Philosophy and Literature Blog

     The Tao Te Ching says that the universe treats us as straw dogs.  Meaning that we are burned as if in a sacrifice.  The sage, so says the Tao Te Ching, treats people as straw dogs.  Interpreters say this doesn't mean to be mean; it means to remember that everyone is temporary, including the people we love the most.  It makes no sense to kick against the pricks of the universe about this.  This interpretation is certainly consistent with the rest of the Tao Te Ching, but someone can take it in a mean way if they choose -- and I'm sure some have.      I personally don't plan on being mean to anyone at this point of my life.  However, I've come to know myself well enough to know that I don't plan on starting some spate of massive, public political involvement. That's one way to go in life, but it isn't my way.  I'm emotionally too unconnected.  I realize my connection to the society around me, but it is not in my nature to throw my hat in too much.

     For Allinson the butterfly image is the perfect image for the Zhuangzi because it represents an internal transformation to 'beauty' from 'ugliness' -- though he insists on calling caterpillers ugly when I find them rather cute and fuzzy.  I always like to see them crawling around, you know, devil-may-care, along the sidewalk.  I could crush their little guts out if I wanted, but I don't because I'm a nice guy.  Poor little things.      He also points out how transient the butterfly is.  The self-transformation is itself very delicate and could be 'broken quite easily'.  Any state of mind, even the state of enlightenment, is therefore impermanent.  You can lose it by forgetting the lessons of the zhuangzi.  Now, I know what you're saying: the whole point is to forget that there are lessons to begin with...  There are no lessons.  Just hang out and be spontaneous.  But this is easily forgotten.  Next thing you know you're squashing metaphor

     What I'm beginning to understand about this response to Confucianism is that these taoist thinkers are rejecting in many ways the entire social contract.  The social contract of hierarchy and social obligation.  There is a hint that the spontaneity suggested here yields social relations based on authentic compassion, not on compassion arising from obligation or the sense of right and wrong.  There is, after all, no right and wrong in the philosophical sense.  More important than right and wrong is freedom from societal rules.      The famous passage where Zhuangzi rejects the position of prime minister is often criticized in the west because he does not accept his 'obligation'.  The critics have missed the point.  The point is that the freedom itself is what life is about, to give that up for this sense of obligation is to destroy the very result of his own enlightenment.

     Allison starts off the 4th chapter of his book on the Zhuangzi by making us regard social outcasts.  In the extreme case he refers to them as 'monsters'.  These are people whom normal people avoid.  Zhuangzi puts philosophical reflections into the mouths of cripples, hunchbacks, people with no lips, and one Master Shu: "My back sticks up like a hunchback and my vital organs are on top of me.  My chin is hidden in my navel, my shoulders are up above my head, and my pigtail points at the sky."(as quoted in Allison pg. 52). Allison goes on... "The use of the monster serves two philosophical functions.  First, the monster is a living counterexample to the norm, whether cultural or biological or both...That which all monsters possess, which is feared and avoided by those who live according to the rule, is spontaneity.  In a very subtle way, then, the first philosophical significance of the monster is to make us aware that the value represented by the monster