The Zhuangzi is one of the most beloved Chinese philosophical and literary texts. It was revered by Daoists and admired by thinkers throughout Chinese history. The text also attracted criticism from early Confucians and from modern authors. In the West, Zhuangzi was hailed by Oscar Wilde as containing “some of the most caustic criticism of modern life I have met with.” It also inspired the philosopher Martin Buber and the novelist Ursula Le Guin. Yet, there was little engagement with the text among Indian philosophers. Our panel’s goal is to change that. The panel brings together scholars who work on Indian philosophy, who will engage with the themes in the Zhuangzi through Indian philosophical perspectives. After the presentations, an expert in Chinese Philosophy will respond. The panel ultimately will foster direct dialogue between these philosophical traditions and to explore the unique possibilities such a dialogue affords.
The paper explores the relationship between language and world through the investigation of Zhuangzi's analysis of "indicators" (指) and in dialogue with two Indian frameworks: the Madhyamaka tetralemma (catuṣkoṭi) and the Jain seven-fold reasoning (saptabhaṅgī). Drawing on Kripkean semantics, the paper argues that thinkers across these traditions deploy modal arguments to grapple with the indeterminacy of language and reference.
The Zhuangzi radicalizes Gongsun Longzi's nominalism, in which indicators are ontologically distinguished from real things, and then applies the same logic against things themselves: if indicators cannot be indicated, referents are equally unstable. I argue that this indeterminacy structurally encompasses both Nāgārjuna's denialism and Malliṣeṇa's pluralism. Rather than choosing between them, the Zhuangzi holds both: a horse both is and is not a horse, and is neither a horse nor not a horse, depending on a perspective. Indeterminacy, on this reading, is not a failure of language but its feature.
My point of departure is the congruity of Jaina and Daoist perspectivalism. Jain philosophers hold that reality is non-one-sided (anekānta): any object of knowledge is knowable from infinite variety of viewpoints (nayas), and that no statement can provide an exhaustive account of a thing. All epistemic expressions implicitly reference one aspect (deśa) of a thing, rather than its totality.
These assumptions share remarkable similarities with Zhuangzi's “The sorting which evens things out” (Qiwulun). Like the Jain philosopher Samantabhadra, Zhuangzi saw knowledge as perspectival, that statements which express determinate knowledge are parameterized by viewpoints, and that uncareful combativeness in philosophical discourse is a major problem which should be assuaged through context-sensitivity and some way of embracing seemingly contradictory views. The paper draws these connections and explores how normative accounts of language-use in Jaina and Daoist traditions may be construed as mutually informative approaches to framing the soteriological value of dynamic perspective-shifting.
Scholars have argued that Zhuangzi's embodied form of epistemic perspectivism, which brings together contrary perspectives to form more inclusive “higher” perspectives (“larger knowledge” (大知). In this, the Zhuangzi shares remarkable similarities with the perspectivism (nayavāda) of Jaina philosophers, in which opposing perspectives are unified through a process of contextualization (syādvāda). However, Jaina philosophers ground this perspectivism on a realist objective standard. Unlike Zhuangzian perspectivism, this synchronizing perspectives depend on an objective standard for veridicality. However, the Zhaungzi rejects any such standard. Within the Zhuangzi, the world and ourselves are in a constant state of flux. Hence, any objective standard cannot be predetermined and cannot last. I argue that the Zhuangzi takes all perspectives to depend on one’s changing socio-physical embodiment, in which veridicality is determined by temporary usefulness, in contrast to the Jaina objective standard.
| Peter Yuanxi Chen | pc2936@columbia.edu | View |