Zhuangzi

Their big question

Is a dream less real than a day?

Zhuangzi is the funniest important philosopher, which is itself an argument. Where Plato wrote dialogues aiming at definitions, Zhuangzi wrote about a butcher whose knife never blunts and a man who is not sure whether he is a butterfly. His reader is expected to laugh and then notice the ground has moved.

Take the useless tree. A carpenter walks past one, sniffs, and says it is good for nothing. Zhuangzi’s answer is that this is why it is still standing, three hundred years old, while the useful trees are furniture. Usefulness to somebody else is not the same as mattering. Every child who has been told they are not good at the thing that gets prizes knows the shape of this argument already.

His deepest move is about the difference between what is real and what is certain. The butterfly passage is not really about dreams. It is about the fact that when you are asleep you are as convinced as you are now, and you cannot step outside both states to check which one you are in — so your conviction is not evidence. Descartes reached the same place and treated it as a crisis to be argued through. Zhuangzi treats it as a joke, and the joke lands harder.

“I do not know whether I was a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or a butterfly now dreaming I am a man.”

From the butterfly chapter. He is not asking you to doubt everything, he is asking how you would ever check.

Three things worth knowing

• His book is mostly stories about people who are odd — a butcher who cuts up an ox without ever sharpening his knife, a cripple everyone admires, a man who talks to a skull.
• He pointed out that a tree with a knobbly, useless trunk is the one that survives, because no carpenter wants it.
• He turned down a job as a minister, comparing the life to being a sacred turtle kept in a box after death.

Try it — think like Zhuangzi

Pick something you own that has no use at all. Keep it where you can see it for a week and notice how often you feel you should get rid of it. That feeling is what Zhuangzi was arguing with.

Zhuangzi — Unknown authorUnknown author. Source on Wikimedia Commons.