of warlords and dynasty collapses, which may account for some of the willfully blase worldview.  The Zhuangzi gives a lot of attention to useless things – huge trees, for example, that are no good for lumber, or food.  Civilization wants to burn them down or chop them to flinders and so we can put in a rice paddy or a pavilion, condos, something you can use.  No no, says Zhuangzi, lie down under or upon the giant tree.  Take a nap.  Leave the useless tree alone.  Quit chopping things down for a darn minute.  Still, Zhungzi is accepting of the world as it is, ambitions greed and all, and even is willing to contribute to it if we follow the Dao.  Our best moments, he claims, are intuitive, and come after we know what we’re doing.  We learn to ride a bike, and after that we don’t think about it.  Habit leads to second nature, which is part of nature, and nature is the way.  It’s all pretty basic, yet a bit magical.  Thomas Nagel wrote an essay “What is it like to be a bat,” often used to inspire classroom discussions about consciousness, concluding that we might know what it’s like to hang upside down, or fly at night, or even echolocate with the proper training, but we can’t really know what a bat’s experience is like.  That’s why we have AI.  Duh.  But now we return to Zuangzi, who lived over 2000 years ago, and his most famous story, about dreaming he was a butterfly, and then waking up to be Zhuangzi and wondering if he was dreaming he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he’s Zhuangzi.  HEAVY!  The butterfly or me paradox echoes Quantum physics, in which subatomic thingies can be both wave and particle until you look at them.  It all seems kind of creepy and inexplicable, or in the case of understanding bats, frustrating.  Don’t sweat it says Zhuangzi.  This is all just a moment in the flow.  So just as learning to play the guitar enables you to annoy people at parties without looking at your fingers, so too does writing and thinking make it easier to make our way in this ever shifting world.  Markers, signs, bridges to the other side.  Here’s another story.  Zhuangzi and Huizi, his Daoist friend, were strolling along the dam of the Hao River when Zhuangzi said, “See how the minnows come out and dart around where they please! That’s what fish really enjoy!”  Huizi said, “You’re not a fish—how do you know what fish enjoy?”  Zhuangzi said, “You’re not me, so how do you know that I don’t know what fish enjoy?”  Huizi said, “I’m not you, so I don’t know what you know. But you’re not a fish—so that still proves that you don’t know what fish enjoy!”  Zhuangzi said, “Let’s go back to your original question. You asked me how I know what fish enjoy—so you already knew that I knew it when you asked the question. I know it by standing here beside the river.” Sure, that’s species ist, and exhibits alarming amounts of subjectivism and privilege, but maybe these weren’t minnows, but koi fish he’s talking about, which are always relaxed and swimming around.  Not like barracuda or walleye or warlords, snapping at bait and racing to the bottom.  Koi enjoy life!  Therefore, a view from a bridge is always correct.   Like having a dream as you nap under a tree.  Also, to add more layers, Zhuangzi is not only the author and ghost writers he’s also the hero of this fish story, and the butterfly story, or the butterfly of the story, depending on where you came in.  This too is the way of Dao.  If you’re wandering, all thoughts are true. I gotta go.

Josh Landy
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW San Francisco Bay Area and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2023.

Ray Briggs
Our executive producer is Ben Trefny. The Senior Producer is Devon Strolovitch. Laura Maguire is our Director of Research.

Josh Landy
Thanks also to Jamie Lee, Elizabeth Zhu, Emily Wang, Merle Kessler, and Angela Johnston.

Ray Briggs
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Josh Landy
And from the members of KALW local Public Radio San Francisco, where our program originates.

Ray Briggs
The views expressed (or mis-expressed) on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders.

Josh Landy
Not even when they’re true and reasonable. The conversation continues on our website, philosophtalk.org, where you can become a subscriber and gain access to our library of more than 500 episodes.

Bryan Van Norden
I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.

She’s Out of My League
It’s done man—the Tao of Love. You being with Molly defies, like, forces of nature. It’s over, man.