Zhuangzi’s Way to Nature: Metaphorical Process as Natural Process in the Inner Chapters

Précis

What has Zhuangzi’s delight in and facility with figurative language to do with the attention to and concern with natural ways that are taken by common consent to be definitive concerns of traditional Daoists? After considering and rejecting several inadequate views, with special attention to recent cognitivist approaches, I propose that there is a deep structure to the inventive myths and metaphors that power and shape the text. Rather than merely colorful devices to get us to attend to nature or to find more natural what is ordinarily regarded as strange or grotesque, Zhuangzi’s metaphors are alive with wildness. His language actually illustrates natural processes of formation and transformation. To understand the ways the text engages with nature, we must ‘rewild’ his language . . . and our imaginations.

The case proceeds in four stages.

(1) Drawing on earlier work,[1] I argue that Zhuangzi’s creative metaphors exemplify discernible metamorphoses which in their most primitive shape are ways of transformation at work in nature at large. This takes us beyond the now common belief that these processes are special human possessions. It also takes us beyond any more Romantic reading of the Zhuangzi that might appreciate that the imagination[2] somehow darkly manifests the formative powers of nature. It leads to a more philosophical articulation of the “root,” the “magic storehouse,” etc. that is said to exist before the formation of things.

(2) I distinguish five basic sorts of imaginative transforms[3]—and then consider examples of each kind from the Zhuangzi. This approach is offered in contrast to those recent cognitivist approaches which do not plumb the forms of transformation at play within the body schmata they use to interpret Zhuangzi particularly and to understand the mind more generally.[4]

(3) Exploring a definite non-representational use of language, this reading moves us beyond readings in which any language regarding the Dao must falsify it. Skill with the ways of change can be manifest in and through imaginative language. Zhuangzi shows us in the practice of using language what it is to be “without essentials” (82) and at the “axis of the Way”.[5]

(4) Finally—and more briefly—I say a little something about the implications of this approach for the enactments and skills of self. To remember the self is to establish through habituation and socialization a stable individuality with a steady perspective that interacts in expectable ways. This process of shaping employs the natural powers as formative acts. To forget the self is to turn to these same powers as transformations. This enables us first to move between perspectives and contexts and modes of engagement, and then to generate new ones—attaining identity fluidity, living at the neutral midpoint of heaven and earth, and becoming an emissary of nature by living with and manifesting forth nature’s ways of formation and transformation.[6]

Along the way, the approach to the Zhuangzi’s metaphors by Allinson, Slingerland, and Chong are discussed, with a particular focus on Chong’s and Slingerland’s leaning on body schema cognitivistically construed. I argue we can do better. We will understand the Zhuangzi inadequately if we fixate on such schemata without following how he uses, imaginatively and revealingly, these natural forms of transformation to surpass convention, open the axis, and root the source.

This account takes us beyond readings which appreciate the Zhuangzi’s imperative to self-transformation and ideal of formlessness but leave these vaguer than need be. It also disabuses us of readings that try to constrain the Zhuangzi within the bounds of ‘perspectivism’ or ‘contextualism’ or ‘relativism,’ since the transforms set but also shift perspectives and contexts, define but also redefine the boundaries of individuals and kinds. To take root in the ways of change manifested in what we call ‘imagination’ (and in nature at large) is to transcend the relativities of context and perspective and situated exchange by immersion in the Dao, their upsurging resource.[7]

In this manner, the way-faring sage functions as an envoy of the Dao. She can do so in part as Zhuangzi does in part: in and through a use of imaginative language which manifests primitive forms of change that are nature’s own means of transformation.[8]

[1] See “The Generation and Destruction of Categories” (in Categories: Historical and Systematic Essays (Ed. Gorman, M. and J. Sanford. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2004, 238-267) and “Platonism in the Means of Construction” (1998 Meeting of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association and 1998 Meeting of the World Congress of Philosophy) and Wittgenstein and Philosophical Signification (diss., Vanderbilt Univ. 1991). See also “Righting the Names of Change” infra.

[2] Neither proposing nor presupposing a faculty psychology, I mean by ‘imagination’ here a group of powers of variance by which experience and practice are transformed. (See “Reason, Imagination, and Reality” [2009 meeting of the Metaphysical Society of America, Emory University, Atlanta] for discussion of three senses of imagination in contrast with three senses of rationality.)

[3] Importive transforms alter the boundaries that define individuals and kinds; contextual or ‘comportive’ transforms shift contexts; aspective or ‘apportive’ transforms are those which trope partitivities (settled patterns of selection and sampling, the partialities of relationship) and hence change perspective; purportive transforms alter the purposes that shape narratives and intentions and biotic functions, and ‘transportive’ are those which modify transactions of exchange, natural or social. See references in note one above.

[4] In “Second Wave Consilience and Deep Vertical Integration” (2016 meeting of the Northern new England Philosophy Association) I call this approach, in reference to the cognitivism of Slingerland and others, “speculative cognitivism.”

[5] See “Better than Ethics? The Way of Moral Power” (2013 meeting of the Metaphysical Society of America, College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA).

[6] Eventually one can forget all and rest in the permanent homeland of the changeless forms of change; though this last is not my quarry here, I do say just a little in passing about the way sitting-forgetting functions in this account.

[7] Centering and balance and harmony and so on are best understood in the thick of these processes of transformation, rather than in relation to defined perspectives and contexts and relativities; the axis of Dao is their pivot. I say more about this, in relation to Zhuangzi and in relation to the Neosocratic metaphysics of reflexivity, in “Better than Ethics?” supra, which explores the inner bond of the ‘ways’ and the norms, and “Rewilding Imagination” in process.

[8] See also “Righting the Names of Change” (Journal of Chinese Philosophy 36 (1) March, 2009: 9-29), in which I relate these natural transforms to some of the forms of change in the Yi Jing. Though this earlier essay is not prerequisite to the present case, it does support it.