Organizer and Chair: Jonathan R. Herman, St. Lawrence University
Discussant: Roger T. Ames, University of Hawai'i
Ever since the earliest redactions of this presumably Daoist document, the identity and purport of Zhuangzi have been debated vigorously. Over the years, the text has been variously identified as a mystic's chronicle, a work of radical individualism, a philosophical statement of freedom, and even a linguistic and epistemological treatise. It has indirectly informed the legacies of Daoist asceticism, landscape painting, and romantic poetry, while also contributing to the ancestries of traditions as diverse as Chan Buddhism and shamanistic immortality cults. The text has been viewed as both brilliant pastoral literature and the abject remnant of a moribund slave owning class, and it continues to be employed by monastic communities as a manual for meditation.
On this panel, we will further expand the range of debate on Zhuangzi by bringing together four papers, each of which is grounded in rigorous textual analysis yet presents an unconventional perspective on the subject. Cumulatively, these papers provide cause to rethink the most elemental questions about the text and its author. What was the original intent of the historical Zhuangzi? How is the Zhuangzi related to other early documents and movements that have been labeled Daoist? What is the implicit relationship between the text and its audience? How does the author's choice of language contribute to the text's didactic qualities? What other models of meaning can be employed to flesh out new, legitimate readings of the text? Finally, how can the scholarly community make intellectual sense of the fact that Zhuangzi lends itself so easily to such a diverse scope of interpretations and interpretive models?
Chad Hansen, University of Hong Kong
In the frenzy of excitement generated by the discovery of two silk manuscripts of the Daodejing, Zhuangzi has been cast adrift-alone to confront the dogmatists, authoritarians, and control freaks. Laozi has been kidnapped by a quasi legalistic ruler cult-a group of bandits going by the name of Huang Lao. Today, I suspect, many would regard the phrase "Lao Zhuang philosophy" as an anachronism-something invented by Wang Bi. I will argue that this fashionable debunking of the traditional lineage of Daoism is premature.
A different debunking, however, might be in order, i.e., Zhuangzi should be treated as the founding voice of Daoism and Laozi as his second. This should change our conception of Daoism. I will not argue that Laozi wrote anything or even lived. I will draw on A. C. Graham's view that the Zhuangzi may well have predated the coming together of the Daodejing as a text. Graham speculates tantalizingly that the persona of Laozi might have been a mischievous invention of Zhuangzi or his school. I will argue that Graham's skeptical theory, together with the other uses of Laozi or Lao Tan in the Zhuangzi, justify us in continuing to speak of a Lao Zhuang tradition. It should, however, be identified more by Zhuangzi's views than the supposed doctrine in the Daodejing.
The next question is whether that "tradition" should be identified as Daoist? How does its essence justify the term? I will argue that the Zhuangzi's internal genealogy gives us a viable standard of Daoist philosophy that meaningfully sets Daoism apart from authoritarian and reactionary movements. That core, however, conflicts with the dogmatic, intuitionist, sage ruler elements now frequently identified as Daoist. The alternative is to retain the traditional broad scope of Daoist and discover its essence by asking what each element within the scope has in common which distinguishes it from those excluded from the scope. The drawback of that approach is that it blocks even formulating the skeptical question and then threatens to make the name useless-there may be no coherent essence linking all such diverse views. Thus, contrary to the trend, I will argue we are comparably more justified in denying the label "Daoist" to the Huang Lao tradition (its ancestors and progeny) than in denying it to the Lao Zhuang tradition.
Paul Kjellberg, Whittier College
Zhuangzi's "Qi Wu Lun" presents a series of skeptical arguments which challenge the possibility of establishing any one position as definitively right. By the same token, however, they also challenge the possibility of establishing any position as definitively wrong, either. They are compatible with the kind of relativism Chad Hansen ascribes to Zhuangzi, but are equally compatible with its rejection, or any other position at all, for that matter. The skeptical arguments are normatively neutral and do not entail or even enjoin any positive position whatsoever. Indeed, they do not even entail skepticism since, if people really cannot know what position, if any, is the right one, then there is no obvious reason why they are better off knowing this. Thus we cannot tell just by looking at the arguments themselves what Zhuangzi was trying to do with them; if we want to figure this out, we will have to look somewhere else.
After having rehearsed the above reflections, in the second part of my paper I will try to place some parameters on Zhuangzi's positive project by approaching it through his negative one. By looking at the kinds of images and examples Zhuangzi uses, we can determine the particular sort of errors he was trying to avoid, i.e., mistakes due to narrow minded commitment to a single perspective. This in turn will allow us to determine types of positions he would not have advocated; certain positions, like relativism, while compatible with Zhuangzi's skeptical arguments, are clearly incompatible with his overall project, since they do nothing to alleviate narrow mindedness and may even encourage it. Such readings can therefore be excluded. While this analysis falls short of providing an adequate characterization of Zhuangzi's positive vision, it does generate some significant insights into the kinds of interpretations we can rule out.
Jonathan R. Herman, St. Lawrence University
This paper brings yet another voice to Zhuangzi, as it interprets the text through the lens of Martin Buber's "dialogical principle," the intricate philosophy expounded in his 1923 classic, I and Thou. This unorthodox approach is methodologically justified by the fruits of Buber's own encounter with Zhuangzi more than a decade earlier, when he published a German translation of and commentary on the text. In this romantic and impressionistic volume, Buber develops a unique hermeneutic-one that has since been unintentionally echoed by numerous sinologists-where textual "meaning" is identified not with the reconstructed intent of the author, but with the self transformation of the reader inspired by the encounter with the text. That is to say, the locus of inquiry is shifted away from the text as a frozen philosophical document, and toward the organic and flexible "conversation" between text and interpreter. And while the issues raised directly in Buber's commentary are worthwhile in and of themselves, it is more interesting to note the tremendous thematic continuity between Buber's "proto dialogical" interpolations of Zhuangzi and the mature dialogical position developed in I and Thou. As a consequence to Buber's proposed hermeneutic model, this resonance might suggest that the latter represents a continuation of the process of self transformation begun during the original encounter. In other words, I and Thou can be imaginatively conceived, in part, as an interpretation of Zhuangzi.
Of course, this claim could simply be dismissed as post modernist sophistry, were it not demonstrable that the dialogical principle does, in fact, bring much to an understanding of Zhuangzi. The body of this paper relies on rigorous historical philological method to explore a dialogical reading of the text, to illustrate how an analogue to Buber's I Thou relation is actually latent in the pages of the original Chinese. Specifically, this new interpretive framework provides an important conceptual link between Zhuangzi's implicit metaphysics and his playful mystical vignettes. The argument begins with a discussion of three related points: the nature of Dao, the principle of equality, and oneness within transformation. It moves on to illustrate the aesthetic orientation toward existential reality and the role of mysticism in the text, and concludes by considering the concept of presence.
Kuang-ming Wu, National Chung-Cheng University
What makes Zhuangzi captivating and uplifting is the fact that whatever spicy things he says pungently reflect life as it should spontaneously be lived. Because our life, concrete and specific as it is, remains human throughout, what he says about it remains as universally concrete as our linguistic expression of it is; life's expressions are as eternally contemporary as life's meaning is. And so we first clue ourselves into Zhuangzi's world by noting some traits in some of our English adjectives. Then, seeing them in the delightful adversarial Zhuangzi Huizi "team," we glimpse internal iconoclasm that contributes crucially to Zhuangzi's nonchalant spontaneity.
The following adjectives are significant, all with a tacitly iconoclastic prefix, "un ": "uneventful," "unfixed," "unflagging," "unflappable." Being part of the words, the prefix subtly turns around the tenors of the prefix less words. The prefix has three traits, then. Its subtlety bespeaks its tacitness. Being part of the words, the prefix is chiasmically in them, thereby turning their expressive tenors around. The prefix is thus performative, internally iconoclastic.
All characteristics of these prefixed adjectives serve to vivify and refresh life. Gracie Allen visibly exemplifies her subtle chiasmic iconoclasm in such "un "ed words. Her role as her husband George Burns's "unflappable foil" reminds us of Huizi and Zhuangzi's playful "adversarial" (iconoclastic) relation, which delightfully concludes several chapters of Zhuangzi.
The above description vignettes Zhuangzi with two points: his iconoclasm and, consequently, his nonchalance. This paper explores those two points respectively, then their inter relation-his iconoclasm as tacit, his unity of iconoclasm with nonchalance as chiasmic, and his resulted ironic playfulness as irenic. Tacit, chiasmic, irenic-they spell nonchalant "spontaneity" vivified by its constitutive iconoclasm.
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