Competing Interpretations of the Inner Chapters of the "Zhuangzi"

The Zhuangzi is a protean text. Even if we limit ourselves to a discussion of the Inner Chapters, we find that just when we think we have understood the text, a new passage calls into question our previous interpretation. Consequently, it is not surprising that the Zhuangzi acts almost like a Rorschach test: different interpreters see different things in it, and what they see there often reveals more about their own preoccupations than about the Zhuangzi itself. A. C. Graham reads Zhuangzi as presenting a sort of ideal-observer view of ethics.1 Chad Hansen has depicted Zhuangzi as an ethical relativist, who would be at home with contemporary analytic philosophers like Gilbert Harman.2 Benjamin Schwartz and Lee Yearley both think that Zhuangzi is a mystic-but very different kinds of mystic. Schwartz regards Zhuangzi as being very similar to Jewish, Christian, and Islamic mystics, in advocating union with a transcendent entity.3 Yearley, in contrast, takes Zhuangzi to be an intra-worldly mystic, who advocates detached contemplation of each moment of experience.4 And most recently, Paul Kjellberg and Lisa Raphals have stressed the similarities between the thought of Zhuangzi and both Platonic and Hellenistic skepticism.5 Some will find this state of affairs unsurprising. It has become almost an article of faith in some circles that every text has an infinite number of (equally defensible) possible interpretations.6 However, the problem is not so much that the Inner Chapters can consistently be read in a variety of different ways. Rather, the problem is that whatever the merits of various interpretations in making sense of portions of the text, none of them seems to do justice to the text as a whole. I submit that this is due, in part, to the fact that there are theoretical tensions within the Inner Chapters that seem hard, prima facie, to reconcile. Now, there are a variety of ways of accounting for tensions or apparent contradictions in a text. There may be interpolations in the text by other authors.7 Alternatively, various portions of the text may represent different stages in one author's intellectual development (as in Montaigne's Essays). I do not mean to rule out these possibilities a priori. However, it seems worthwhile to attempt to reconcile apparent contradictions before we start making efforts to explain why they are there. Bryan W. Van Norden