Vagueness In The Zhuangzi

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Introduction

The Zhuangzi, named after who is claimed to be its author (Zhuang zi – Master Zhuang), is one of the central texts in Chinese philosophy. Along with the Laozi, the Zhuangzi is a canonical text of the Daoist school of thought, which preaches following the natural course of life, and non-interference.

The book contains 33 chapters, which are considered to be the product of several if not many hands. The opening seven chapters, Known as the “inner chapters”, are traditionally thought to be the literary product of Master Zhuang himself, while the remaining “outer” and “miscellaneous” chapters are taken to be later elaborations and commentary by members of what retrospectively can be called a Master Zhuang school or lineage.

The Zhuangzi as a philosophical text is for the most part addressed to the project of personal realization, and uses parables and clever rhetoric to convey its ideas. Chapter 2 of the Zhuangzi is considered the most complex, many of the passages in it read like a conundrum and use vague terms and self-contradictory structures. The main idea conveyed in the chapter, as commonly accepted by Sinological scholars who have studied the Zhuangzi, is that human perception is tainted with prejudice, and in order to grasp life and nature as they really are, one must dissolve the prejudice, which is a construct of the mind.

I wish to discuss several passages in this chapter, and show how they use the concept of vagueness in order to convey their philosophical ideas. Note that the vagueness I will be referring to is not the vagueness we discussed in class, where a certain term has more than two values and therefore can create a paradox as in the case of Sorites. This vagueness is what I will try to label as “conceptual vagueness”, in which the text makes concepts vague by linguistic means, thus belittling their importance, in order to prove the philosophical point.

Seeing as Chinese and ...