Series on the History of Chinese Philosophy, Pt. 17
Cicada-catching with Zhuangzi
Dao Strategy, Moral Imagination, and the Genuine Person
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Q: “Why was the hipster so jealous of the cicada?”
A: “Because it stayed UNDERGROUND for 17 years!”
As the 17th part in the series, it’s only appropriate we talk about cicadas. You can check out previous entries, too:
We finished up Part 16 with an introduction to Butcher Ding’s “knack” and its association with what Zhuangzi called the “secret for nourishing life.”
As we saw, stories like this one run throughout the text (we called them knack passages) and they present characters who possess a unique combination of moral imagination and bodily spontaneity that we compared to the contemporary notion of “flow” psychology.
In this part, we’ll consider how that sort of knack might constitute a special type of moral knowledge.
To do so, I’ll highlight the Zhuangzi’s value pluralism, found in the various forms of life it depicts as “skillfully coping” with a transforming, natural world and a delusional Confucian society. The phrase “skillful coping” comes from the late phenomenologist Hubert Dreyfus, who endeavored to understand human expertise, and what it conveys is the type of improvisation performed when an expert encounters a novel challenge within their field.
If you check out the chart below, you can see the way Dreyfus laid out the progression of skill acquisition from novice to expertise. You’ll notice that, as one advances to the highest levels, a beginner’s reliance on rules, guidelines, and maxims slowly gives way to the adaptability, perspective, intuition, and imagination of an expert.
The similarities between Dreyfus’ account and Zhuangzi’s knack passages are remarkable. The knack passages display several virtues consistent with this modern conceptions of expertise — viz. embodied responsiveness, situational awareness, epistemic modesty aimed at self-improvement, and a willingness to bend or break rules toward a higher good. The name Zhuangzi gave to this kind of knacky comportment is dàoshù [道術] — or “dào strategy” — and it looks very much like Dreyfus’ “skillful coping.”
Here’s a chart locating the knack passages in the various chapters and “schools” of thought with which they’re associated…just in case you’re interested in reading them yourself.
Although there’s only a couple of these passages that are thought to be written by Zhuangzi himself, they share a common philosophical theme about dàoshù. As Robin Wang has described it:
the shu of the Dao is fitting one’s environment so well one forgets that it is even there… From the [dàoshù] point of view…morality is not about the dichotomy of right versus wrong or good versus bad, but rather aligning one’s activities with the force and propensity of the natural world. (p. 128–9)
Since Zhuangzi loved to talk about the dynamic flux of nature, it only makes sense that such alignment would be multiply realizable. In other words, there are many “paths” this kind of strategy might take… many dào within THE Dào.
Catching Cicadas and the Hipster Paradox
When Confucius was on his way to Ch’u, he passed through a forest where he saw a hunchback catching cicadas with a sticky pole as easily as though he were grabbing them with his hand.
Confucius said, “What skill you have! Is there a special dào to this?” (Ch. 19, Watson tr.)
The old man explains how he practiced for many months until he could make his body seem like an old tree-trunk and his arm like a withered branch (mimicking the cicadas’ natural habitat) and could narrow his focus until all he saw was cicada wings.
Confucius tells his disciples with admiration: “He keeps his will undivided and concentrates his spirit.”
If the story ended there, we might be left thinking Zhuangzi’s dàoshù was just a reboot of Confucian “carving and polishing” — i.e. an arduous STRIVING for moral goodness. But, in the following chapter (Chapter 20) we get a second story about cicada-catching:
Zhuang Zhou was rambling in the park of Diao-ling when he saw a weird magpie coming from the south. It had wings seven-feet in width, and large eyes one-inch across. It brush his forehead as it passed, and landed in a grove of chestnut trees. “What bird is this” he said, “that it can’t fly straight with such great wings and didn’t see me with such big eyes?!” He girded up his skirt, and hurried with his cross-bow, waiting for it. Then he noticed a cicada, which had just alighted in a nice shady spot, and forgot to notice its exposure. A praying mantis raised its feelers, and pounced on the cicada, but in its eagerness for its prey, it too forgot its exposure; the weird magpie took advantage of its opportunity to snatch them both, but likewise forgot about its exposure. Horror washed over Zhuang Zhou and he said, ‘Ah! That’s how things bring evil on one another, each of these creatures invited its own calamity.’ He put away his cross-bow, and rushed out of the park, but the forester mistook his haste and chased him with accusations of stealing chestnuts. (Ch. 20)
So, in one cicada-story we see how a single-minded focus can lead to the kind of attunement Zhuangzi advocated — in the other, we see that it can lead to the TOTAL OPPOSITE of attunement and can also be REALLY dangerous… even for an experienced Daoist like Zhuangzi!
He doesn’t think we should conform, but he doesn’t want us to STRIVE to be nonconformists, either.
In other words, STOP TRYING SO HARD TO NOT TRY, YOU HIPSTER HYPOCRITES!
When your non-conformity becomes mainstream, there’s no such thing as “underground” anymore.
That’s known as the hipster paradox.
Gnarly Trees and Peculiar People
Zhuangzi makes a point to show how the most gnarled of trees and the most peculiar of people can be paragons of virtue. Throughout the text, there are stories of such physically different figures which exhibit the highest virtue because they “[align] their activities with the force and propensity of the natural world” and rest at ease within their own natures.
Unlike a hipster, they never STRIVE to be counter-culture.
For example, in the fourth chapter, a master woodsman has a large, sacred tree appear to him in a dream (after earlier rejecting it as useless). The tree says to him, “If I had been of some use, would I ever have grown this large?” The woodsman awakes and admits to his apprentices that by judging this tree by conventional standards he was “way off.”
Later in the same chapter another large, useless tree is likened to the sage insofar as neither can be exploited. And towards the end of the chapter, we find the story of Zhili Shu…
“By sewing and washing, he gets enough to fill his mouth; by handling a winnow and sifting out the good grain, he makes enough to feed ten people… And when they are doling out grain to the ailing, he gets three big measures and ten bundles of firewood. With a crippled body, he’s still able to look after himself and finish out the years Heaven gave him. How much better, then, if he had crooked virtue! (Ch. 4, Watson tr.)
Whether one feels at home in the mainstream or prefers swimming among the counter currents, the Zhuangzi’s advice is to not let those outside influences preclude you from staying true to yourself.
As a later passage explains:
Crooked or straight, pursue to the limit the Nature in you. Turn your face to the four directions, ebb and flow with the seasons. Right or wrong, hold fast to the round center upon which all turns, in solitude bring your will to completion, ramble in the company of the Way. Do not strive to make your conduct consistent, do not try to perfect your righteousness, or you will lose what you already have. Do not race after riches, do not risk your life for success, or you will let slip the Nature within you. (Ch. 29, Watson tr.)
Likewise, in the fifth chapter, a story is told of a disabled man who visited Confucius, but because of his unusual appearance, received an unkind welcome. Later, when Laozi asks the man if Confucius can be freed from the shackles of his narrow-mindedness, the disabled man responds, “When nature [tiān] has punished him, how can he be set free?”
It seems Confucius had focused so heavily on appearing “upright” that he’d forgotten the central idea of his moral philosophy: “do not impose on others what you would not want imposed on yourself.”
Truth and the Genuine Person
The way Confucius is depicted by Zhuangzi as having been shackled by convention is the perfect segue to introducing the Daoist concept of zhēn [真], or genuineness, which served as a direct challenge to that Confucian ethical system.
The word zhēn has come to mean ‘real,’ or ‘authentic’ in modern usage — or as William Callahan has called it, an “untrammeled” quality — even though its meaning in the Zhuangzi is more multivalent. It appears only three times in the Laozi and not at all in the Confucian Analects or Mencius, which may indicate it was a Daoist neologism. This is why the zhēnrén (or “genuine person”) is probably intended as a satirical foil to the Confucian ideal — jūnzi [君子], or “noble son.”
For instance, in one later chapter of the Zhuangzi, there’s a story about a fisherman who questions Confucius and his students about their philosophy. After hearing Confucius prized benevolence and ritual propriety over all else, the fisherman laughs and says,
Benevolence schmenevolence! I fear he won’t get out of this alive. All this effort and trouble just to endanger zhēn. Phew! He’s far away and totally cut off from the Dào! (Ch. 31)
After a lengthy discussion, an exasperated Confucius finally asks what the old man means by ‘zhēn.’ In his response, the fisherman explains that zhēn consists in a kind of sincerity, sure, but it’s a sincerity toward one’s own inner nature, out of which filiality, kindness, appropriateness, loyalty and honesty all grow. The fisherman goes on to explain that,
Those rites [that Confucius prized] were made up by the vulgar; truth is what is received from nature [tīan]. Its spontaneity can’t be changed. That’s why the sage prizes the patterns of nature [fă tīan] as truth and isn’t cramped by convention. (Ch. 31)
So, it appears the author(s) of this passage viewed the Confucian emphasis on ritual propriety and benevolence as officious and too easily corruptible. This is best illustrated in the way zhēn is contrasted with the artifice of wéi (human effort/action) in the famous second chapter of the Zhuangzi. “How has the dào become obscured such that there is zhēn and wéi?”
The seemingly paradoxical truth presented in the notion of zhēn is that allowing oneself to transform alongside the transformations of nature is the best way to be a genuine person.
In the 41st Chapter of the Daodejing we find the line: “Genuine nature resembles variation.” Hans Georg Moeller and Paul D’Ambrosio have called this kind of natural growth “genuine pretending” and have this to say about it:
Genuine pretending is real, but not determining; it neither violates nor constructs identity… [it] is thereby associated with what may be called an existential mode of play. In this mode, as in child’s play, roles are not assumed to deceive others or ourselves for the sake of personal gain, nor to eventually make one become something that one is not (yet); instead, possibilities are momentarily or experimentally enacted, experienced, or engaged with, all without any essential commitment to them. (p. 3)
Simply put, nature is always changing and the genuine/real person [zhēnrén] is able to change along with it by playfully using moral imagination. As Mark Johnson suggests:
Moral reasoning is thus basically an imaginative activity, because it uses imaginatively structured concepts and requires imagination to discern what is morally relevant in situations, to understand empathetically how others experience things, and to envision the full range of possibilities open to us in a particular case. (Preface)
Zhuangzi did not mean for us merely to become more conscientious of our natural environment, instead he hoped to foster a respect for the impulses of all the myriad things that might precipitate personal transformation, tantamount to what one might call self-cultivation, through the growth of personal efficacy.
Mirroring Nature
So, there’s no “right” way to attune with nature. Looking for rules, guidelines, or maxims for such spontaneity is like a hipster struggling to stay out of the mainstream!
Zhuangzi would say it’s like boring extra holes in somebody’s head — totally excessive and potentially fatal. A famous passage in Chapter 7 helps illustrate this:
The god of the Southern Sea was Swift; the god of the Northern Sea was Sudden. The god of the center was Hundun (Hodgepodge/Wonton). Swift and Sudden would often meet in the land of Hundun, and Hundun would host them with great courtesy. Swift and Sudden made a plan to return Hundun’s generosity. “All men have seven orifices,” they said, “so that they can see and hear, eat and breathe. Hundun alone has none. Why don’t we bore these for him?”
Each day, they bored one orifice, and on the seventh day, Hundun died. (Ch. 7, Watson tr.)
Instead, the best thing to do is be like still water, which mirrors whatever is around it.
The sage is still not because he takes stillness to be good and therefore is still. The ten thousand things are insufficient to distract his mind — that is the reason he is still. Water that is still gives back a clear image of beard and eyebrows; reposing in the water level, it offers a measure to the great carpenter. And if water in stillness possesses such clarity, how much more must pure spirit. The sage’s mind in stillness is the mirror of Heaven and earth, the looking glass of the ten thousand things. (Ch. 13, Watson tr.)
Empty Your Boat
So, moral knack in the Zhuangzi appears to be a property of a natural, public field — one in which an actor must constantly learn to adapt to continuously changing moral circumstances. As such, the dào practitioner finds herself constantly needing to apply moral imagination, in a way similar to how experts “skillfully cope” with novel situations.
The best way to start down that kind of path may very well be to practice “genuine pretending” by adopting the perspectives of those around us. Approaching every situation without preconceived notions, without rules, guidelines, or maxims— i.e. learning to be empty and “listen without any words” — is Zhuangzi’s advice.
As a passage in Chapter 20 puts it:
If someone’s crossing a river and an empty boat happens to bump into him, no matter how hot-tempered he is, he won’t get angry. But if there should be someone in the other boat, he’ll shout out to haul this way or veer that. If his first shout is unheeded, he’ll shout again, and if that’s not heard, he’ll shout a third time, with a torrent of curses following. In the first instance, he wasn’t angry; now in the second he is. Earlier he faced emptiness, now he faces occupancy. If a man could succeed in making himself empty, and in that way wander through the world, what harm could come to him? (Ch. 20, Watson tr.)
And, as the final chapter of the Zhuangzi reminds us, that kind of imaginative moral understanding is always close at hand… if only we can get out of our own way and start LIVING it:
Many are the shù of those trying to regulate the whole world, and each claims to be something that cannot be improved upon. But, what the ancients called dàoshù, where has it gone?! We say: “It is everywhere.” (Ch. 33)
Okay, that wraps up our discussion of the Zhuangzi.
In what remains of this series we’ll look at some of the other schools of thought from the same time period in Chinese history — including Mohism, the School of Names, Sunzi’s Art of War, and the Legalism of Hanfeizi and Li Si.
Stay (at)tuned for Part 18!
