- Length
- 400 pagesZiporyn, Zhuangzi: The Complete Writings, Hackett, 2020
- Reading
- DemandingReadable with attention; assumes no other book
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
Zhuangzi
The strangest and most enjoyable book in classical Chinese philosophy, arguing through stories that every judgement is made from a position and that the position is doing most of the work. It has never been anyone's orthodoxy and has never gone unread.
- Date
- c. 320 BC and later
- Attributed to
- Zhuang Zhou and later hands
- Region
- The state of Song, southern China
- Language
- Classical Chinese
- 1889 English, Herbert Giles Public domain Attested
- 1968 English, Burton Watson Long the standard English; in copyright Attested
- 2020 English, Brook Ziporyn Complete, with selected commentaries; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Exchange — Both: answers an earlier work and drew a later one
- Form
- Compiled
- Method
- Narrative — Argument carried by story, image or confession
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
Never lost, never orthodox, and read continuously for two thousand years by people who had no intention of following it.
What the book says
Thirty-three chapters of stories, dialogues and arguments, and the funniest book in ancient philosophy. A cook cuts up an ox for nineteen years without sharpening his blade, because he has stopped looking and lets the knife find the spaces that are already there. A man dreams he is a butterfly and wakes not knowing whether he is a man who dreamt of being a butterfly or a butterfly now dreaming it is a man. A vast gourd is useless for anything until someone suggests using it as a boat. Confucius appears constantly and is generally being corrected - by hermits, by cripples, by a robber, and once by a man with no feet whom students avoid until they realise he is the teacher. The philosophical core is an argument about perspective. Every judgement of big and small, useful and useless, right and wrong is made from somewhere, and the somewhere is what produces the judgement; a fish and a bird do not disagree about water, they occupy it differently. From this comes a suspicion of all disputation, including a famous exchange with a logician friend about whether one can know what fish enjoy. Death is treated the same way, as a change of state that looks calamitous only from here.
What it argues
That distinctions are perspectival all the way down, and that recognising this changes how one lives rather than what one believes. Big and small, useful and useless, even life and death are relations between a thing and a standpoint, and disputes about them are usually disputes about where to stand disguised as disputes about what is the case. The positive recommendation is a kind of responsiveness: the cook, the swimmer, the wheelwright and the cicada-catcher all do something perfectly and none of them can explain it, because the skill lies in having stopped imposing a scheme on the material. Where the Daodejing states this, the Zhuangzi shows people doing it.
What it answered
Analects c. 5th-3rd century BCConfucius and disciples
Confucianism first, and the Mohists and logicians alongside. Against the Mohists the objection is that their doctrine is too austere for anyone to live and that they are miserable; against the logicians, that winning an argument establishes who argued better and nothing else - if you and I dispute and you win, are you right? The deeper target is the assumption all three share, that the human standpoint is the one from which things can be assessed.
What answered it
Xunzi 3rd century BCXun Kuang
Xunzi, briefly and sharply, in his survey of contemporaries: too much Heaven, not enough people. The charge is that a philosophy of shifting perspectives cannot ground institutions, education or obligation, all of which require a standpoint one is not free to leave. Later Confucians repeated it. What is notable is that almost nobody tried to refute the metaphysics; the standing objection has always been about consequences rather than truth.
How it argues
By story, and the stories are the argument rather than illustrations of it. A point about perspective made discursively invites a counter-argument from another perspective; the same point made by a fish, a butterfly and a one-legged man leaves the reader having occupied three positions. The book also argues discursively when it wants to, and the second chapter is as tight a piece of reasoning about the limits of disputation as anything in the period. The mixture of registers is the reason it survives translation better than most classical Chinese texts and the reason it is hard to summarise without flattening.
The moment
Late Warring States, and the author declined to participate in it. The best-known biographical story has Zhuang Zhou offered the chief ministership of Chu and refusing, on the grounds that a sacrificial ox is well fed for years and then led into the temple. The book's persistent interest in uselessness - the tree too gnarled to be worth felling, which is why it is old - is a position about how to survive a dangerous century as much as a metaphysics.
How it travelled
Continuously and unofficially. Never part of the examination curriculum and never a school's charter, it was read by everyone anyway - it shaped Chinese poetry and landscape painting, supplied Chan Buddhism with much of its vocabulary and manner when Indian Buddhism arrived, and gave the literati a language for what they thought outside their official duties. It reached Europe in the nineteenth century and has had an unusual reception in Western philosophy, taken up by readers interested in scepticism, in relativism and in skilled action.
The strongest objection
Xunzi's, and the book invites it. If every standpoint is one among many, then the standpoint from which that is asserted is one among many too, and the text acknowledges this with apparent cheerfulness rather than answering it. The practical version is harder: someone has to build the roads, and a philosophy that treats the useful as merely one perspective on the useless has nothing to say to the person doing it. Defenders answer that the book is a corrective rather than a complete ethics, and is addressed to people who have already over-invested in one standpoint - which is a good reply and concedes the point.
Why read it
Because it is the only book in this section that is genuinely funny, and because the stories work on a reader who is not trying to extract a doctrine. Read the first seven chapters, which are the ones by Zhuang Zhou; the cook, the butterfly, the useless tree and the argument about the fish are all there, and they take an evening.
- First printed
- 1445
- First in English
- 1889
- Digitised
- Yes
Guo Xiang's edition of about 300 AD is the only complete text and he reduced a fifty-two-chapter version to thirty-three. What he removed is unknown, and his commentary is inseparable from the text as transmitted.
Legge's 1891 and Giles' 1889 English are public domain. Watson, Graham and Ziporyn are in copyright, and Graham's rearrangement of the text is itself a scholarly argument.
Where it stands
Live and unusually well regarded. Analytic philosophers have engaged with the second chapter's arguments about disputation and self-refutation, and the accounts of skill have been discussed alongside work on expertise and tacit knowledge.
On quoting this book
The Chinese is public domain and the Victorian versions are too, but the passages everyone knows circulate in modern in-copyright translations. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Only the inner chapters are generally credited to Zhuang Zhou, and the outer and miscellaneous chapters include material by writers who disagree with him. Guo Xiang's reduction from fifty-two chapters to thirty-three means the text we read was shaped by an editor with his own philosophical commitments, and what he cut is unknown. Whether the book is best read as scepticism, relativism, mysticism or a therapy for over-committed intellectuals is argued in all four directions. And whether the biographical anecdotes describe a person or are literary constructions cannot be determined.