Zhuangzi’s Trees Insubordinate Joy and Heavenly Becoming

Gil Morejón

This paper was presented at the 31st annual joint meeting of The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy and The Society for the

Study of Islamic Philosophy and Science at Fordham University in October 2013.

divergent resonance

There is a forest in the Zhuangzi, a collection of trees that flourish together and which

speak to one another across the horizontal surface of the text. Frequently, the tree figures as

something which is useless. However, Zhuangzi wants to insist that useless beings do not for

this reason have no value: “The cinnamon tree is edible, and thus it gets chopped down. The

lacquer tree is useful, and thus it is cut down. Everyone knows how useful usefulness is, but no

one seems to know how useful uselessness is.”1 This paper will seek to unravel the meaning of this

paradox by threading together the tree-stories in the Zhuangzi. I will argue that the uselessness

of the trees is exemplary insofar as it represents a refusal to be subordinated to teleological ends

which claim an authoritative status. Zhuangzi‟s perspectivalism denies that any such claims to

authority can be legitimately made. Becoming useless in this sense thus amounts to reclaiming

an immanent field of possibilities, returning to an undifferentiated from which paths open out

in all directions: at Zhuangzi‟s suggestion, we should plant our tree in its “homeland of not-

even-anything, the vast wilds of open nowhere.”2

In this ancient text, I argue, a rigorous ethics is articulated. In spite of the fact that this

paper takes its primary orientation in the literary analysis of a symbolic trope, that of the tree, it

will become clear that Zhuangzi presents a radical metaphysics of immanence punctuated by

strategic principles for cultivating ethical comportment. This metaphysics, whose ethics is set in

opposition to all morality, would later be developed in the line that runs from Machiavelli

through Spinoza and Nietzsche, and most recently thematized in the analyses of Deleuze.3

1 Zhuangzi. Zhuangzi: the Essential Writings. Trans. Brook Ziporyn. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2009.) [hereafter cited as „Zhuangzi‟, with parenthetical chapter] pg. 32 (emphasis mine). (4. In the Human World) 2 Zhuangzi 8 (1. Wandering Far and Unfettered) 3 I will footnote instances where Zhuangzi‟s positions prefigure the concepts of these figures, although none of them will be developed but for a brief aside about the particular proximity of Zhuangzi‟s tree and Deleuze-Guattari‟s body without organs.

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Thus, in the latter‟s parlance, in the Zhuangzi we find an astonishing „dark precursor‟, 4

determining in advance the extreme coordinates and horizons of this later historical movement.

I will need to argue more thoroughly for this embryonic, perhaps tectonic, connection

elsewhere. This paper will focus on presenting one line of reading the Zhuangzi, one series of

transverse connections that illustrates its heterodox ethicality. The Zhuangzi is a text which can

provide us with incredible and unique resources to think through philosophical problems

which are pressing and contemporary. That ancient Chinese thought has been marginalized in

the study of the history of philosophy is indicative not of a deficiency in its rigor, depth, or

clarity, but of a theoretically indefensible western cultural hegemony whose overcoming we

must take as one of our critical tasks today – though one not, perhaps, more pressing than our

real need to engage with, for instance, contemporary feminism and queer theory. This world

has no single center, only a multiplicity of focal points. The goal is not to establish the authority

of one, but to learn to speak to and harmonize with one another.

radical perspectivalism

From the very beginning of the text, Zhuangzi is constantly effecting wild shifts in

perspective. The scale of the world is unimaginably diverse; it is at once populated by beings

which we might barely notice underfoot and others which absolutely dwarf us both in physical

vastness and longevity. The opening lines describe the birth of a massive bird named Peng from

a xfish egg; Peng “has quite a back on him, stretching who knows how many thousands of

miles.”5 The bird journeys from the Northern to the Southern Oblivion, kept aloft by ninety

thousand miles of air beneath its wings. At the same time, to the cicada and fledgling dove, talk

of such size is incomprehensible: “We scurry up into the air, leaping from the elm to the

sandalwood tree, and when we don‟t quite make it we just plummet to the ground. What‟s all

this talk about ascending ninety thousand miles and heading south?”6 For these small creatures,

it‟s not even that such vast distances cannot be traversed; they cannot even be conceived. We

should also say that the reverse is true: for Peng, even the sandalwood and elm trees which

tower over us are unthinkably small.

For us, however, the tree nevertheless represents a longevity which reveals the extremity

of our own finitude. “In southern Chu there is a tree called Mingling, for which five hundred

years is as a single spring, and another five hunred years is as a single autumn. In ancient times,

there was even one massive tree whose spring and autumn were each eight thousand years

long.”7 Even those humans who live long lives, as Pengzu was famous for, are from this

perspective instantaneous passages which are almost imperceptible. Zhuangzi asks us why we

should therefore value so highly our human „longevity‟, which appears as fleetingly miniscule

4 Cf. Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.) 119 5 Zhuangzi 3 (1. Wandering Far and Unfettered) 6 Zhuangzi 4 (1. Wandering Far and Unfettered) 7 Ibid.

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under the aspect of the tree [to say nothing of it sub specie æternitatus]. In any case, measures of

both space and time are shown here to be completely dependent on perspective. The only

reason we can call some things „large‟ is due to the adoption of a particular perspective, and for

the very same reason, we are able to call those same things „small.‟ Zhuangzi develops this into a

series of paradoxes which present contradictory valuations achieved through shifts in

perspective: “Nothing in this world is larger than the tip of a hair in autumn, and Mt. Tai is

small. No one lives longer than a dead child, and old Pengzu died an early death.”8

This radical perspectivalism 9 has several important consequences for Zhuangzi‟s

thought. On the one hand, it undermines the possibility of any metaphysically authoritative or

absolute truth claims. All values are dependent on perpective. At the same time, this allows for

a palliative practice of redescription. In ancient China, convicts were sometimes physically

mutilated as punishment for their crimes, marking them irremediably as criminals. Their hands

and feet were amputated, their noses chopped off, their faces tattooed; thus they could be

immediately identified as convicts. One such ex-con whose foot was removed as punishment

for his crimes was Wang Tai, who nevertheless became a teacher of great reputation. Confucius

explains this extraordinary situation to a student:

Looked at from the point of view of their differences, even your own liver and

gallbladder are as distant as Chu in the south and Yue in the north. But looked at from

the point of view of their sameness, all things are one. If you take the latter view, you

become free of all preconceptions about which particular objects might suit the eyes and

ears. You just release the mind to play in the harmony of all Virtuosities. Seeing what is

one and the same to all things, nothing is ever felt to be lost. This man viewed the

chopping off of his foot as nothing more than the casting away of a clump of soil.10

We are always able to shift our descriptive levels of perspective in order to minimize the

possible negative affectative responses to situations that befall us. It‟s worth noting that in this

text, Confucius is no exemplar of „right‟ living or thinking; in some cases, when he meets such a

mutilated ex-con, he is too quick to pass judgement, seeing their amputation not as a lost piece

of dirt but as a veritable sign of poor character. 11 Elsewhere, Zhuangzi will say that the

particularly Confucian values of Humanity and Responsibility are among the things stolen and

abused by the great robbers, that they are able to make use of these values for unjust means.12

Zhuangzi even uses this language of punitive mutilation to describe strict adherence to these

8 Zhuangzi 15 (2. Equalizing Assessments of Things) 9 Obviously, here Zhuangzi is most notably proximate to Nietzsche‟s perspectivalism, and especially in light of the latter‟s critical caveat, too often forgotten, that „beyond good and evil‟ does not mean „beyond good and bad‟. 10 Zhuangzi 33 (5. Markers of Full Virtuosity) 11 Zhuangzi 35 (5. Markers of Full Virtuosity) 12 Zhuangzi 64 (10 Breaking Into Trunks)

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values: the Confucian dogmatist has already “tattooed [his] face with Humanity and

Responsibility and de-nosed [himself] with right and wrong.”13

„Right and wrong‟ in such a rigid sense are absolute values which Zhuangzi consistently

undermines. “When people sleep in a damp place, they wake up deathly ill and sore about the

waist – but what about eels? If people live in trees, they tremble with fear and worry – but how

about monkeys? Of these three, which „knows‟ what is the right place to live?”14 There are no

transcendent or external criteria by which we might judge the „rightness‟ of a decision. Living in

a tree is ridiculous and inconvenient for a human, but it might constitute an appropriate

domicile for a monkey. On this point in the Zhuangzi, Lee Yearley is particularly clear: “Most

important distinctions between the good and the bad arise from and depend upon the position,

the perspective, from which a person views the world. Moreover, no fully objective way exists

to decide which of the conflicting perspectives correct because any decision is bound to reflect a

perspective.” 15 By completely rejecting the possibility of appealing to purely objective

standards, Zhuangzi thus advocates a kind of immanent criticism; to judge anything on the

basis of preordained values is always a mistake. We will later come to see what criteria can be

invoked in making legitimate judgments about things: their Heavenly articulations or inborn

natures.

uselessness and insubordination

It is often the case that when we illegitimately pass judgments, the external criteria we

import to ground our decision is what we take to be use-value. What is the structure of

usefulness? An end is posited, and means toward such an end are deemed useful to the extent

that they are capable of bringing it about. But for whom is an end useful? What is lost in our

subordinating something to it as a means? Why would we take our teleological judgments to be

authoritative? Just as the tree might be a good place for some to live and a bad place for others,

the tree itself also has processes of flourishing which are not reducible to those of the human.

Zhuangzi‟s critique of use-value is thus also a critique of instrumental reason, which privileges

the perspective of the human as a place from which true judgments can be made and which

subordinates external objects to this authoritative gaze.16

Zhuangzi tells us of a traveling carpenter who comes across a massive tree at a bend in

the road and scoffs at the people worshiping at the shrine which has been built around it. His

13 Zhuangzi 48 (7. Sovereign Responses for Ruling Powers) 14 Zhuangzi 18 (2. Equalizing Assessments of Things) 15 Yearley, Lee H. “Zhuangzi‟s Understanding of Skillfullness and the Ultimate Spiritual State”, in Essays on Skepticism, Relativism, and Ethics in the Zhuangzi. Eds. Kjellberg, Paul and Philip J. Ivanhoe. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1996. Page 156 16 Thereby also prefiguring the analyses of Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Zhuangzi already presents us with a conception of irreverent rather than enlightenment rationality, that is, he does not fall prey to Adorno and Horkheimer‟s criticism that reason is rooted in a fear of the omnipotence of nature compared to the impotence of humanity; Zhuangzi, in pursuing a real consistency, laughs rather than shudders.

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approach is profoundly instrumental, and he sees the tree as so much gnarled wood that refuses

to conform to the constructions he would build with it. His apprentice is impressed by its size,

but the carpenter understands this to be a function of its defective quality, not a virtue: “This is

a talentless, worthless tree. It is precisely because it is so useless that it has lived so long.”17 The

question is, on what basis can we make legitimate evaluations? Carpenter Shi assesses the tree

based on whether or not its material is suitable as a means to his preconceived ends. For this the

tree rebukes him in a dream, challenging his assumption that the tree‟s ends and values are

identical to those which the human imposes upon it:

What do you want to compare me to, one of those cultivated trees? The hawthorn, the

pear, the orange, the rest of those fructiferous trees and shrubs – when their fruit is ripe

they get plucked, and that is an insult. Their large branches are bent; their small branches

are pruned. Thus do their abilities embitter their lives. That is why they die young,

failing to fully live out their natural [tian] life spans. As for me, I‟ve been working on

being useless for a long time. It almost killed me, but I‟ve finally managed it – and it is of

great use to me!18

Something, or someone, can only be understood as „useless‟ in relation to teleologies which are

determined for them, in advance and from without – in this case, by the carpenter. Being useless

thus means not conforming to these external criteria. On the one hand, this tree refuses the

categories of judgment which the carpenter wants to employ: they are not the same categories

by which the tree might judge itself. On the other, the tree asks us what conforming with such

ends actually amounts to, and asserts that being taken up and used is ultimately insulting.

Worse, it prevents one from being able to flourish naturally.

The tree further challenges the carpenter‟s right to judge the tree at all: “You and I are

both beings – is either of us in a position to classify and evaluate the other? How could a

worthless man with one foot in the grave know what is or isn‟t a worthless tree?”19 For

Zhuangzi, all things are radically singular and different while inhabiting the same plane of

existence: there is no metaphysical hierarchy. For the carpenter, a piece of wood might not be

appropriate for the construction of an artifact, but this does not entail that the wood is

„defective‟. The carpenter took as his criteria the ends of a human project and on this basis

judged the tree in itself, and this is quite simply a category error. And yet, we see that the tree

falls to its own criticism: it calls the carpenter „worthless‟ in the same breath as insisting that it is

impossible to judge the worth or worthlessness of another being.

That being useful can lead to a life being cut unnaturally short is one of the recurring

lessons of the trees. A man named Ziqi comes across a tree similar to the one in this last story,

with gnarled roots and split branches, but unlike the carpenter he immediately recognizes that

there can be serious benefits to being useless: “Those [trees] that are three or four spans around

17 Zhuangzi 30 (4. In the Human World) 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid.

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are chopped down to make pillars for stately homes. Those that are seven or eight spans around

are felled to make coffin shells for the wealthy. Thus, they fail to fully live out their natural

[tian] life spans and die before their time under axes and saws. This is the trouble that comes

from being worth something.” 20 Ziqi sees that for things to be useful is to acquiesce to

conditions that would use them up. This tree is, strictly speaking, worthless – but this is a

spiritual worthlessness which must be understood and integrally connected to “the seminal

quintessence of vitality.”21 Being worthless or useless means being left alone to flourish.

When Confucius admitted that he hated the thought of dying and sought advice on how

to avoid death,22 he was told to remain unobtrusive, to become useless: “The straight-trunked

tree is the first to be felled; the well of sweet water is the first to run dry.”23 When laborers go on

strike, they deploy the (very useful) strategy of becoming useless in defiance of working

conditions that would use them up, like so much raw material, and which foreclose on the

possibility of their flourishing. To become useless is insubordinate, in the sense of refusing to be

subordinated to a teleological end. But this insubordination is itself quite useful: it places one

beyond the reaches of repressive instrumental reason and opens new lines of development and

growth. This is what Zhuangzi explains to Huizi about the Stink Tree, which is twisted and

gnarled: “It will never be cut down by ax or saw. Nothing will harm it. Since it has nothing for

which it can be used, what could entrap or afflict it?”24

It seems clear that if Zhuangzi advocates a palliative practice of redescription at the level

of language and conception, he also presents us with a prophylactic practice of insubordination

when it comes to cultivating oneself. Again, this is a result of the perspectival nature of truth

claims: to designate a practice or being as useful or useless can only be a partial and contextual

judgment, and prescriptive statements with pretensions to absolute applicability are ill-

founded. But as we have seen, being useless also means finding another way to flourish,

sidestepping the prescribed „usefulness‟.25 Becoming useless opens onto a field of alternative

possible organizations that is radically inclusive and which is not reducible to the simple

negative of the prescription. 26 Our situated and finite perspective might lead us to privilege a

20 Zhuangzi 31 (4. In the Human World) 21 Zhuangzi 118 (23. The World Under Heaven) 22 This itself suffices to show Confucius‟ distance from Zhuangzi, who on the contrary seems to advocate an acceptance of life and death as fated, even holding open the possibility that our valuing life intrinsically is delusional: “How do I know that the dead don‟t regret the way they used to cling to life?” (Zhuangzi 19) 23 Chuang Tzu. The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu. Trans. Burton Watson. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1968. [Chuang Tzu] Pg. 213 24 Zhuangzi 8 (1. Wandering Far and Unfettered) 25 The insistence on the importance of finding ways to flourish, whether or not they accord with preestablished strictures of any transcendent moral authority, prefigures Spinoza‟s emphasis that the purpose of rationally directing action is in preventing encounters with sad passions and encouraging joyful ones. 26 It thus seems that Zhuangzi‟s trees have an affinity with the body without organs described by Deleuze and Guattari. (This is not without its irony, as Deleuze and Guattari opposed a kind of thinking which they termed „arborescent‟. But this for them means a thinking which is hierarchical, with rigid rather than

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particular end and declare the value of something useful, but this is always a partial judgment,

and one which presupposes the infinite series of possibilities already contained in the ostensibly

useless. The possibility of any use is subtended by the useless; inclusivity and possibility can

only be found in the undifferentiated, not in the different things. As Zhuangzi says in response

to Huizi‟s accusation that his words are useless, “It is only when you know uselessness that you

can understand anything about the useful.”27

Recall the massive bird Peng, who was born of a fish egg: it becomes differentiated as it

jouneys toward the south, from the Northern Oblivion. In telling a similar story, Zhuangzi

reverses the direction, describing a bird that flies from the south toward the north: “This bird

rises from the Southern Sea and flies to the Northern Sea, resting only on the stericula tree…”28

The stericula is like the stink tree, not „useful‟ but providing shelter, a place to rest – it is a thing

with which we can go along. But the resonance with this earlier image means that for the bird to

fly from the south to the north is to travel backwards, towards the undifferentiated, and the tree

is a step along the way of this process. To become useless like the tree is to take a step towards

undifferentiation, to rescue the possible from the subordinated.

The trees encountered by Ziqi and Carpenter Shi show that precisely being useless,

refusing to accommodate oneself to external ends, can create the requisite space for the

flourishing of a natural life span. But sometimes it seems as though quite the opposite happens.

In a later story from the text, one of two geese will be prepared as a meal; the host spares the

one which can crow, selecting the ostensibly useless mute one to be cooked. A student takes

note of this discrepancy and asks Zhuangzi whether worthlessness or worthiness is ultimately

preferable. At first, Zhuangzi says he would try to take a third position between advocating

worthlessness or worthiness, but since this would still lead to entanglements, he takes it back:

It would be another thing entirely to float and drift along, mounted only on the Course

and its Virtuosity – untouched by both praise and blame, now a dragon, now a snake,

changing with the times, unwilling to keep to any exclusive course of action. Now above,

now below, with momentary harmony as your only measure […] What could then

entangle you?29

supple structures, single centers of concentric focus rather than multiple focal points; to the verticality of the arborescent they opposed the decentered horizontal multiplicities of the rhizome. Understood in this way, it seems clear that Zhuangzi does not present us with arborescent thought, in spite of the importance of the image of the tree, for which I am arguing in this paper.) The body without organs is useless, the unproductive, an “enormous undifferentiated object” which repulses various attempts to teleologically subordinate it. Any possible use-value, any specific telos or organization, is “positive in relationship to the zero intensity that designates the full body without organs.” (Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen Lane. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1972. Page 7, 19) 27 Zhuangzi 112 (26. External Things) 28 Zhuangzi 76 (17. Autumn Floods) 29 Zhuangzi 84 (20. The Mountain Tree)

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Does this perhaps get beyond worthiness and worthlessness? To drift along means that there is

no overarching teleology that overdetermines one‟s actions. To be unwilling to keep to any

exclusive course of action means rejecting authoritative evaluations. However, at the local level,

nonexclusive connections take place and singularities resonate: even while drifting along, we

are guided by harmonious and joyful encounters. Are we worthless for refusing to produce

along the lines of a plan of action in the grand scheme, or is it the case that we are worth

something for harmonizing with the particular in the moment? It seems that we might be able

to resolve the paradox of the „usefulness of the useless‟ by claiming that the two designations

take place at different levels. Of course, Zhuangzi‟s perspectivalism is precisely the insistence

that different levels of description are equally valid. But Zhuangzi‟s lesson here is that in order

to harmonize with the particular, we must secure the space for such a harmony, and for this we

must constantly be skeptical of the overdetermining function of teleological use-values.

becoming attuned to the heavenly

We have already seen one way in which the heavenly or natural is invoked: being

useless can allow for a tree to live out its natural life span. In both Watson‟s and Ziporyn‟s

translations, the ancient Chinese word tian is rendered as heavenly or natural, although Ziporyn

also uses skylike at various points. Ziporyn describes Zhuangzi‟s usage of the word to mean “the

spontaneous and agentless creativity that brings forth all beings, whatever happens without a

specific identifiable agent that makes it happen and without a preexisting purpose or will or

observable method.”30 At times, and generally throughout the Inner Chapters, Zhuangzi clearly

does mean something just like this: “To understand what is done by the Heavenly: just in being

the Heavenly, as the way all beings are born, what it does is bring them into being.”31

As I have said, the Zhuangzi exhibits a strange kind of consistency to it, though it

contradicts itself in various ways. It may be important to take note of a few places in the text

which do not accord with this interpretation of tian. In the chapter entitled Autumn Floods, the

distinction between the Heavenly and the Human is made completely unambiguous: “That

cows and horses have four legs is the Heavenly. The bridle around the horse‟s head and the

ring through the cow‟s nose are the Human.”1 Here it seems like the difference is a dichotomy

of natural and artificial. But this conception is relatively impoverished when we compare it to

the understanding put forth earlier. That is, in the Inner Chapters, Zhuangzi‟s treatment of this

distinction is nuanced enough to problematize such a clear-cut delineation; he asks how we

could possibly know whether something a person did was of the human or of heaven. This

indicates that the two terms stand in a mediating relationship to one another, rather than being

a simple opposition. We do not take the oversimplified distinction found in this passage to

reflect Zhuangzi‟s general position.

30 Ziporyn, Brook. “Glossary of Essential Terms.” In Zhuangzi: the Essential Writings. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2009. Pg. 217 31 Zhuangzi 39 (6. The Great Souce as Teacher)

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In the so-called „primitivist chapters‟, there is another conception of the Heavenly which

we should consider. “The truly true and unskewed way is just not to lose the uncontrived

condition of one‟s inborn nature and the allotment of one‟s life.”32 Here, Zhuangzi seems to

offer a tian which constitutes a minimum of givenness.33 While it may seem unnatural to be born

with webbed toes or a sixth finger, it still causes pain and strife to surgically alter these

conditions, these elements given over to us as inborn nature. Can we justify such „corrective‟

practices? Zhuangzi would have us take things in their inborn natures, that is, their heavenly

articulations, and go along with them. To do otherwise, to insist that we must „correct‟ a six-

fingered hand, would be to make the error of illegitimately taking an all-too-human perspective

as authoritative.

It seems then that the prescription here is to attend to the inborn natures of things: “The

hundred-year-old tree is hacked up to make bowls for the sacrificial wine, blue and yellow,

with patterns on them, and the chips are thrown far into the ditch. Compare the sacrificial

bowls with the chips in the ditch and you will find them far apart in beauty and ugliness; yet

they are alike in having lost their inborn nature.”34 An attentiveness or attenuation to one‟s

inborn nature, a certain safeguarding of that which is given, seems to be called for here.

Zhuangzi critiques both Confucian sages who martyr themselves for their principled beliefs and

the infamous Robber Zhi for going against the Heavenly natures with which they are born:

“Though the goal to which each devotes himself may differ, along with the reputations gained,

all of them are the same in harming their inborn natures by sacrificing themselves to some

thing.”35

Again it seems that Zhuangzi is advocating a kind of insubordination. To subordinate

one‟s nature, even to generally „good‟ values and even successfully, is not a good thing. “What I

call good is not Humanity and Responsibility, but just being good at your own Virtuosity […] It

is just fully allowing the uncontrived condition of your inborn nature and allotment of life to

play itself out.”36 The question at this point becomes, how do we recognize the features of our

inborn nature in order to know what it is that we are to safeguard and preserve?

Perhaps we can return to the trees in order to understand. Lao Tan, when asked by

Confucius about the Dao, compares the tree‟s patterns with those of the human:

The fruits of trees and vines have their patterns and principles. Human relationships, too,

difficult as they are, have their relative order and precedence. The sage, encountering

them, does not go against them; passing beyond, he does not cling to them. To respond to

32 Zhuangzi 58. (8. Webbed Toes) Watson‟s translation is simpler, although they both turn on „inborn nature‟: “He who holds to True Rightness does not lose the original form of his inborn nature.” (Chuang Tzu 99) 33 This conception of Tian, as the spontaneous minimum of givenness against which it would be folly to struggle, bears a striking resemblance to Machiavelli‟s relationship of fortuna and virtù. 34 Chuang Tzu 140 35 Zhuangzi 59 (8. Webbed Toes) 36 Zhuangzi 60 (8. Webbed Toes)

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them in a spirit of harmony – this is virtue; to respond to them in a spirit of fellowship –

this is the Way.37

Virtuous action, which accords with the Dao, does not contradict the patterns that subsist in

things, but goes along with them. To harmonize with things means taking them up in their

naturally occuring patterns. The „skill stories‟ can illustrate this quite clearly.

A woodworker named Qing is asked about the remarkable quality of his work; he

makes bell stands, which onlookers claim appear as the work of spirits. He explains that he

approaches a tree out of which he might carve a stand and fasts his mind for seven days before

undertaking the task: “My skill is concentrated and the outside world slides away. Then I enter

into the mountain forests, viewing the inborn Heavenly nature of the trees. My body arrives at a

certain spot, and already I see the completed bell stand there; only then do I apply my hand to

it. Otherwise I leave the tree alone. So I am just matching the Heavenly to the Heavenly.”38 It is

clear that there is no imposition going on here. The woodworker does not produce anything

that was not already in the tree; only if the bell stand already exists in the wood does he attempt

to draw it out from the material. He does not attempt to subordinate the tree, but rather goes

along with what already inheres in it. „Matching the Heavenly with the Heavenly‟ thus

indicates that in this process of creation, he and the tree go along together, neither enforcing an

edict on the other. It is for this reason, the woodworker contends, that the work resembles that

of spirits rather than an individual; “a single identity can never be designated for the spirit.”39

And, as we noted in our earlier considerations in the case of Ziqi and the worthless tree, the

„Spirit Man‟ is connected to the essence of vitality.

Another prominent skill story is that of Cook Ding, whose ability to carve oxen is also

exemplary. Again, the skillful agent is questioned as to how it is that he is able to perform so

adeptly. In response, the cook explains: “I encounter it with the spirit rather than scrutinizing it

with the eyes. My understanding consciousness, beholden to its specific purposes, comes to a

halt, and thus the promptings of the spirit begin to flow. I depend on Heaven‟s unwrought

perforations [tianli] and strike the larger gaps, following along with the broader hollows. I go by

how they already are, playing them as they lay.”40 By now we are able to recognize all the key

elements of this passage: the cook sheds his understanding with its teleological subordination,

making his consciousness effectively useless; the spirit, freed by this becoming-useless,

encounters things in their vitality and guides his hand; he harmonizes with the articulations of

the ox as they already are, not imposing an order on what presents itself to him. The cook goes

on to explain that this has enabled him to use the same knife for decades without needing to

sharpen it, since he just follows the perforations that already pattern the ox. We could almost

say that the ox cuts itself apart using his knife.

37 Chuang Tzu 239-240 38 Zhuangzi 82 (19. Fathoming Life) 39 Zhuangzi 44 (6. The Great Source as Teacher) 40 Zhuangzi 22 (3. The Primacy of Nourishing Life)

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„Heaven‟s unwrought perforations‟, which translates tianli,41 are those articulations that

striate things in their minimal givenness. By attending to these preexistent structures, the cook‟s

work is harmonious instead of forced.42 As we see in this passage, we do not come to know

these Heavenly articulations, these given patterns, from conscious reflection, but from a kind of

intuition.

Tianli occurs in at least one other place in the text, in a description of perfect music. After

hearing him perform, a man asked the Yellow Emperor why the music had terrified and

exhausted him; the music cast him into total chaos and confusion. The Yellow Emperor explains

that his music escapes understanding comprehension:

I performed it with the Human in me but attuned it to the Heavenly, advancing it with

the trappings of Ritual and Responsibility, but rooting it in the Great Clarity. For perfect

music – which is perfect joy – must start out by resonating with human affairs but also

flowing along with the guideline of the Heavenly [tianli]. […] without overture or

conclusion, without head or tail, now alive, now dead, now rising, now falling. Endlessly

sustainable, it yet has no predictable consistency.43

This music does not have a direction, it is without end, so the understanding consciousness is

incapable of grasping it. The music “sprang from no specifiable place, rooted in the recesses of

oblivion.” 44 Here, without comprehension or predictability, the music accords with the

Heavenly articulations in just the same way as Cook Ding‟s knife: things are taken up as they

are, not contradicted but gone along with.

Yet the understanding consciousness yearns to subordinate, to rationalize things in

terms of a teleology. Thus the listener winds up terrified and confused. But precisely at the

point at which the listener falls back on the uselessness of ateleological insubordination,

something incredible happens: “All at once you were standing in the midst of the Course that

opens out in all directions, leaning against a withered tree and inadvertently singing along.”45

The listener, confused and exhausted, almost inexplicably harmonizes. The uselessness of the

withered tree is needed in order to harmonize: no ends, no subordination, no comprehension –

only resonance, harmony, and joy. “This is called the Heavenly Music, the Heavenly Joy.

Wordless, the heart finds its delight there.”46

We must become withered trees in order to harmonize. In another skill-story, a

hunchback is able to deftly catch cicadas with a glue-tipped stick (how clear it is that being

41 In this passage, Watson translates tianli as „natural makeup‟. (Chuang Tzu 50-51) 42 Ziporyn notes that this is the first time in Chinese literary history that tianli is used, and that it would later become a central metaphysical category in neo-Confucian thought. (Zhuangzi 22, fn.) 43 Zhuangzi 67 (14. The Turnings of Heaven) The ancient Chinese word for joy is the same as the word for music [lè]. Watson‟s translation of this passage does not have the repetition which makes it clear that perfect music is also perfect joy. 44 Zhuangzi 68 (14. The Turnings of Heaven) 45 Zhuangzi 67 (14. The Turnings of Heaven) 46 Zhuangzi 68 (14. The Turnings of Heaven)

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skillful does not mean being useful!). The hunchback‟s explanation describes his becoming

useless: “I settle my body like a twisted old stump, holding my arm still like the branch of a

withered tree.”47 Then the spiritual in him is able to converge and solidify, and the cicadas

practically catch themselves; he is in perfect harmony with them. Or consider Laozi‟s exposition

on the procedure for preserving life: “Can you stop? Can you leave off? Can you ignore how it

is with others and seek it in yourself? Can you be unconstrained and oblivious? Can you

become an infant? […] An infant acts without knowing what she‟s doing and moves along

without know where she‟s going, her body like the branch of a withered tree and her mind like

dead ashes.”48 The vital essence is preserved to the utmost where uselessness is achieved, when

neither good nor bad can befall us. This is where the palliative practice of redescription and the

prophylactic practice of insubordination converge: at absolute velocity, thinking the truth of

perspectivalism becomes the prescription of that which cannot be prescribed, and we transcend

the possibility of harm and benefit, praise and blame, in harmonious, heavenly becoming. This

is the sage‟s way, the “Radiance of Drift and Doubt.”49

anomalous radiance

We have seen the usefulness of the useless: it is an insubordination which opens onto

the possibility of alternative modes of organization and activity. The trees show us the value of

uselessness, hint at the power and possibilities contained within the undifferentiated, and teach

us how to harmonize. To be sure, Zhuangzi is not a utopian, and it is hard to imagine that he

actually believed that there was a utopian moment in the past. The thought of a lost totality, as

well as an ideal completion towards which we should work, are both incompatible with the

perspectival status of truth and the horizontal, immanent metaphysics that Zhuangzi espouses.

In any case, this would all be far too teleological.

However, Zhuangzi does give us descriptions of what he calls the age of Perfect

Virtuosity, when “all creatures lived together, merging their territories into each other”, when

“the people lived together with the birds and the beasts, bunched together with all things. What

did they know about exemplary men? All the same in knowing nothing, their undivided

Virtuosity never left them.” 50 This could be something like a Kantian regulative ideal,

something unattainable and ultimately unknowable which we nevertheless deploy in our

thought in order to attain to more appropriate ways of comporting ourselves in the world. It

could be that Zhuangzi is playing a joke on us, and this is a laugh had at our expense, with our

all-too-human dreams of attaining to Perfect Humanity and Virtuosity constituting the real

punchline. However, we have to consider that Zhuangzi might be quite sincere in these lines. In

our reflections on the paradox of useful uselessness, we thus come to the possibility that a more

fundamental paradox underlies the Zhuangzi: that the point is in fact to subordinate ourselves to

47 Zhuangzi 78 (19. Fathoming Life) 48 Zhuangzi 98 (23. Gensang Chu) 49 Zhuangzi 15 (2. Equalizing Assessments of Things) 50 Zhuangzi 61 (9. Horse Hooves)

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the end of having no ends. Can our telos be the abolition of teleology? What is clear, at least, is

that it is only in the real absence of subordination that harmonious flourishing can take place.