MEDITATIONS: ZHUANGZI, CHAPTER TWO
The Equalizing Assessment of Things
What is Real? What does it mean for something to be real? Or does our concept called “reality” have any validity at all? The same questions could be asked about “Truth,” and it is this set of questions which inspired the brilliantly ticklish preface to Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil:
Supposing that Truth is a woman—what then? Is there not ground for suspecting that all philosophers, in so far as they have been dogmatists, have failed to understand women—that the terrible seriousness and clumsy importunity with which they have usually paid their addresses to Truth, have been unskilled and unseemly methods for winning a woman? (Nietzsche 7)
It is this very problem that Nietzsche identifies which, in this second chapter, Zhuangzi describes—then utilizes like a shovel to subvert and then flatten the axiomatic assumptions born from our limited, human perception and reason. This philosophical tool is the “Equalizing Assessment.” It is the “Illumination of the Obvious,” the self-conscious realization that a dialectical contradiction runs all the way down to the nature of being itself. In short, it is the dangerous realization that, for us, we don’t know—perhaps cannot know—precisely where the line dividing subjectivity and objectivity lies—if there really is a line! But let us refrain from diving headlong into that intellectual abyss which has swallowed so many thinkers who have gazed too long into it. Instead, I will attempt to make understandable a philosophical conundrum which is in some sense the essence of chaos.
“Chaos” is that label we give to that which we do not know how to properly label. It is the name of the nameless. In the first stanza of the opening chapter of the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu describes the “the true Tao; the Tao that cannot be named”:
the tao source of life that we often talk about
is beyond the power of words and labels to define or enclose (Lao Tzu 9)
This Tao source of life that cannot be named is the objective universe—the thing in itself. It cannot be named because that which we’d be naming would only be our conception or perception of it, not the “real thing.” But then, what is the real thing? It is ineffable, unknowable; therefore, it is chaos. To understand what that means is to comprehend that the fundamental substance of Truth and Reality is actually Chaos in its archetypal sense. That is why I called it an abyss, because to become conscious of this is to have the philosophical bedrock of experience dissolved underneath oneself. We are adrift in a bottomless ocean from which the sky and the horizon cannot be distinguished.
What are we to make of this? The usual and unfortunate answer is a kind of hyper-skepticism which leads to nihilism. Even in Zhuangzi’s time, this tendency was prevalent enough that he captured it in his writing:
Sir Shoestrap of Southwall was leaning against his armrest on the ground, gazing upward and releasing his breath into the heavens above—all in a scatter there, as if loosed from a partner.
Sir Swimmy Faceformed stood in attendance before him. “Who or what is this here?” he asked. “Can the body really be made like a withered tree, the mind like dead ashes? What leans against this armrest now is not what leaned against it before.” (Zhuangzi 11)
Sir Shoestrap, having stumbled upon the aforementioned philosophical abyss, has been brought into a state of depressive lethargy. He cannot find the motivation to do anything, because he can’t be certain of anything. He can’t even be sure of who he is. He argues:
“What’s here now is this: I have lost me. But could you know who or what that is? You hear the piping of man without yet hearing the piping of earth; you hear the piping of earth without yet hearing the piping of heaven. . . . .”
Sir Swimmy Faceformed said, “So the piping earth means just the sound of these hollows. And the piping of man would be the sound of bamboo panpipes. What then is the piping of Heaven?”
Sir Shoestrap said, “It is the gusting through all the ten thousand differences that yet cause all of them to come only from themselves. For since every last identity is only what some one of them picks out from it, what identity can there be for their rouser?” (Zhuangzi 11-12)
The piping is a metaphor used within this parable to illustrate the degrees of separation between our perception, conception (i.e. categorization), and what really is. As wind, symbolizing the ineffable reality—passes through a hollow object, it creates a tone, symbolizing the world as we perceive it. Each tone possesses different qualities due to their various frequencies of vibration. Each of these tones we name is given a distinct identity to separate it from the others, symbolizing how we conceive of the world which we perceive. But at the very bottom of this metaphor, all of these tones are really products of the wind’s interaction with the hollows. In other words, the tones are each emergent aspects of the same wind. The division between them is only relevant to us as subjects—as subjective beings—yet as subjects, we cannot identify a tone for the wind itself: that is to say, even though all the tones are parts of the wind (i.e. even though all the concepts are parts of the ineffable reality), there is no single tone by which to identify the wind itself. In a sense, the wind is all the possible tones. This creates an intractable problem for the philosophically minded.
Recall the issue of philosophical explosion. If a definition becomes so inclusive as to encapsulate its own opposite, it becomes its own contradiction and self-destructs under the scrutiny of rational thought. Now contemplate the thought which devoured Sir Shoestrap’s soul: the wind contains all possible tones; objective reality contains all possibilities, including those which oppose one another.
Oh, no.
Everything really real is chaos: chaos contains dialectical contradictions: those contradictions self-annihilate through philosophical explosion . . . Everything is nothing. This is the Post-Modern problem. How can those of us with an intellectual conscience escape the gaping maw of nihilistic despair? Zhuangzi answers by turning this revelation back against itself in the following dialogue:
Gnawgap asked Baby Sovereign “Do you know what all things agree in considering right?”
Baby Sovereign said, “How could I know that?”
Gnawgap said, “Do you know that you don’t know?”
Baby Sovereign said, “How could I know that?”
Gnawgap said, “Then are all things devoid of knowledge?”
Baby Sovereign said, “How could I know that? Still let me try to say something about this. How could I know that what I call ‘knowing’ is not really ‘not-knowing’? How could I know that what I call ‘not-knowing’ is really not ‘knowing’?” (Zhuangzi 18)
It is archetypally appropriate that the child’s wisdom is what rescues us from the gnawing, gnashing teeth of our arrogance and ignorance. What Baby Sovereign has pointed out is that the very words and labels we use to reach such despairing conclusions also dissolve themselves. Carry this thought to its end, and all that is left is something like possibility or potential—that is, the positive manifestation of uncertainty, of chaos. This means that chaos is potential, and that potential is what constitutes the fundamental nature of objective reality.
But is this really wisdom? Said this way, that, “reality is fundamentally potential,” seems both obvious and pragmatically useless. It is a fair question to ask. There are two different answers, each in dialectical opposition to one another. To the scoldquail, Sir Shoestrap, and Gnawgap, this whole meditation is nothing but obscurity. “Gnawgap said, ‘If that’s the case, then you can’t even tell benefit from harm’” (Zhuangzi 19). They each see the anxiety of becoming more and more conscious of uncertainty and prefer to remain asleep. But to Peng and to Zhuang Zhou, anxiety can just as easily be excitement. For them, becoming conscious of the chaos of life is like finding the potential inside themselves. It is what allows for the self-transformation which in turn makes possible the journey toward some nobler end. It is this realization which brings their dreams into being.
Once Zhuang Zhou dreamt he was a butterfly, fluttering about joyfully just as a butterfly would. He followed his whims exactly as he liked and know nothing about Zhuang Zhou. Suddenly he awoke and there he was, the startled Zhuang Zhou in the flesh. He did not know if Zhou had been dreaming he was a butterfly or if a butterfly was now dreaming it was Zhou. Now surely Zhou and a butterfly count as two distinct identities, as two quite different beings! And just this is what is meant when we speak of transformation of any one being into another—of the transformation of all things. (Zhuangzi 21)
Lao Tzu. Tao Te Ching; An Authentic Taoist Translation, translated by John Bright-Fey, Sweetwater Press, 2014
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil, 1886, translated by Helen Zimmern in 1906, Enhanced Media, 2017
Zhuangzi. Zhuangzi; The Complete Writings, translated by Brook Ziporyn, Hackett Publishing Company Inc., 2020
