Zhuangzi's Perspectivism

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Discussion

Eric Schaetzle:

"The Japanese concept of wabisabi is described by Leonard Koren as beauty that is "imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete". This aesthetic developed through the influence of Zen. And Zen was in turn influenced by the confluence in China of Buddhist thought (where the characteristics of existence are impermanence, suffering, and emptiness) with Daoist thought. As an aside, according to Xunzi the mind is empty, unified, and still when it is in accord with the Dao. Concerning Daoism, Brook Ziporyn wrote that "there are three intertwined themes at the heart of Zhuangzi's project: transformation, dependence, and perspective." I would slightly modify this triad. Zhuangzi’s wabisabi observer-observed (perspectives) can be understood as a dialectic within and between three pairs of opposite qualities: one-many (composed of fractal parts, infinite continua, internally differentiating aspects), independent-interdependent (contextuality of relations, pathos and ethics, causality, logical connectives, etc.), and rest-motion (in the process of continuous change, flux, transformation). So how do contextually situated, partial perspectives transform? We can look to ancient philosophy both East and West for an answer. The concept of change and the unity of opposites characterized the thought of Heraclitus. A few phrases he was credited with include: "hen diapheron heautôi" (the one differentiated in itself), and "panta rhei" (everything flows). The first phrase acknowledges that our partial perspectives do clearly divide us from each other (as the left hemisphere readily avers). But it also suggests that perspectives, as inherently relational processes, point to a deeper unity that, though hidden from the left hemisphere, is discernable by the 'higher point of view' of the right hemisphere (McGilchrist). Concerning Heraclitus' teachings on flux, John Burnet (1930) wrote: "Nothing ever is, everything is becoming"; "All things are in motion like streams"; "All things are passing, and nothing abides". The ebb and flow of a braided stream is also a metaphor to understand the dynamic and fluid nature of evolution and our genetic heritage. A mighty torrent fans out into numerous rivulets before merging again, now here, now there. The waves rise over the rocks and boulders, and spill over the falls. And when it reaches its terminus in the sea, it evaporates, falls on the mountains, and the cycle repeats once more. Carl Jung thought Heraclitus was marvelous, though over the course of development of Western philosophy (epecially its modern expression, as described by McGilchrist) Heraclitus' views seemed increasingly paradoxical and obscure. Thales considered water as the arche, the fundamental element that united all things. Laozi used water as a metaphor for Dao: “Dao in the world may be compared to rivers and streams running into the sea” (chap. 32); and “The Great Tao flows everywhere. It may go left or right. All things depend on it for life” (chap. 34). This is how perspectives transform: everything flows, and it completes a process-relational understanding of Carlo Rovelli's QM perspectivism (relational quantum mechanics), and Lee Smolin's causal theory of views. How matter and energy flows in ecosystems was also the concern of Howard Odum and his energy hierarchy.

On one hand, what Zhuangzi has to tell us may seem fairly obvious, as it is borne out by experience. We are aware of the limitations of bounded rationality, we recognize the need to understand changing contexts, and we have become all too familiar with the everpresent danger that a narrow and intolerant perspective presents when it gains power and influence, wreaking havoc due to its inability to appreciate its own limitations. But on the other hand, our failure to heed the implications of all this makes Zhuangzi’s insights even more relevant today than they were over two millennia ago. In his article about Zhuangzi for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Chad Hansen wrote (paraphrasing): “Epistemic modesty undergirds Zhuangzi’s openness and willingness to interact with others. There are no naturally ideal observers. No judgment comes from some point outside of or everywhere within the maze or network of dàos (paths) presented by nature. There is no final or ultimately broad perspective from which we can make judgments. We are one among many natural creatures (as natural as monkeys, birds, and fish) with different capacities, choosing paths from their indexed point in space and time, and limited in the sense that there is no behavior from the point of view of the whole, no omniscient perspective on the path structure. Paths are in nature but not choices of nature for us. So the discussion, competition, and even strife between paths and their advocates are factors in an ongoing, natural guiding process. Dialogue is part of the natural process of path construction and making them available to others.

"We and our circumstances change as we each find, choose and walk different naturally evolving paths, but this does not entail we should not advocate our own way. Realizing this, we should not flatter ourselves, posing as the Confucian father shaping his child’s character, but rather as a contributor in this competition among similarly natural ways. We are all naturally influenced by others’ evaluations, their judgments of our choices and their behavioral virtuosity — especially when the others are our parents, perceived superiors and respected models. We each express perspectives located in a real world of indexed points from which we choose behavioral paths. We may judge others as correct or incorrect from our own present perspective. We need not judge that all are good choices for those following them — only that the grounds of their choice may be different from ours. They might still be dogmatic, careless, or unwarranted even given the situational grounds of their choice. Nothing about the naturalness of how our choices arise makes them right.

"We may wonder if we have discovered all the available paths. And we may always wonder if our judgment about which is best now is about the best in the long run. But all we can substitute for this global perspective is some local consensus. There may be occasions when we experience a gestalt broadening of perspective as revealing something real and significant (like waking from a dream), but we cannot extrapolate from that to claim to know the direction and final result of such gestalt leaps to broader perspectives or a final state of knowing what to do. Zhuangzi’s relativism is mildly skeptical because he cannot know either that there is not, nor that there is, a final or ultimate “awakening”. Credulous, dogmatic and imperious absolutists do not appreciate themselves as being one of a variety of natural perspectives. Zhuangzi ridiculed the social moralists of his time for the narrowness of their range of choices — their failure to appreciate the richness and complexity of alternative ways of life and their paternalistic, superior attitude toward other points of view."

It was in his introduction to Zhuangzi: The Essential Writings that Brook Ziporyn introduced his conception of the three intertwined themes at the heart of Zhuangzi's project, he explaind: "One way in which he illustrates this is with the story of tones emerging from the hollows in the woods during a windstorm. Each tone is different; the wind is blowing forth a wide variety of divergent sounds, all of which are equally "the sound of the wind." Which among all these varied sounds is the wind itself, the wind's "own" sound? Which sound more adequately represents "the sound of wind" than any other? The implicit answer is that the sound of wind is not discoverable anywhere but in these individual tones, none of which is a privileged representation of the sound of wind." Reflecting on the chapter in which this appears, chapter two of the Zhuangzi, which begins with "Can you really make the body like a withered tree and the mind like dead ashes?", Edward Slingerland suggested that there may have been some inspiration from the use of psychoactive drugs involved. It may not be possible to rule that out. Michael Pollan has described how a "guided psilocybin session" can cause people to experience an increase in the personality trait of openness, described as "openness to other people’s views, openness to new experience, openness to new ideas". As he said, "psychedelics create this opening, this plastic moment where people can reexamine themselves and get some perspective on their habitual ways of thinking and doing. New connections are made that can produce new insights, new perspectives, new ways of looking at the world.”

Ziporyn again: "Why is it that the source of varying perspectives, a fixed single real identity, can never be discovered? This brings us to the crux of Zhuangzi's argument. Zhuangzi claims that the way we see things, the way we consciously know, is itself determined by our perspective, our mood. But the question about the origin of this way of seeing things is posed as part of that way of seeing things. The question about where moods and perspectives come from is posed from within some particular perspective; a perspective is attempting to see and verify its own becoming. However, Mood X cannot witness its own transition from not being there to being there, for by definition it cannot be there to view what preceded its own emergence. Whatever it sees and knows is ipso facto a part of the world that exists after its emergence—the world of anger, the world of joy—not the preexisting cause or source of that emergence. Knowledge of the source of X would require an ability to stand outside of X. It might try to get around this problem by drawing conclusions about its preexistent source based on inferences rather than direct witnessing. But this conclusion and the premises of the inferential procedures that produce it do not really stand outside of X; they are themselves manifestations or aspects of X's own experience, internal to it. Since all assertions about the origin of a perspective are internal to that perspective, there is no perspective-independent way of verifying their reliability, or of adjudicating between conflicting accounts.

Ziporyn concludes: "For Zhuangzi, the way perspectives transform into other perspectives is the heart of the matter, and the Dao is the ceaseless generation of new perspectives. We may say that a being is simply a perspective, and the constant becoming of perspective after perspective, each constitutively unable to know anything outside itself, reveals nothing more or less than the obvious unknownness of what is ultimately so, or right, or source, or purpose." In the many parables, such as The Butterfly Dream or The Joy of Fish in Zhuangzi, these themes leap out at the reader. The Joy of Fish (chapter 17) highlights that we have a perspective on the perspectives of others (much like the quantum physics thought experiment “Wigner’s friend”):


- “Zhuangzi and Hui Shi wandered over the Hao River bridge. Zhuangzi said, “those mini-fish coming from there and cruising around, relaxed and unhurried, are fish at leisure.” Hui Shi said “You are not a fish; from whence do you know the leisure of fish?” Zhuangzi retorted, “You are not me, from what perspective do you know my not knowing fish at leisure?” Hui Shi responds, “I’m not you, of course I don’t know about you; You are not a fish and that’s enough to count as you’re not knowing fish’s leisure.” Zhuangzi concludes, “Let’s return to where we started. When you said ‘from what perspective do you know fish at leisure’, you clearly knew my knowing it as you asked me. I knew it here above the Hao.”

There are qualitative differences between perspectives, and these can reveal a sort of hierarchical structure. For Zhuangzi, this was made explicit in his comparison of the great bird and the little bird and the breadth of their relative viewpoints as they viewed the ground from different heights. The perspectival conception of objectivity used by Nietzsche sees the deficiencies of each perspective as remediable by a study of the differences between them. More recently, Iain McGilchrist noted the need for context and depth within perspectives (notably lacking in most contemporary political dialogue). He provides one of the best analyses of the qualitative characteristics of perspective I have yet seen. And so, the criticism that relativism, at least to the degree that it is synonymous with perspectivism, yields a flat and undiscriminating ontology (which is a popular criticism leveled against 'standpoint epistemology' and theorists like Latour) does not really hold up under analysis. Or, if relativism as a term is beyond rehabilitation, perhaps perspectival pluralism could suffice. Relativism is of course relatively defined, the same goes for perspectivism, relationalism, etc. For a significant number of people these terms are self-refuting and suggest an "anything goes" orientation. But of course that is not what perspectivists like Zhuangzi meant at all, and I think it reveals a particularly naive understanding of a very wide family of concepts that could be grouped under the umbrella term of 'relativism'. For instance, if we take the term 'subjectivism', we could say “If everything is ultimately subjective, then all value judgements are equivalent". However John Deely defined a 'suprasubjective', the subjective relationship to the multiple subjectivies to which we relate, that corresponds to a higher subjective understanding. We could call that a 'trans-perspectival' understanding. He was following a path parallel to Zhuangzi, whose central message was to develop the potential to have a 'perspective on perspectives' (the point Brook Ziporyn forcefully made). And from that much more becomes possible. So just as we cannot abandon the notion of subjectivity to naive conceptual understanding, it would be unfortunate to do the same with relativism; even biosemiosis would become a casualty.

An inability to understand and develop a more nuanced popular conception of relativism and relationship is a consequence of the Western mind which has struggled to shake off a fascination with Platonic Forms (with a few notable exceptions, again see McGilchrist for more on that). For Plato, objective truth resides in a non-perspectival domain, so emerging from the cave simply must be possible otherwise relativism would not be defeated. He needs an essentialist, absolutist foundation to build upon. Camus wanted desperately to emerge from the cave, but realizing he could not, turned instead to the Myth of Sisyphus to answer the question "Does the realization of the meaninglessness and absurdity of life necessarily require suicide?" Camus' philosophy of absurdism was entirely a salvage operation. It was valiant, but no one was completely satisfied with absurdist philosophy. And so, now suicide (nihilism) is the unspoken, and generally unacknowledged, planetary policy. So if we ask "How can breadth deal with the relativism charge?", another answer is that the prevailing alternative of insisting upon absolutist foundations has led to self-destructive ideologies. Of course, perspectivism certainly could as well! For although Nietzsche correctly made Plato a central target of critique, he unfortunately advocated for a form of "egoistic perspectivism" rather than Zhuangzi's multi-perspectivism. Bret Davis wrote how, in the hands of later Eastern philosophers this developed into a very keen understanding of perspectival delimitation. Walter Benesch was significantly inspired by Zhuangzi to articulate an aspect/perspective philosophy; as Dogen wrote, "when one side is illuminated, the other is dark". In "Zhuangzi: The Complete Writings", Brook Ziporyn summarized some of the views and philosophical flow of the book:


- "Small and large, use and value, recognized identities and status, these are relative to surrounding conditions, to the position one occupies. For holders of divergent ideas about what is right to be carping back and forth, judging one another, ignores that dependence of valuation on its conditions, and forecloses a possibility of greater flexibility in transforming from one such function and value to another. In fact, this relativity of value to position and prior condition is deep and thoroughgoing. It actually extends beyond questions of value even to the most fundamental ontological questions, the question of who or what any given entity is. This leads not to the solipsism of the ordinary skeptic but to the mutual transformation of any tentatively posited identity and its putatively paired opposite, the opening up of each position into every other, with large and attractive consequences. For one thing, not letting putative knowledge direct the process of transformation, of life and activity, can be seen in a certain sense to enhance adaptive life skills in dramatic ways, and concomitantly to free us of concern with fame and disgrace, even with life and death, which anecdotally seem to be among the key blockages to really virtuosic living. In fact I could tell you some stories about people who have thoroughly abandoned all putative knowledge about values, about what is right, about facts, about what is so, and thus also all projects and plans, and yet who seem to have a mysteriously dramatic effect on others, even when everything else about them - physically, mentally, and morally — is, to all appearances, completely worthless. The total and thoroughgoing absence of all merit, beauty, skill, and purpose attracts and changes people, as still water allows people to view their own reflections, thereby fascinating, revealing, and transforming them.


So identify with all transformation, hide the world in the world, simultaneously follow both Heaven and man, never knowing to hate death or love life, swooshing along in the great Transforming Openness, swooshing along all the better for never knowing who or what causes it or why, or what it really is. This will dispel the pretensions of seers, shamans, and savants who claim to know who you are or should be, or who or what anything else is or should be. Be mirrorlike, and don't let your primal chaos be killed by these pretensions to know and fix things into one definite identity or another. It's all about the transformation of things, but sometimes you have to deal with knowledge, order, morality, family, government, and all the other sociopolitical roles that bestow relatively fixed identities. People are always trying to use some one-sided technique to master the world, to know it, identify it, and commodify it. They think they have knowledge of the vast form, the total form — but really each of them is just a fragment of the vastness, of the endless and indeterminable whole. And yet they are also right in a way: each of them is the vastness of unavoidable transformation, which is everywhere; it’s just that knowledge and values take one piece and stretch it too far, and take it out of communication with all the other parts and aspects and forms of it. This is true for all the various philosophical, moral, and social thinkers of the world — even me, Zhuang Zhou, but really I'm just tossing forth a tangled cluster of jokes and baubles, unsettling and unsettleable questions to spur on the endlessness of the transformation of meanings and identities."

Chad Hansen introduced the novel assumption that Zhuangzi was a philosopher of language and mind, of interpretation and meaning. This may suggest some interesting connections between Zhuangzi's perspectivism and biosemiotics. Furthermore, it places Zhuangzi near the center of our philosophical story here, with physicists like Rovelli providing supporting evidence from the periphery. Brook Ziporyn above suggested that Zhuangzi's relativity "leads not to the solipsism of the ordinary skeptic, but to the mutual transformation of any tentatively posited identity". I believe Descartes was the archetypal skeptic to which Ziporyn refers. Regarding the world of the 'right hemisphere' as described by Iain McGilchrist, Descartes was very skeptical. So when confronted with relativity, he viewed it as a problem to be contained and eliminated, and much less to be understood. As a result he focused on a reductive and fixed account of knowledge. But confronted with the same problem, Zhuangzi sought to understand relativity and was skeptical of the world that the 'left hemisphere' revealed, so he produced a relational account of knowledge that accomodates processes of change, growth, and transformation. The correct relativist-skepticist posture per Zhuangzi, as Hansen explained, is not that our judgments are wrong, but that all of them are right "from a perspective". So for any actual perspective from which we make judgments, there we will find some language that is appropriate, and some that is not appropriate. As Benesch put it, the key in all this is "accommodating the ‘mind of the observer’ as an aspect of the ‘nature of the observed’ in the process of observation". We inquire about the aspects of the world that can be revealed to us, each from our unique perspectives."

(https://pedon.blogspot.com/2021/06/relationalism.html)