Do not injure one’s boy internally by means of likes and dislikes, constantly going by what is self -so without adding to life.
-Zhuangzi 5.6
Huzi,
the ancient Chinese mask changer, is not a corpse presiding over his good name.(page
113)
I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous, and independent denizens.
- Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
The picture of Confucian philosophy that the Zhuangzi paints often revolves around a
philosophical program of a rectification of names and ethical demands attached
to it that focus on a correspondence of names and actuality, or of forms and
names. As texts such as the Analects
and the Mencius show – the depiction
of Confucius in the Zhuangzi – the
early Confucianism to which the Zhuangzi
critically reacts highlights the moral importance of a correspondence between,
first, the designation of social roles and relationships (or ranks or titles,
or ‘names’) and their enactments (i.e. ‘forms’),and, second, between this performance of a role or relationship
and the inner mental and emotional self of the person who performs it.
We use the term ‘dual correspondence’ to refer to the early Confucian command that one ought to sincerely commit to one’s roles and relationships not only in one’s actions but also with one’s heart-mind. Such a dual correspondence requires one to ‘live- not play’) one’s roles such that, for instance, a father not only acts as a father should but also eventually become a true father with his whole heart and soul. The early Confucian insistence on dual correspondence has been embraced and creatively adopted by later champions of Confucian ethics, but it also originally gave rise to anti-Confucian ideas and sentiments, both of which are on display in the Zhuangzi. Here, these sentiments work towards a ‘rehabilitation’ of a playful enactment of social roles and relationships.
In modern Western philosophical terms, the dual correspondence implicit in an early Confucian ethics can be addressed as an issue of sincerity. A seemingly good person my fulfill his or her task reliably and correctly. However, from a dual correspondence perspective, this is not good enough. Mere correspondence between role and action smacks of, as Hegel puts it, ‘the heroism of dumb service.’ One may enact one’s roles without cultivating a corresponding identity and thus lack a sincere commitment to them. Accordingly, a Confucian dual correspondence ethics, as well as a modern ethics of sincerity, is constantly concerned with potential fraud and false appearances. It questions people’s true ethical motives and requires real intellectual, emotional and existential identification with one’s actions.
The constant suspicion of sincerity that haunted many modern Eastern philosophers had already been aroused in ancient Confucians. Early on in the Analects we learn that we cannot trust ourselves morally and so have to double-check our commitment to do and ultimately be good every single day on various levels: “Daily I examine my person on three counts. In my understanding on behalf of other people, have I failed to be dedicated? In my interactions with colleagues and friends, have I failed to be true to my word? In what has passed onto me, have I failed to make it my practice?
As we attempt to show in this book, the Zhuangzi finds the permanent suspicion of oneself and others entailed in the categorical imperative of Confucian dual correspondence disquieting and –perhaps more problematically- creating an impossible task. As the anti-moral criticisms found throughout the Zhuangzi show, the text assumes that the very insistence on Confucian morality brings about what it tries to get rid of – namely, falsity, hypocrisy, and selfishness. It creates the very same problems it claims to resolve. Confucian moral demands are, to put it in contemporary parlance, tied to social constructs. And rather than simply demanding conformity with such social constructs, a Confucian ethics demand the impossible –that one ‘naturalize the social by personally substantiating family relationships and political roles established by the structures of a social order. This impossible demand is to sincerely make one’s own what is not one’s own to begin with, or in the words of the Analects, ‘what has been passed onto oneself.’
From a Daoist perspective such as we find expressed repeatedly in the ‘primitivist’ sections of the Zhuangzi, the acts of civilization enforced through the imposition of social divisions, ranks, and institutionalized human relationships as hailed in the Confucian texts and celebrated by the establishment of exemplary models are acts of wei – literally, acts of ‘human making.’ In other words, they are inherently artificial or, to put it once again into contemporary language, social constructs. From a Daoist perspective, Confucian ethics is profoundly paradoxical, or to use another contemporary term, it is built on a proliferates a giant double bind: it is aimed at a sort of a posteriori verification of what is essentially socially enforced and learned as being actually natural or personally sincere. What is external is supposed to be matched and grounded internally after the fact, as demanded by the emblematic maxim ‘inner sageliness and outward kingliness’, which, notably, first occurs in section 33.1 of the Zhuangzi, though it later became a paradigmatic expression for the Confucian ideal of personal cultivation.
The supposed moral grandeur of one’s social role – ‘one’s kingliness’ – is to be founded one one’s personal virtuousness or ‘sageliness’. Or, speaking with Mencius’s famous organic imagery, one’s ethical excellence in the social dimension is supposed to ‘sprout’ from one’s true inner nature. Everyone is there by called upon to supply with sincerity the social roles that one finds oneself entrusted with, and to meet moral expectations with a purported inborn identity. According to a most crucial passage in Zhongyong, while the dao of nature or the world in general is supposed to have been ‘sincere’ from the start, humans are single out with the task of making sincere whatever they do. This is what the text calls the dao of humankind: ‘Sincerity is the the dao/way of nature/heaven; making it sincere is the dao/way of humankind.’
The Zhuangzi, we submit, rejects this impossible Confucian categorical imperative of making sincere what is not so from the start. Instead of simply adopting the Confucian ‘game plan’ it inserts a joker into the fold – the genuine pretenders.
The Zhuangzi’s reaction to the impossible Confucian demand to make one’s social persona is not, we believe, to replace a wrong Confucian notion of sincerity with a correct or even better Daoist one – that is, a kind of authenticity. On the contrary, the genuine pretender, as a reaction to the Confucian sincerity claim, diverts from sincerity and steers toward an altogether different direction. Therefore we believe it is unfortunate that in the ‘age of authenticity,’ Heideggerian and other notions of authenticity have been ascribed to Daoism and, in particular, to the Zhuangzi. One of our intentions in this book is to liberate Zhuangzi from Heidegger’s all-to-tight and all-too-constraining – and even more uncomfortably, all-too-German and all-to-serious – embrace.
https://ctext.org/zhuangzi
We use the term ‘dual correspondence’ to refer to the early Confucian command that one ought to sincerely commit to one’s roles and relationships not only in one’s actions but also with one’s heart-mind. Such a dual correspondence requires one to ‘live- not play’) one’s roles such that, for instance, a father not only acts as a father should but also eventually become a true father with his whole heart and soul. The early Confucian insistence on dual correspondence has been embraced and creatively adopted by later champions of Confucian ethics, but it also originally gave rise to anti-Confucian ideas and sentiments, both of which are on display in the Zhuangzi. Here, these sentiments work towards a ‘rehabilitation’ of a playful enactment of social roles and relationships.
In modern Western philosophical terms, the dual correspondence implicit in an early Confucian ethics can be addressed as an issue of sincerity. A seemingly good person my fulfill his or her task reliably and correctly. However, from a dual correspondence perspective, this is not good enough. Mere correspondence between role and action smacks of, as Hegel puts it, ‘the heroism of dumb service.’ One may enact one’s roles without cultivating a corresponding identity and thus lack a sincere commitment to them. Accordingly, a Confucian dual correspondence ethics, as well as a modern ethics of sincerity, is constantly concerned with potential fraud and false appearances. It questions people’s true ethical motives and requires real intellectual, emotional and existential identification with one’s actions.
The constant suspicion of sincerity that haunted many modern Eastern philosophers had already been aroused in ancient Confucians. Early on in the Analects we learn that we cannot trust ourselves morally and so have to double-check our commitment to do and ultimately be good every single day on various levels: “Daily I examine my person on three counts. In my understanding on behalf of other people, have I failed to be dedicated? In my interactions with colleagues and friends, have I failed to be true to my word? In what has passed onto me, have I failed to make it my practice?
As we attempt to show in this book, the Zhuangzi finds the permanent suspicion of oneself and others entailed in the categorical imperative of Confucian dual correspondence disquieting and –perhaps more problematically- creating an impossible task. As the anti-moral criticisms found throughout the Zhuangzi show, the text assumes that the very insistence on Confucian morality brings about what it tries to get rid of – namely, falsity, hypocrisy, and selfishness. It creates the very same problems it claims to resolve. Confucian moral demands are, to put it in contemporary parlance, tied to social constructs. And rather than simply demanding conformity with such social constructs, a Confucian ethics demand the impossible –that one ‘naturalize the social by personally substantiating family relationships and political roles established by the structures of a social order. This impossible demand is to sincerely make one’s own what is not one’s own to begin with, or in the words of the Analects, ‘what has been passed onto oneself.’
From a Daoist perspective such as we find expressed repeatedly in the ‘primitivist’ sections of the Zhuangzi, the acts of civilization enforced through the imposition of social divisions, ranks, and institutionalized human relationships as hailed in the Confucian texts and celebrated by the establishment of exemplary models are acts of wei – literally, acts of ‘human making.’ In other words, they are inherently artificial or, to put it once again into contemporary language, social constructs. From a Daoist perspective, Confucian ethics is profoundly paradoxical, or to use another contemporary term, it is built on a proliferates a giant double bind: it is aimed at a sort of a posteriori verification of what is essentially socially enforced and learned as being actually natural or personally sincere. What is external is supposed to be matched and grounded internally after the fact, as demanded by the emblematic maxim ‘inner sageliness and outward kingliness’, which, notably, first occurs in section 33.1 of the Zhuangzi, though it later became a paradigmatic expression for the Confucian ideal of personal cultivation.
The supposed moral grandeur of one’s social role – ‘one’s kingliness’ – is to be founded one one’s personal virtuousness or ‘sageliness’. Or, speaking with Mencius’s famous organic imagery, one’s ethical excellence in the social dimension is supposed to ‘sprout’ from one’s true inner nature. Everyone is there by called upon to supply with sincerity the social roles that one finds oneself entrusted with, and to meet moral expectations with a purported inborn identity. According to a most crucial passage in Zhongyong, while the dao of nature or the world in general is supposed to have been ‘sincere’ from the start, humans are single out with the task of making sincere whatever they do. This is what the text calls the dao of humankind: ‘Sincerity is the the dao/way of nature/heaven; making it sincere is the dao/way of humankind.’
The Zhuangzi, we submit, rejects this impossible Confucian categorical imperative of making sincere what is not so from the start. Instead of simply adopting the Confucian ‘game plan’ it inserts a joker into the fold – the genuine pretenders.
The Zhuangzi’s reaction to the impossible Confucian demand to make one’s social persona is not, we believe, to replace a wrong Confucian notion of sincerity with a correct or even better Daoist one – that is, a kind of authenticity. On the contrary, the genuine pretender, as a reaction to the Confucian sincerity claim, diverts from sincerity and steers toward an altogether different direction. Therefore we believe it is unfortunate that in the ‘age of authenticity,’ Heideggerian and other notions of authenticity have been ascribed to Daoism and, in particular, to the Zhuangzi. One of our intentions in this book is to liberate Zhuangzi from Heidegger’s all-to-tight and all-too-constraining – and even more uncomfortably, all-too-German and all-to-serious – embrace.
https://ctext.org/zhuangzi
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