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“Students always fall in love with Zhuangzi. It’s a philosophical work that makes its points through a combination of explicit arguments, very intriguing short stories, and poetry. One of Zhuangzi’s most interesting philosophical arguments is a kind of regress argument for scepticism. He says: ‘Suppose you and I are arguing and I win the argument.’ He doesn’t specify what counts as winning an argument, but I think that’s part of the genius of his account: you can specify whatever conception of ‘winning’ you wish. So Zhuangzi asks, ‘Well, does the fact that I won the argument mean that I’m right and you’re wrong?’ The idea is that we cannot think that winning an argument guarantees that the conclusion is correct, because we know of cases where people ‘win’ arguments that we think they shouldn’t have won, where the other person simply couldn’t think of a response on the fly, or the audience or judge shouldn’t have been persuaded by the argument. But then Zhuangzi says: ‘So all we know in an argument is who wins according to some criteria. That doesn’t show us who is right. And we don’t have access to anything except different criteria for judging that someone has or hasn’t won an argument, which in each case will be inadequate to establish what’s actually right.'” Read more...
The best books on World Philosophy
Bryan Van Norden, Philosopher
“What the Zhuangzi is trying to do is to break us out of our patterns of thinking….The way the Zhuangzi will do it is through this extraordinary, imaginative prose that will try, in the very way it’s written, to break us from our limited perspectives. So, as you’re reading it, you will take the point of view of a butcher, you will take the point of view of a bird, of a piece of bark, a fish. Zhuangzi is trying to break us out of our limited understandings so that we begin to get a sense of the world as endless flux, endless transformation, in which, if we can train ourselves to do so, we can begin to understand its tremendous multiplicity.” Read more...
The Best Chinese Philosophy Books
Michael Puett, Historian
