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Follow podcast failed. Unfollow podcast failed. Stream or download thousands of included titles. Narrated by: Chirag Patel. No default payment method selected. Add payment method. Switch payment method. We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method. Pay using card ending in. Taxes where applicable. Language is not blowing breath; language users have language.
That which it languages, however, is never fixed. He develops this critique perhaps initiated by Hui Shih's relativism with his own analysis of the indexicality of all distinctions.
His argument relies heavily on the core terms of Chinese philosophical analysis, shih is this: right and fei not this: wrong. He starts by highlighting the indexical content of shih by contrasting it with pi that.
Chuang Tzu asks if anything is inherently 'this' or 'that'? Is there anything that cannot be 'this' or 'that'? These key terms in language illustrate the claim that it does not have any rigid, naming relation to an external reality. Language traces our changing position relative to reality.
This perspectival pluralism differs from Western subjectivity in that Chuang Tzu does not highlight the perspectives of individual consciousness or internal representations--subjectivity.
Arguably Chinese thinkers did not generate anything comparable to Western folk psychology. In fact, Chuang Tzu seems as fascinated with the shifting perspectives of even the same person at different times and in different moods as he is in the difference of perspective between different individuals. His main theoretical focus, however, is on the kinds of perspective arising from using language differently, i.
Chuang Tzu does reflect briefly on the perspective of "self. They "alternate day and night" and not knowing where they come from we give up and merely accept that they come. Without them there would be no "self" and without "self," no "choosing of one thing over another. Chuang Tzu wonders how the heart can be any more natural than the other "hundred joints, nine openings and six viscera. Can't each rule itself?
Or take turns. The identification of one organ as supreme seems to conflict with the implicit intention to offer a natural basis for morality. Chuang Tzu implies that all of the organs of the body grow together in encountering and adapting to life. As it does it is ch'eng completed --a term that Chuang Tzu uses somewhat ironically as suggesting that any completion leaves in its wake some defect.
Translators frequently render it as "biased. The translation, however, abandons the implicit irony-- ch'eng is 'success', 'accomplishment' something we all aim for. Chuang Tzu's use suggests that our natural and common goal is not possible without some kind of skewing and loss. Thus all hearts equally achieve ch'eng. They grow up just as the rest of the body does. For the heart, this amounts to acquiring a pattern of tendencies to shih-fei judgment. So if it is this heart, the one that grows with the body, that is the authority, then we all equally have one.
Confucian innatists make a question-begging assumption about which pattern of ch'eng completion is really right. They advocate a program of cultivation so the hsin heart-mind will give the correct shih-fei judgments. Without it, they imply, the heart's natural potential will be lost. The sage's heart-mind is the ultimate Mencian standard for rightness of judgment. He is one who has allegedly fully cultivated his natural moral potential.
Chuang Tzu wonders, from what perspective can we distinguish sage's heart-mind from a fool's? Both have a heart-mind and make shih-fei judgments. If we use A's judgments as a guide, A will look like a sage and B the fool and vice versa.
There appears to be no way to identify the proper way to cultivate common to all existing heart-minds. The intuitionists beg another question in favor of their acquired perspective when they advocate cultivation.
The appeal to the judgment of a "natural ruler" would leave everyone acting however they do act. Chuang Tzu's analysis of the ch'eng hsin completed heart-mind echoes Lao Tzu's analysis of knowledge as unconsciously acquired in the very process of learning language.
Attitudes that seem natural and spontaneous may simply reflect early upbringing and experiential attitudes that have become "second nature. The linguistic nature of perspectives comes more to the fore when Chuang Tzu responds to the Later Mohists.
He notes that the Mohists' term of analysis, ke assertable , is obviously relative to conventional, linguistic perspective. Different and changing conventions of usage and principles still constitute conventions and generate a language and a perspective. Single schools of thought may split and disputing factions may combine again.
Any language that actually is spoken is assertable. Any moral language for which there is a rival is from its point of view not assertable.
Chuang Tzu hints that the confidence we get in the appearance of right and wrong in our language is a function of how fully we can elaborate and embellish--how effectively we can continue on with our way of speaking.
We argue for a point of view mainly by spelling it out in greater detail. The seemingly endless disputes between Mohists and Confucians arise from their respectively elaborated ways of assigning 'is this' and 'not this'. As we saw, each can build elaborate hierarchies of standards that seem to guide their different choices and considers the errors of their opponents to be "obvious.
Chuang Tzu, wary of Hui Shih's error, generally avoided contrasting our limited perspectives to any cosmic or total one. He contrasted them mainly with each other. His 'perspective' on the relativity of language Chuang Tzu calls ming clarity. It is tempting and common to suppose ming is some absolute standpoint.
Chuang Tzu extrapolates in imagination what would happen if we reversed our course back to the 'axis' from which all guiding discourse begins. From that 'axis,' he says, no limit can be drawn on what could be treated as 'is this' or 'is not this'. All shih-fei patterns are possible, none actual. From that axis, therefore, we make no judgments.
It is not a relevant alternative to the disputing perspectives. If we succumb to the interpretive temptation, we fall back into the anti-language abyss. The absolute viewpoint cannot advocate or forbid any dao. From the perspective of ming, it is not even a point of view. Any practical guide is an actual path of judgment making that takes one from that axis down one particular indefinitely elaboratable way of making distinctions. Even if thing-kinds are made 'so' by our classifications, we can't conclude they are 'not-this'.
Chuang Tzu emphasizes the infinite possibility of these standpoints. Occasionally, however, he presents it as almost a tragic inevitability. Once we have started on a tao, we seem doomed to elaborate and develop it in a kind of race to death.
Youth is the state of being comparatively open to almost any possibility and as we grow and gain knowledge, we close-off the possibilities in a rush toward old-age and death. The inflexibility of intellectual commitment to a conceptual perspecive that is so rigid that any thing we encounter already has a classification.
Nothing can free us from the headlong rush to complete our initial committments to shih and fei as if they were oaths or treaties. We rush through life clining to the alternative we judge as winning. Or is it that I am the only stupid one and there are others not so stupid. Lacking any theoretical limit on possible perspectives, guiding systems of naming, we lack any limit on schemes of practical knowledge. No matter how much we advance and promote a practical guide, a way of dealing with things, there are things we will be deficient at.
To have any developed viewpoint is to leave something out. This, however, is not a reason to avoid language and a perspective; it is the simple result of the limitless knowledge and limited lives. So-called 'sages' project their point of view and prejudices on nature, which they then treat as an authority. Chuang Tzu does not recommend we emulate that attitude.
Instead of trying to transcend and abandon our usual or conventional ways of speaking, Chuang Tzu recommends that we learn to treat them as pragmatically useful. They enable us to communicate and get things done. That is all it is sensible to ask of them.
Beyond what is implied in the fact that our language is useful from the standards of our perspective , we don't know the way things are in themselves. We signal our lack of that pure metaphysical knowledge by calling reality ' tao '.
Treating metaphysical ultimate as 'one' differs from saying nothing about it only in attitudinal ways. In the end, neither skepticism nor monistic mysticism says anything about ultimate reality. They are characterized by the different attitudes one takes in saying essentially nothing.
Chuang Tzu's balance between skepticism and monism surfaces in a number of places. In one he traces the "devolution" of the knowledge of old from knowing "nothing exists" to knowing "one" to knowing things but no distinctions or boundaries and finally to knowing shih-fei. In another notoriously obscure passage, Chuang Tzu is skeptical about skepticism.
However, he does not appeal to our familiar sentential grounds. He does not ask how he knows that he doesn't know. He does ask how he can know what he does not know. His question centers on distinction grounds. He wonders if he knows how to distinguish between knowing and ignorance. Chuang Tzu's philosophical writings highlight his different approach to skepticism by their treatment of dreams.
He does not use dreaming to motivate skepticism. He takes it as already motivated on semantic grounds. Is there any real relation between our words and things? Dreaming then becomes a further illustration of a skepticism rooted in worries about whether there is a right way to distinguish with or "pick out" using a word. The dreaming-waking distinction is one we use to organize "what happens" in the broadest sense. We have learned to use that distinction to bring greater unity or coherence to our experience.
In a dream we can still make the distinction between dreaming and waking. Ultimately we can wonder about other ways the pragmatic advantages of making that distinction. Chuang Tzu fulfills his heart's desire in dreaming the butterfly. He doesn't know how to distinguish Chuang Tzu's dreaming a butterfly from a butterfly's dreaming Chuang Tzu. Translations convert the distinction-point into a propostional one. Because Chuang Tzu puts his positions in fantasy and parable, interpretions of his point are inherently subject to dispute.
Perhaps Chuang Tzu intended this outcome. We can either attribute to him what actually follows from perspectival pluralism or attribute some familiar but invalid conclusion. Some interpreters read it as monism entailing dogmatic skepticism--everyone is wrong , others as classic relativism everyone is right!
Neither of these, however, follow from perspectivalism. For each, one may cite passages where the position is forumulated, but it is always left unclear whether the passages express Chuang Tzu's considered point of view or is merely one on which he is critically reflecting.
Some of Chuang Tzu's most memorable images and parables illustrate the interpretive impasse. Chuang Tzu tells us of an encounter between a Giant Sea Turtle and a frog in a well. It is natural to suggest the Sea Turtle represents some ultimate truth not accessible to the frog as does the Chinese parable based on the story.
However, in Chuang Tzu's account, the sea turtle cannot even get one flipper into the frog's well. He is as incapable of appreciating the frog's perspective as the frog is his. Similar analysis applies to the Great Bird and the small chicadee, the great fish etc. Chuang Tzu is the least likely thinker to take "great" and "small" as signs of absolute value. The dogmatic monistic reading relies on the epistemology of mysticism. Chuang Tzu must have some unexplained route to meta-knowledge that everyone else lacks.
The burden of this interpretation is showing that Chuang Tzu's arguments do not undermine the conception of knowledge proposed by the interpreter. The above refutation of Mencius seems to apply mutatis mutandis to any view of a special transcendent insight or intuition.
It is not clear how he could be astute enough to see the fallacy in Mencius' view and naive enought to turn around and adopt what is effectively the same view except for its talk of a natural organ. The relativistic interpretation is plausible to the extent that Chuang Tzu clearly views all existing points of view as natural points of view.
Saying they are natural smoothing them on the whetstone of nature is neither to approve nor to judge them equal. Since the account of cultivation typically presupposed practice in conformity with the social practice requiring justification, the threat of circularity pushed traditionalists eventually to teach about and appeal to an allegedly innate or pre-social human psychology.
By contrast, the craft—inspired Mohists went on to emphasize the use of measurement tools and operations as the standards guiding term use.
Zhuangzi conforms to the general pre-Han model, using a path metaphor to discuss normativity in general. This fuels the traditional view of him as a Daoist. Is it nature? Is it man? Humans are as natural as monkeys, birds, and fish.
This stance makes the complexity of the natural network only the first level of variety and possibility. He situates us at indexed points in this network seeking paths forward from here and now , choosing from among the plethora of those accessible which, if any, to follow.
Nature gives us a complex network of iterative guiding structures among which we are about to swim. We recognize greater and lesser models of both—the more reflective and engaging vs. As we walk through a day, we encounter attitudinal states—joy, sorrow, surprise, ennui etc. When we describe that entire structure, e. All guidance is at a point in the network and available to and for some emergent object—physical, living, animal or human. We light on paths and react with heart-mind responses.
Zhuangzi recognizes its involvement in the construction process, but is skeptical of making it a kind of natural authority.
It is, after all, only one of the natural organs involved—our daily reactions include being directed by our stomachs, our eyes, etc. Why, Zhuangzi wonders, should we think they need a single authority?
There are many natural ways of finding and choosing ways. Humans naturally exhibit variety in how they find or choose a course of behavior. They may be capacities of individuals or of social groups, embodied in their social practices.
Zhuangzi does not view it as a rational or logical construction, but a complicated, multi-layered natural one. Then who or what does the choosing? Joy, anger, sadness, pleasure, worrying, sighing, resisting, clinging, being drawn to, eschewing, launching, and committing, like music from empty holes, dampness generating mushrooms, these day and night replace each other before us and yet none can know from what they emerge.
Let it be! The trend from social construction humanism toward naturalism had been gradual. It seems, he says, there must be one, but we find no evidence of it. We approve of behaviors and place our trust in its reactions but find no sign of what is authorizing or making them. Being a product of ritual training. Nor could one trained practitioner have authority over another in resolving interpretive disputes about how to execute the ritual, e. He insisted we need a neutral, non-cultural or natural basis for such meta-choices of social practices of choosing and interpreting practices.
The narrative history of Classical thought found near the end of the Zhuangzi Ibid. Many stories in the text target the notion that utility is a naturally constant value—particularly the human utility that Mozi champions.
Among this series of parables, the most famous, the useless tree, illustrates the relativity of usefulness to Hui Shi. He had also objected to Confucian reliance on acquired intuition since it made access to such judgments esoteric. His utility standard, Zhuangzi is suggesting, is still relative to the way of translating it to behavior. The growing awareness that norms of behavior are intertwined with norms of language use, produced another feature of this strand of thought bringing the natural world into our guidance.
Primitivists came to advocate silence—letting the natural paths of the world take over completely. For most of history, the Laozi has exemplified this rejection of language. Shen Dao, based on his version of logical determinism i. Later Mohist writings contain several acute critiques of such a trending pro-silence posture. Language is natural and arguments for silence are self-condemning. It is natural for us to make a judgment, but not nature making it.
Normativity arises from within nature, but nature only makes all its normative, behavior-guiding paths for us naturally available.
There are no naturally ideal observers. We should, however, adopt an attitude of epistemic modesty in making our perspective based choices and recommending our interpretations to others. Hence nature makes no choice that implies a more absolute, or superior normative status on either perspective. Does it amount to taking the view of nature but of nowhere in particular or is it a naturally occurring, perspective on perspectives, a recognition of the plurality of natural perspectives?
He provokes us to realize that we may make progress and improve our guiding perspective by simulating the guiding perspectives of others. Still a third outcome of the interaction, as with violent gangsters, reminds us simply to keep our distance. New accumulated insights about natural structures may improve our range of options, from our own point of view.
First, we do this from our own present perspective. We neither judge all to be right nor all to be wrong—nor even that all are equal. Certainly, not all are equally worthy of our choice.
We need not judge that all are good choices for those following them—only that the grounds of their choice may be different from ours. They might still be dogmatic, careless, or unwarranted even given the situational grounds of their choice. Nothing about the naturalness of such choices arising makes them right.
We neither seek to follow all at once or each equally—as Hui Shi seems to suggest. Nor do we resolve to follow none—as Shen Dao suggests. We are more inclined to follow a path, and given our similarities, think we might pursue it with benefit when we know some natural being like us found and followed it. And Zhuangzi clearly does ridicule the social moralists Confucians and Mohists as well as Hui Shi for the narrowness of their range of choices—their failure to appreciate the richness and complexity of alternative ways of life.
The judgment from no-where-when is no-judgment. That we progress in such exchanges is something we ourselves judge, not the cosmos. The latter structures his analysis mainly on comparatives. Ergo, there are no real distinctions and the world is actually one.
Now that we are one, can I still say anything? Now that I have called us one, did I succeed in not saying something? One and the saying make two, two and one make three. Proceeding from here even an expert calculator cannot get to the end of it, much less a plain man. Commitment is setting off along a path. We have momentum and a trajectory. The shape of the path combines with these and commits us to walk on or continue in a way that depends on the discernible shape of the path.
Walking a path involves staying mostly within its physical boundaries. Zhuangzi would not make that point in terms of deduction from a normative premise or principle. The internal and external paths themselves have a causal and normative relation to our walking behavior. A sentence would state the action or the intent—rather like the conclusion of a practical syllogism rather than, as as fits in this metaphorical space, as performing a role in a play or or part in a symphony.
Confucian social versions emphasized the names of social roles and statuses more than of natural kinds. Human language is a natural sound. The cosmos does not select which way to make the choice. Graham had noted that Zhuangzi returns to the metaphor nearer the middle of the dialogue, noting that here Zhuangzi seems to be taking back some of its implications.
The Later Mohists advocated a version of pragmatic-semantic realism. This is the basis of a social standard of correct word use enshrined in past practice. The world, in effect, gives us many ways of establishing conventional distinctions and assigning names. However, the analogy with bird calls is a fortuitous suggestion.
We arrange, adapt and modulate the elements of our language to fit our environment, abilities, and opportunities e. Would Zhuangzi have guessed the same about birds? In one passage, Zhuangzi allows this appeal to past or existing common practice but does not endorse it as right—merely as useful. Conventions are useful because they facilitate communication. Our trajectory along our paths incorporates these accumulated commitments to prior practices of language use.
Our existing evaluation practices remind us that shared and unquestioned past practices can be wrong. Mozi appealed to what he would also have regarded as a purely natural practice. Humans, in finding ways to walk and walking them, initiate the construction of social paths, naturally and perhaps unintentionally, by leaving prints in the natural world.
How do we know either that our past practice was correct or that we are correctly following them in this new situation, here and now, based solely on our eyes and ears? The main mechanism Zhuangzi discusses is appeal to a judge or authority. It is not clear if the conclusion is supposed to be a solution to the skeptical problem posed or merely a way to cope constructively with complexity and uncertainty.
The passage rules out any appeal to a special authority of any other point of view—while giving equal authority in the construction to all. Nonetheless, let me try to put it in language. And let me try a question on you. If people sleep in the damp, they get pains and paralysis; would eels?
If in a tree, they tremble in fear; would monkeys? Of the three, does any know the correct place to live? Linguistic skepticism easily metastasizes to virtually any commitment. It sweeps in metaphysics, epistemics, and semantics. Broad because it infects so many judgments, but weak not merely in the usual sense of denying absolute certainty, but in failing to imply that we should stop or refuse to make the judgment.
It does not rest on any theory of the probability of an error, but that the concept of an error is subject to the same concerns as the original judgment. It neither undermines nor give us reason to withdraw our judgments. Appreciating that others reach their views as naturally as we do only removes our status to claim that our judgment is authentically and uniquely correct. The skepticism does not target any specific failure in my epistemic process.
It does not advise me to abandon my present course. It reminds me only to remain open to the further possibility of learning more—about what? About the world? It counts as skepticism because it reminds us that we normally err on the side of overestimating than underestimating our epistemic security. Hence the pragmatic upshot of his skepticism is to remind us to engage with more other points of view. Implicitly, it does not deny that we could meet some particular standard of knowing, but that we could know for every situation which standard is the right one.
Zhuangzi makes an assertion and Hui Shi initiates the skeptical challenge. His challenge implies that there is a favored or correct standard of knowing that turns out to be impossibly strict. All knowledge must come from inside. Notice, the argument about the fish implies we have a perspective on the perspectives of others.
So skepticism grounded in dependence or relativity of perspective need not be predominantly negative. Zhuangzi, here, uses it to justify a way of claiming to knowing. This is the more comprehensive perspective Zhuangzi urges on us. We experience such gestalt shifts especially when we come appreciate we had been wrong before and now view things differently. We reach a state where we judge our former perspective to be inferior to our present one.
It includes insight into our relative situations. This kind of gestalt shift leads us to reflect on how narrow our past perspective had been. He casts doubt on there being a final, ultimately small or large. It has a dual nature—an epistemically modest perspective on ourselves that arises from improving our epistemic status and encourages us to continue.
It helps us appreciate that we are still as naturally situated and others with whom we may disagree and still grow. Further improvement can come from further exchange of perspectives. Yet, the Zhuangzi repeatedly reminds us not to abandon epistemic modesty when we make epistemic progress.
That we now see things from a perspective in common with another does not make us both right. Aside from its frequent usefulness from our point of view, the main benefit from the self-recognition as a natural creature embedded as are others at a perspective-point within a natural network structure is to encourage being open-minded.
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