New essay in draft:
The Unskilled Zhuangzi: Big and Useless and Not So Good at Catching Rats
Abstract: The mainstream tradition in recent Anglophone Zhuangzi interpretation treats spontaneous skillful responsiveness -- similar to the spontaneous responsiveness of a skilled artisan, athlete, or musician -- as a, or the, Zhuangzian ideal. However, this interpretation is poorly grounded in the Inner Chapters. On the contrary, in the Inner Chapters, this sort of skillfulness is at least as commonly criticized as celebrated. Even the famous passage about the ox-carving cook might be interpreted more as a celebration of the knife’s passivity than as a celebration of the cook’s skillfulness.
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This is a short essay at only 3500 words (about 10 double-spaced pages excluding abstract and references) -- just in and out with the textual evidence. Skill-centered interpretations of Zhuangzi are so widely accepted (e.g., despite important differences, Graham, Hansen, and Ivanhoe), that people interested in Zhuangzi might find it interesting to see the contrarian case.
As always, comments welcome either by email or in the comments section of this post. (I'd be especially interested in references to other scholars with a similar anti-skill reading, whom I may have missed.)
4 comments:
Thanks for this. You made me smile, and think, and respond:
https://roughlyandinoutline.wordpress.com/2017/02/04/eric-schwitzgebel-on-being-a-knife/
In essence, I agree but doubt Zhuangzi is any more dogmatically tied to 'being useless' than he is to 'effortless action'.
I agree. I don't think that Cook Ding's skill is the important aspect of the story, but rather what the skill amounts to: "going by the inherent rightnesses" 因其固然 and “depending on the heavenly coherences" 依乎天理. I argue for a non-skill based reading of this passage in my article "The Radiance of Drift and Doubt: Zhuangzi and the Starting Point of Philosophical Discourse," Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 16(1). The article is available online.
Paul Skowron said...
Thanks for this. You made me smile, and think, and respond:
https://roughlyandinoutline.wordpress.com/2017/02/04/eric-schwitzgebel-on-being-a-knife/
In essence, I agree but doubt Zhuangzi is any more dogmatically tied to 'being useless' than he is to 'effortless action'.
The only reason I am contributing is so I can quote The Complete Idiot's Guide to Taoism. They comment that "Ding" is "third", possibly the lowly position rather than the name: the attitude exemplified can be carried out by anyone, even the humblest butcher.
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