Eric S. Nelson: Review of Hiding the World in the World

Eric Sean Nelson

Review of Hiding the World in the World: Uneven Discourses on the Zhuangzi. Edited by Scott Cook.

(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. 320 pp.)

Journal of Chinese Philosophy 32:3 (September 2005) 529–532

[Page 529]

Scott Cook is to be commended for gathering a collection of nuanced and provocative readings of the Zhuangzi in this anthology. Although the primary focus of many of the articles is the Qiwulun chapter, there are also substantial discussions of other segments of the Inner Chapters. In his introduction, Cook explores the challenges of interpreting the Zhuangzi without explaining away its very richness, for it is precisely its use of playful, paradoxical, and aporetic language that makes it such a compelling work.

Given the recent focus on the Zhuangzi’s perspectivism, relativism, and skepticism, Harold Roth seeks to restore its “mystical dimension.” Instead of seeing the question of whether the Zhuangzi is a mystical or relativist text as an exclusive either/or, Roth argues that the Zhuangzi involves a bimodal mysticism that includes introvertive and extrovertive moments. Zhuangzi’s intra-worldly mysticism does not deny but calls on its readers to embrace the ordinary and everyday world. Roth convincingly examines passages that refer to or presuppose “Daoist” religious practices, especially those of the “inner cultivation” tradition. Zhuangzi’s commitment to inner cultivation can be found in his discussions of the fasting of the mind and the emptying of the self, genuine breathing coming from the heels and other passages related to breathing meditation, sitting and forgetting, letting the body drop away and expelling knowledge, and the critique of “small” knowledge in the name of “great” knowledge. Zhuangzi’s “mysticism” is a spontaneous openness and responsiveness to the situation and experiencing the dao immanently in relation to the everyday world of distinctions rather than some irrational union with a supernatural, transcendent, or metaphysical entity or static absolute called the Dao. Zhuangzi’s skepticism is not doctrinal but used methodologically against propositional and conceptual fixity. Roth shows how Zhuangzi’s distinction between the contrived (weishi) and adaptive (yinshi) “that’s it” challenges the individual’s confinement to the self, its schemas, and one limited perspective in order to be “illumined” in the equalizing and holistic perspective of the dao such that one responsively lodges things in the ordinary.

[Page 530] Brook Ziporyn and Scott Cook examine, in their contributions, whether and how the Zhuangzi privileges oneness. Ziporyn explores the apparent tension between asserting both the oneness and multiplicity of things and perspectives. Ziporyn challenges Hansen’s assertion of the incompatibility of “mystical” and “skeptical/relativist” tendencies by arguing that the Zhuangzi does not establish a unicentric but rather an “omnicentric” holism. The whole is not ordered from one privileged or absolute center but rather each point in any whole is itself a center. The assertion that each perspective is true is not theoretical but a self-referential and pragmatic truth confirmed by its performative demonstrability in any given perspective. The oneness of things is consequently the denial of definite knowledge and the possibility of responsively wandering free and at ease in a transforming world. Cook investigates the oneness of things by examining the issue of individual value and meaning in confrontation with the inevitable and equalizing character of death. Asking whether the image of the panpipes of heaven (tianlai) is a celebration of life or only noise, Cook responds that it is paradoxically precisely by forgetting the self that one learns to listen to this symphony of life and death such that oneness is found precisely in the diversity and harmony in cacophony. The first three articles reinforce each other by showing how a kind of pluralistic holism is at work in the Zhuangzi.

Chad Hansen continues his argument from previous works that Zhuangzi is a thoroughgoing relativistic philosophical skeptic rather than a “mystical guru.” For Hansen, these two positions are incompatible, although his own assertion that there is no need to assume one consistent position for a text such as the Zhuangzi, much less for an author, would seem to imply that mysticism and skeptical relativism are not necessarily incompatible. Hansen rightly argues that the Zhuangzi’s dao should be understood in its ancient Chinese context, although this should include “religious” as well as “philosophical” texts, and provocatively interprets the dao through its practical context as a recommendation for anarchy. Dan Lusthaus also emphasizes the Zhuangzi’s practical character. But for Lusthaus, Zhuangzi is not a radical skeptic but a “critical thinker” who selectively uses skepticism to articulate his own prescriptive yet aporetic ethics. Zhuangzi rejected knowledge for the primacy of the ethical. Zhuangzi’s aporetic ethics accordingly adopts a perspectival attitude in order to use this very indeterminacy as an immanent and anarchic grounding for the ethical itself. Zhuangzi’s critique of various positions is motivated by this open and aporetic ethics that productively welcomes and employs the paradoxicality and questionability of [Page 531] things. Like the preceding two articles, Alan Fox takes up the practical dimension of the Zhuangzi. Fox stresses the recognition and role of perspectival limits in his study of “non-action” (wuwei) and related notions in the Zhuangzi. For Fox, wuwei should be understood as a prudential sense of appropriateness letting one match up and fit with the unique situations which one encounters. This variation on virtue ethics results in a freedom from slavish commitments to rigid principles that cause one to act inappropriately and unresponsively. Wuwei, as the hinge of the dao, is not indifference to the world. It is an effortless and unobtrusive responsiveness allowing one to expect the unexpected with an open-minded disposition. This engagement with the world calls us to precisely embrace its fullness and richness rather than pass it over in rigid conceptions and practices of the self.

Paul Goldin, Rur-Bin Yang, and Michael Puett raise questions of mind, body, and spirit. Goldin argues for the presence of the mind/body problem in ancient Chinese thought, including the Zhuangzi. For Goldin, since the “mind” (xin) can be constant and at ease despite a changing world and body, there must be a disembodied mind. Goldin utilizes references to the unchanging character of mind in relation to changing matter and qi to suggest that the equality and constancy of mind is independent of these. If true, this mind/body dualism would call for a radical reinterpretation of the Zhuangzi since it seems to undermine the transformation of all things, the affective and bodily character of xin argued for by Yang, and the interpretation that equanimity and constancy are a responsive being at ease in and throughout these transformations rather than being separate from them. The important bodily basis of Zhuangzi’s thought emerges in Yang’s careful examination of the body as a kind of “common sense” embodying and living the dao as well as how the entire body becomes “perceptualized.” Both xin and qi need to be interpreted in terms if the unitary experience of the body in the Zhuangzi. The difference between spirit-man (shenren) and ritual specialists (wu) provides a different way to pursue the issue of spirit in the Zhuangzi. According to Puett, other texts of the period are critical of wu even as they share the goal of gaining knowledge and power over things through the cultivation of qi. In a fascinating argument, Puett illustrates how Zhuangzi rejects both of these tendencies, since the truly spiritual are not concerned with power at all. They paradoxically liberate themselves by no longer being dependent even on these spiritual practices, as can be seen from Zhuangzi’s ironic portrayal of Liezi. For Puett, Zhuangzi is neither a skeptic or relativist but a cosmologist who locates freedom in accepting the order of heaven and accordingly one’s place in the world.

[Page 532] Finally, Shuen-Fu Lin examines A. C. Graham’s translation of the Zhuangzi and demonstrates how he embodied the ideal of being a literal translator by attempting to articulate the original text’s mode of signification. Lin criticizes Graham’s translation because of his questionable understanding of what a text generally and an ancient Chinese text in particular is. Arguing that the Inner Chapters have their own intricate logic and unfolding of ideas, he finds Graham’s rearrangement of the Zhuangzi flawed.

This volume should be welcomed for illustrating both the diversity of contemporary approaches to the rich and enigmatic text attributed to Zhuangzi as well as the continuing debate and intense disagreement over its significance.

Eric Sean Nelson

University of Massachusetts Lowell

Lowell, MA

Journal of Chinese Philosophy 32:3 (September 2005) 529–532