The thing most important

1 Purposed ambiguity

Few indeed are the philosophers whose most salient attribute is their ambiguity. Zhuangzi is just such a one. His very method makes abundantly clear that he wishes us to be forever off-balance, unsure of what he actually believes – if anything at all. This was recognized by some of his earliest interpreters. The author of the Tianxia chapter of the Zhuangzi, likely written in the late Third Century BCE (Liu 1994: 185) makes much of this:

So confused – where is it all going? So oblivious – where has it all gone? […] He used ridiculous and far-flung descriptions, absurd and preposterous sayings, senseless and shapeless phrases, indulging himself unrestrainedly as the moment demanded, uncommitted to any one position, never looking at things exclusively from any one corner. He considered the world so sunken in the mire that it was pointless to say anything in earnest, so he used spillover-goblet words for unbroken extension of his meanings […]. Vague! Ambiguous! We have not got to the end of them yet. (Ziporyn 2020: 272)

All this is just as Zhuangzi himself would have had it. If there was a Zhuangzi. And if an extant Zhuangzi wrote anything of the book that bears his name. And if his interpreters, ancient and contemporary, have just all been too dense to discern his clear and unambiguous meanings. What we discover then is that whatever we think we know of Zhuangzi, the words that he ostensibly wrote, our present attempts to expound upon them, or the interpretative adaptations he is thought to have inspired are all just a kind of not-really-knowing-at-all. This, however, brings us full circle, since this is precisely what we believe Zhuangzi was telling us: that we cannot really know anything for sure and that this very not-knowing is the key that opens us to an entirely new way of viewing our world and our situation within it. We cannot therefore honestly presume to pronounce upon this philosophy with any degree of assurance. This may not be as we would have it, but it seems to be just as Zhuangzi himself would have had it.

Having confessed our doubts concerning the actual existence of Zhuangzi or his role in creating anything within the Zhuangzi, we will nonetheless proceed on the assumption that he did exist and wrote at least some portion of the Inner Chapters from which we draw most of our conclusions regarding his ostensible philosophy. We can do so because, if we are to affirm what we believe to be that philosophy, the supposed truth of things does not here matter. To declare the verisimilitude of our conclusions would be to negate them. To exercise that philosophy here we cannot declare our conclusions to be “right,” but only one possibility among many. What matters most within the context of Zhuangzi’s thought is the experiential outcomes of our endeavors. We do not have to get it right to get it. And yes, for Zhuangzi, experiential outcomes, not intellectual conclusions, are the whole point of his philosophizing. This is not to say that our collective attempts to understand this philosophy should not proceed in as cogently an informed way as possible – the more so the better. But as with all things Zhuangzian, our conclusions, however informed by scholarship, must be seen in the larger context of our essential not-knowing. The Zhuangzian ambiguity so clearly evinced in his method of writing is, in the final analysis, the central point of his entire enterprise. As in philosophical Daoism generally, so too in Zhuangzi: what is left out, what cannot be articulated, is the most important thing of all.

2 Essential not-knowing

We know many things, an apparent infinity of things, but we don’t know if all this knowing is not really a kind of not-knowing. It would be great to have the answers to life’s greatest questions, Zhuangzi opines, but even when we think we may have answered one or all, we discover that our answers have no reliable foundation. Knowledge, we discover, is “peculiarly unfixed” (Ziporyn 2020: 53). It is, as Kierkegaard observed, like sewing without a knot at the end of our thread. For all our stitching together of elaborate intellectual constructs, it continually unravels behind us. How can we know that we know? How can we know that we do not know? At best we can only “recklessly” affirm some things and deny others (Ziporyn 2020: 19). This is our only and best option – the one that life requires. Like Newtonian physics it works, even if it falls short of a comprehensive explanation of things. We are thus immersed in a profound ambiguity. The only question is how we choose to live within it. And as in most Daoist thought generally, for Zhuangzi it is the lack, the void, the unintelligible that becomes the most important thing of all. It is ultimately from the meaningless that we discover our meaning – such as it is.

The passage from the Tianxia quoted above speaks to the purposeful elusiveness in Zhuangzi’s method. The message is very much in this medium. His “spillover-goblet words,” like Zen koans, are not riddles to be solved, but surds upon which to founder and in that foundering to discover an entirely new kind of buoyancy. Still, we can echo Zhuangzi’s imagined interlocutor and declare, “Speech has something of which it speaks, something it refers to” (Ziporyn 2020: 13). True, there are some real meanings to be found in these “absurd and preposterous sayings.” But once we think we might have grasped them, they are undermined by the very medium through which they are communicated. Everything seems so tongue-in-cheek. And even when some definitive assertion seems finally to have been made, it is quickly contradicted and overturned. Once we think we have filled our cup, it tips and spills all that we thought we had come to understand. Has nothing then been gained beyond an appreciation of the fallibility of words? Zhuangzi seems to have thought so. Indeed, his entire project appears to be directing us to something beyond words, something experiential that is predicated on the very failure of words.

The author of the Tianxia goes on to give his own elucidation of what he means by “spillover-goblet words”: they are “undepletable, giving forth new meanings without shedding the old ones” (Ziporyn 2020: 272). New meanings do not displace the old. Meanings are simply stacked new upon the old. The author clearly subscribed to a much more substantive view of things than we maintain here. Indeed, his entire project was an attempt to discover aspects of the definitive “ancient art of the Dao” in the thought of those who nonetheless adhere to only a small corner of it. Truth is to be had. The Dao can be spoken. Still, there is something instructive to be seen in this statement. It is not so much the meanings that abide as the impressions of the fluidity of meaning that their succession reveals. Eels like it cold and clammy, while humans like it warm and cozy. What is true for some is not true for all. What was true yesterday may not be true today. There are as many daos as there are pairs of feet to walk them. There are as many truths as there are minds to imagine and embrace them. There are daos and truths, but no Dao and no Truth that can be spoken.

The Tianxia also tells us that Tian Pian taught Peng Meng “the eschewal of all definite teachings” (Ziporyn 2020: 271). Whether this can be said of these two or not, we can certainly say that it appears to have been the case with Zhuangzi. The reason for this might be said to be twofold. On the one hand, we have sophisticated arguments for the abandonment of all dependence on reason as a final guide for the conduct of one’s life. Reason proves the unprovability of its proofs. No definite teachings are to be had. On the other hand, we have an invitation to release into the very not-knowing that those arguments demonstrate. It is the lack of anything definite to teach that creates a useless void that Zhuangzi suggests we make useful. We could say that the former leads to the latter, that our realization of the limits of reason leads us to pursue this alternative path, but there is also something viscerally experiential in the philosophy of Zhuangzi that precludes such an easy progression. We can ostensibly demonstrate the inadequacy of reason, but we cannot prove it. Ultimately, it is our experience of being fundamentally unmoored from any fixed and sure purpose or meaning that first leads us to and away from the promises of reason. We are adrift. This is our “existential dangle,” an unavoidable condition of our humanity. “The Radiance of Drift and Doubt is the sage’s only map,” concludes Zhuangzi (Ziporyn 2020: 16). The dao of Zhuangzi is the way of ambiguity, and this is rooted in the experience of being human. The drift and doubt are intrinsic, and the reason we seek something fixed and sure. Finding none, the Zhuangzian sage makes use of this apparent uselessness.

3 The usefulness of the useless

In this context, we might also consider the words of Zhuangzi’s friend and chief interlocutor, Huizi, that his words are “big but useless” (Ziporyn 2020: 8, 222). What, in his opinion, renders them useless? They fail to further the goals of human ambition. We gather from several anecdotes that personal ambition was indeed a driving motivation in Huizi’s life. And the Tianxia tells us that he loved debate and the confounding of others with his paradoxes chiefly in order to “show off” (Ziporyn 2020: 273). Though reason fails to adequately explain the world and the meaning of our place within it, as Huizi clearly believed he had demonstrated, this need not lead us to an ambiguous response to life. Indeed, it unambiguously leads us to the pursuit of the most immediate of human inclinations, the pursuit of power and prestige in the cause of self-aggrandizement. In Huizi’s opinion, Zhuangzi’s embrace of ambiguity rendered his philosophy useless because it ultimately led him to the abandonment of those pursuits.

Perhaps even following in Huizi’s footsteps, Zhuangzi came to many of the same conclusions as Huizi concerning the inability of reason to adequately ground our responses to life. Their answers to this problem were, however, radically different. We might say that Huizi’s skepticism led to cynicism, while it led Zhuangzi to a profound optimism. The one chose the negation of life’s most fundamental lessons, the other their affirmation. In the end, Huizi remained a rationalist; if reason proved unable to support a genuine raison d’être, then no such thing was on offer. Life is absurd. Zhuangzi, on the other hand, took this as an opportunity to look elsewhere. Life itself is life-affirming, and that suffices to provide a rationale for the affirmation of one’s own life experience, and indeed, of all things. Huizi took his “mind as his teacher”; Zhuangzi took life itself. “Thus what makes my life something good is what makes my death something good; considering my life good is what makes me consider my death good” (Ziporyn 2020: 56). This is a conclusion based not in reason – it cannot be proven – but in experience. Life self-affirms despite its embedding in oblivion. It is ultimately simply a choice to follow along.

Huizi’s pronouncement that Zhuangzi’s words are big but useless gives occasion for Zhuangzi’s demonstration of the usefulness of the useless. From various anecdotes and from assessments of Huizi’s character as described in the Zhuangzi, we gather that though these words might be high-flying, they were, in Huizi’s opinion, of no practical value, and that would entail the furtherance of one’s personal ambitions in the this-worldly realm. In the case of Huizi, if we are to believe the abovementioned references, this would involve the attainment of prestige (Ziporyn 2020: 271) and worldly power (Ziporyn 2020: 141). But these are precisely the things that Zhuangzi refutes in the first chapter of the Inner Chapters as examples of serious hindrances to a life of freedom, specifically freedom from all psychological dependence (Ziporyn 2020: 5). And in his more immediate refutations of Huizi’s criticism he declares that this kind of ambition, this usefulness, lands one in all sorts of problems. The nimble weasel is very proficient at catching mice, but this also lands it in a snare. The yak, on the other hand, is big and clumsy but no one will find it caught in a snare. Conversely, Huizi’s stink tree is completely useless from the point of view of a carpenter, but this very uselessness turns out to preserve its life. This is the practical usefulness of the useless (Ziporyn 2020: 7, 8).

This usefulness may not always be immediately obvious, but to the Daoist sage it is the most important thing of all, and its embrace leads to one of the clearest manifestations of sagacity: an apparent simple-mindedness. In the Laozi (20), the author tells us that people take him for an ignorant fool, just as Huizi opines of Zhuangzi. Others have the answers, but she does not. Others get ahead in the world, but he lags behind. And this, we gather, is exactly what we should expect in the case of a sage, should there be any such one. Anything else, a towering figure of spirituality and success, for example, would be a faux sage at best.

If, as has been suggested, much of what Zhuangzi wrote had Huizi in mind, then this could not be clearer than in his opening metaphor of the flight of the great bird Peng (Ziporyn 2020: 3, 4). Taking advantage of the monsoonal winds, it soars to incredible heights in order to complete its life’s journey to the bracketing Oblivion from which it arose and can only return. The little doves, the Huizis of the world, having observed this vast undertaking, laugh and mock it. What’s the point? It’s enough to flit from tree to tree; it’s enough to succeed in the mundane ambitions of life. This soaring journey seems a useless exertion to the doves, but for Peng it is a liberating soar upon the winds of innate existential frailty.

The usefulness of the useless thus has both-worldly and meta-worldly dimensions. It helps “keep one’s life intact,” keeps one from being ensnared in the consequences of worldly ambition, and it enables one to soar through life unencumbered by concerns for even that. The uselessness is only in the eyes of the Huizis of the world; the usefulness escapes them.

But there is something even more fundamental here, and this is still more germane to our present theme. The useless animates the heart of so-called Daoist philosophy. It is the hole at the center of a wheel, the windows and doorways of a house. This uselessness is equivalent to emptiness. These and everything else would be useless without this emptiness. Without uselessness nothing would be truly useful.

4 Inherent emptiness

None of this is simply speculative stargazing. It is born of the human experience. “Is human life always and everywhere such a daze? Or could it only be me who is dazed, while there are others who are undazed? Of humans is there anything or anyone undazed?” asks Zhuangzi (Ziporyn 2020: 13). He wants to know what this life experience is all about but can discover no answer. He seeks a Maker but can find none. He sees evidence of a Source everywhere he looks, but at best can only say: It is present only as an Absence. Similarly, he looks within in search of a master, someone in charge, a true self, a concrete someone he can lean on. But again, he can find no such self. This emptiness, it turns out, dwells at the very heart of the human experience, and because all things are filtered through that experience, it can also be said to permeate all things.

It is said of Daoism that it discovered the importance of Yin. What is Yin? Nothing. We can describe it by reflective analogy, say that it is the female, the hole in the wheel, the receptive valley, the empty space that occasions the arising of things. Yin/Yang is a conceptual model that is applicable on a multitude of levels. But ultimately Yin is quite literally nothing. The importance of nothing is that it brackets everything. There is no-thing outside the context of nothing. Yang, on the other hand, is every-thing. Yin is what is not; Yang is what is. All human activity is thus a perpetual yang-ing. This is what we do and know, our default response within the human experience. But Daoism realized that this too is embedded in nothing. And this suggests that even in the midst of all our yang-ing we would do well to consider the experience of Yin. For, as suggested above, there is a void, an emptiness, a yin, at the very core of our human experience. A life lived informed by this dimension of experience can be a life lived in greater authenticity. This too is the usefulness of the useless.

Daoism does not actually have much to say of Nothing. What could possibly be said? Daoism is much more focused on emptiness. What is emptiness? Emptiness is the experience of Yin in the context of Yang. For all its pointing to the dark side of the moon, Daoism is in fact entirely life-affirming. Nothing need be negated. Since we are an endless yang-ing let us yang on. Only let us do so as informed of Yin. The prioritization of Yin is only remedial; our yang-ing is happier and healthier when seen in the context of Yin.

We can say of a cup that it is empty, but it is a cup just the same. Daoism affirms both the cup and its emptiness. It affirms the totality of human experience, the knowing and the not-knowing, the gaining and the losing, the living and the dying. Yin/Yang is an important concept within Daoism because it speaks to the whole of human experience. We could say that the entirety of the philosophical Daoist project is an acknowledgement of and response to this unity of Yin/Yang. We are called upon to embrace both. Our raw human inclination, however, is to focus solely on Yang. In the context of our yang-ing, Yin appears as a negation. If Yang is life, then Yin is death. And we fear death. If Yang is a concrete self, a “soul,” then Yin is no-self-at-all, something akin to death itself. And there is perhaps no greater drive in the human psyche than to be a self, to be a someone. And why is this something for which we need to strive? Because Yin, a void, abides at the core of our self-experience. Not only does death loom large on the horizon of the future, but it also dwells in our hearts as an ever-present negation of our being in the form of an emptiness.

What Zhuangzi does is take a hard and honest look at his own experience. This is nowhere clearer than in the opening metaphor of the Qiwulun, the second chapter of the Zhuangzi. There is a great deal of huffing and puffing, disputation, among the forest’s trees as the wind rises, but it all returns to silence as the wind dies down. What truly animates all this? What truly animates our own ceaseless striving? There would seem to be a Mover, but we cannot discover it. It is present only in its absence. We can find no Mover for either the happening of the world or that of our own selves. This leads Zhuangzi, at least, to a bewilderment that today we might call existential despair. And this is his point of departure. All that precedes this metaphor and all that follows is his attempt to find an adequate response to this experience. This is about him. It is a philosophy of life.

5 Just be empty

To our thinking, for Zhuangzi it is our response to this unavoidable circumstance of humanity’s existential dangle, its inherent adriftness, that is of paramount importance. How he got there, though important, is only secondary at best. Much has been made of the elaborate arguments for some species of skepticism found especially in the Qiwulun, but from a Zhuangzian point of view, these can only be tentatively instructive. To take them otherwise would be to “take our mind as our teacher.” They are “reckless” words only to be taken “recklessly” (Ziporyn 2020: 19). The conclusions reached are necessarily self-effacing. If it can be said to have been demonstrated that nothing can be proven, then that proof is itself a contradiction.

Who or what can then be our true teacher? If we are to believe the title of the sixth chapter of the Zhuangzi, the Dazongshi, we can take “The Great Source as Teacher.” And what might this be? As we have already seen, it is a vast and inarticulable Absence. It is a Void, a Nothingness. But though we can say these words, we can have no idea what they really mean. What we can at least get an inkling of is what they mean when taken in the context of Something, our self-experience, and the world of that experience. And that, as we have seen, is Emptiness, a presence as an absence. The Great Source is an emptiness. And what can it teach us? Remain “a vacuity, nothing more” (Ziporyn 2020: 72). So concludes Zhuangzi, at any rate.

What does it mean to be empty? It is both something we already unavoidably are and something we apparently can also become. Our self-experience is fundamentally an emptiness, and therefore emptiness pervades all things in our experience. There is no one home – not really. Self, as Kierkegaard suggests, is a relationship, but unlike Kierkegaard, Zhuangzi can discover no Third Term, no Source, in which to ground it. Between “I” and “me” there is nothing. Taken together there is an emptiness. This is our unavoidable experience. It is not one that we are readily inclined to accept, however. We wish it to be otherwise and consequentially take our “me” as a concrete and fixed somebody. From a Zhuangzian perspective, this might not of itself be a problem. It’s all just a made-up world in any event. It’s all just an interpretation of a dream within a dream (Ziporyn 2020: 20), and if this interpretation works to get us through life, there’s no harm done.

But Zhuangzi sees it as problematical. It is the cause of most of our suffering and dysfunctionality. It is the source of our greatest fears – the loss of self in death and of its possible diminution in relation to oneself and others. All this fear and dysfunctionality is a consequence of our dependence on being a fixed someone, a self. This is made clear in his closing conclusions drawn from the story of Peng (Ziporyn 2020: 5). There we have three examples of those who have a self to bolster and protect. There is someone who becomes a person of political importance in some province. This may very well be a dig at Huizi, who is portrayed as having been foolishly fearful that Zhuangzi might unseat him from his governorship (Ziporyn 2020: 141). Power can be lost, and fear of that loss is a form of dependence. There is Song Rongzi, who drew a clear distinction between what he thought of his own self and what others thought of him. But he still had a self to protect. And there is Liezi, who was so spiritual that he could ride on the wind. But this just made him a “spiritual” someone dependent on being that someone dependent on the wind. Commitment to the idea of being a fixed and concrete self when no such thing can be said to be true to experience creates a form of dependence that requires perpetual striving and strife in the protection of self-image. It is the labor of Sisyphus, a continual plodding on the moving stair.

When, in the introduction to his metaphor of the trees, Ziqi is unloosed from his “me,” he realizes this fundamental emptiness experientially. And this is Zhuangzi’s no-self, or as Ziporyn has it, “no definite identity” (Ziporyn 2020: 5). When Ziqi declares “I have lost my me,” he is telling us that though some form of self remains, the “I” who speaks and self-identifies, there is nonetheless something novel in this experience. He has become unmoored from his “me,” which is to say he has gone adrift of a fixed and definitive self. For Zhuangzi, this equates with freedom. Freedom from what? Freedom from all forms of dependence. We see then that all this further elucidates his conclusions in the first chapter. “Thus I say, the Utmost Person has no definite identity, the Spiritlike Person has no particular merit, the Sage has no name” (Ziporyn 2020: 5). And all this is to say that such a one is free of all dependence. To be free of being a fixed self is to be free of the infinity of worries and concerns that arise from the attempt to perpetuate and protect that particular myth. For, as we have seen, what Ziqi experientially realized was what was already the case, that he was in fact empty at the core, that there never was a fixed-self to begin with. One is reminded of the purported words of the Buddha that he “gained absolutely nothing from ultimate, unsurpassable enlightenment.”

6 Just a thought experiment

The question remains, however, whether this is really of any practical value. Is this uselessness truly useful? What do we learn when we remember that it is unlikely that there ever was any such person as Ziqi who lost his “me”? Did Zhuangzi, if he existed, lose his “me”? Zhuangzi certainly seems to have thought it possible, though that does not mean that he realized any such thing in his own experience. This we cannot know. Furthermore, were we or anyone else to declare that we had done so, would that not violate the very spirit of Zhuangzi’s entire project? As we suggested at the beginning and have attempted to demonstrate throughout, ambiguity and its concomitant lack of all definitive teaching is the unrelenting guiding principle of Zhuangzi’s philosophy – if there was a Zhuangzi who philosophized or anyone who has correctly unraveled his meanderings. In the end, it is only through the exercise of this or any similar thought experiment of which we can say something of value might have been gained. And what is that? “The sage hides it in his embrace […]” (Ziporyn 2020: 17). But then it is unlikely there are now or have ever been any so-called sages.