What is Zhuangzi’s Distinctive Approach?

Zhuangzi conforms to the general pre-Han model, using a path metaphor to discuss normativity in general. This fuels the traditional view of him as a Daoist. Most of his discussion, moreover, further conforms to the practice of focusing on social dàos—undermining treatment as religious disciple of Laozi’s insistence we follow only 天 tiānnatural dàos. What links him to a naturalist theme is his reluctance to draw the usual contrast between natural and social dàos. (Is it nature? Is it man?). Human social dàos are natural behaviors of natural animals. This grounds Zhuangzi’s pattern of talking about and with other equally natural creatures.

Humans are as natural as monkeys, birds, and fish. “How can dàos be hidden such that there are authentic and artificial?” he asks rhetorically? (Harvard Yenching Zhuangzi Yinde hereafter HY 4/2/24–5) All the different social traditions expand the number and kinds of naturally existing dàos. Other animals’ walking patterns also construct natural dàos which, similarly, become available for human finding, choosing and walking.

Zhuangzi’s discussion, particularly in the philosophically most sophisticated second chapter, is mainly about the plurality and relativity of second-level dàos, our naturally endowed, internal dàosways of finding, choosing and following one of many natural ways of life in the maze or network presented by nature. This stance makes the complexity of the natural network only the first level of variety and possibility. Recursion of dàos explodes the complexity. A tripartite recursion follows because there are many dàos of finding, of choosing, and of translating the first level plethora. The many layered complexity of dàos of dàos yields the human sphere of life. “Fish interact in water; humans interact in dàos” (Ibid., HY 18/6/72)

He naturalizes dàos less by attending to natural physical guiding structures (e.g. dàos of water) than to the variety of human dàos presented by analogy to the variety of creatures with different dàos. Alternately, he encourages us not to assume we have found all the available ways to behave or he reflects on the variety of sources of dàos of choice or of different capacities to catch on and follow within us—our different natural organs and the range of different ways we may train or habituate them. This complexity of dào structures fuels, in turn, both his skepticism of absolutes, of authority, of ideal observers, of social dogmas and his qualified advice to leave the finding, choice and interpretation to a working out from the variety of perspectives that make up the behaving units in the particular circumstance. Dào choices are best made from the perspective of walkers.(Ibid., HY 4/2/33)

The other distinctive feature of Zhuan……….