Ep. 342: Zhuangzi on Knowledge and Virtue (Part One)

0:00 Mark: Please consider purchasing the new Partially Examined Life book. A breezy read. An excellent momento the ideal gift. Learn more at partiallyexaminedlife.com book. You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Today for episode 342, we're continuing the discussion we started in the last episode, reading the Zhuangzi, books 1 through 6. Our question continues to be something about what is it to be maximally virtuous or maximally wise given the kind of creatures that we are? This is Mark Linsenmayer using what my understanding understands to nourish what my understanding does not understand.

0:43 Seth: In Madison, Wisconsin, this is Seth Paskin resting secure in transformation. In Austin, Texas, this is Dylan Casey,

0:51 Dylan: seeing that day and night constantly come to us and without that there is nothing, and without me there is nothing picked out from that in the world. In Madison, Wisconsin, this is Theo, Happy

1:01 Theo: like the Fish Fukuoka, Japan welcome back, Theo.

1:04 Dylan: Yes, thanks for coming back, Theo.

1:06 Mark: So it was great having Karen on to give a full overview, but we want to do our full deep dive picky thing that we like to do for a full length episode here. So let's do it. Theo, you had a thing you wanted to start with?

1:18 Theo: I thought we'd start with the happy fish story. Zhuangzi and Huizi were strolling along the bridge over the Hao River. Zhuangzi said, the minnows swim about so freely, following the openings wherever they take them. Such is the happiness of fish. Huizi said, you are not a fish. So whence do you know the happiness of fish? Zhuangzi said, you are not I. So whence do you know? I don't know the happiness of fish. Huizi said, I am not you, to be sure, so I don't know what it is to be you. But by the same token, since you are certainly not a fish, my point about your inability to know the happiness of a fish stands intact. Zhuangzi said, let us go back to the starting point. You said, whence do you know the happiness of fish? Since your question was premised on your knowing that I know it, I must know it from right here above the Hao River. Is that good enough reading?

2:15 Mark: Other than that being a lot of repetition of phrases that's probably confusing to listen to and sounding like I know that you know that I know that you know that the fish are hap. You know, what are we getting out of this? What does it tell us about EPISTEMOLOGY

2:28 Theo: say, I think let's first point out if my delivery was better, of course, is that it's meant to be funny. I think it's a two man group, the Zhuangzi, and perhaps the less august, wise Huizi, who gets hit over the head. But it's slightly interesting in the sense that Zhuangzi is taking, even if we take it not as a pure joke, but as like a philosophical joke, the best kind. It's interesting that Zhuangzi seems to be arguing against the skeptical side, which is unusual. So I thought that was a good place to start too. It's like a very famous story. And I was thinking that I should actually take the claim that Zhuangzi knows the happiness of fish seriously and how I might understand that.

3:15 Mark: Well, our editor in the very, very long footnote, does not seem to take it seriously, or rather seems to say that your subjective state is a part of my experience of the world. So it's not quite the same as saying I can never know your mind, you can never know my mind. We are all isolated. No, it's more like the Heideggerian. I am in a world that has the subjectivity of other people as a given, and I know it as naturally as I know anything. But from a certain point of view, we can accept that it's really sort of my making it up. I don't know specifically what you're thinking.

I just in general am living in a world in which other people are thinking and have points of view. I can never really see through their eyes, but the fact that they have have eyes to see through is part of my experience. In one way we're cut off from people, but another way we're all at least similarly cut off and we're entertaining features of each other's experience.

4:13 Dylan: That makes sense as an acknowledgement in the skeptical point of view, but incorporating that there are other beings in the world with other points of view. So that would be a first step on the direction towards acknowledging things outside oneself. In that case, in that analysis, you're acknowledging that there are other beings that have points of view outside of yourself. Maybe it's as far as saying there's a mind independent world out there in the sense that there are entities that are experiencing the world in a way that's distinct from your own.

But I think the last sentence from Zhuangzi says your question was premised on your knowing that I know it, I must know it from right here. Seems at least to imply that there is a status of his knowing something about the fish, he's at least claiming, I know it from where I'm standing, I know that the fish are happy. So he's claiming an epistemological claim that he can know something about the world I don't, that the fish are happy. Based upon his own observations, I was

5:17 Theo: thinking this idea that skepticism leads us to kind of a solipsism is the road that Huizi is going down. So he's going into a set of problems Zhuangzi kind of wants to avoid. And his skepticism doesn't lead him into himself. But I think if we kind of look at the skill stories that Zhuangzi's knowing the happiness of fish is like the butcher knowing the joints of nature or the wheelwright having the perfect knowledge of new forms of wood that come to him. Zhuang goes on to say that the skepticism about knowledge, like the knowledge that the Confucians are building and the other system building, leads you into still kind of a relatedness. You're more skeptical about yourself in Taoism than you are about your relation to things.

6:11 Dylan: But you're pointing also to there being a primacy of natural things that one can know more about than oneself, or maybe social things, which would go along with skepticism about a lot of Confucian positions about the ordering of the social world.

6:29 Theo: Yes, It's a knowledge that exists only within the action of weighing as well, that he doesn't want to write a tract on how we might know the happiness of fish, and can't do that just as much as the wheelwright can't write a treatise on how to make wheels or cook ting express how he cuts up meat. I think there was a mistake of thinking that Zhuangzi's use of scepticism does what it does in the west, which is to trap us in our mind. I just think he's trying to make a different move here.

7:05 Seth: I guess I'm not grasping the essential disagreement here. If there's a disagreement, I mean, the

7:11 Dylan: story is told as a parable, but it comes down to one guy saying that the fish are happy. So he's making an observation about the state of a biological being in the world based upon their activities. And he's sitting there on this bridge above the Hao River, and his interlocutor says, how can you know about it? And basically denying making the skeptical argument. You can't know that the fish is happy at all because you can't know anything about the world.

7:38 Seth: Okay, I don't think that's what's happening here. Maybe that's why I'm confused. So Zhuangzi says fish are happy. Huizi says, you're not a fish. So whence do you know the happiness of fish? He doesn't say, how do you know that fish are happy? And he doesn't say, you can't know that fish are happy. He's essentially saying, you're not a fish, but you know fish are happy. How did you come by that knowledge?

8:07 Dylan: What's the distinction you're making between identifying that fish are happy? I mean, I agree with you that you would have to know what the characteristic of happiness for a fish is, and then be able to say that you're in a position to know that those two things. Is that the distinction you're making? The distinction between what happiness is for a fish and then being able to identify happiness in a fish?

8:30 Seth: No, sorry. The distinction I'm making, Huizi is saying you're not a fish. In other words, I could understand how a fish could come to awareness that fish are happy. I could understand how that could happen. But you're not a fish. So how did you come by that knowledge? He's assuming that in fact, Zhuangzi has that knowledge. And that's Zhuangzi's point later on in the essay. So it's ultimately not a skeptical argument about the having of knowledge. It's a question about the acquisition of knowledge, but it's not skepticism about the knowledge itself.

9:09 Dylan: Well, wait, but look at Zhuangzi's reply. You're not I. So whence do you know that I don't know the happiness of a fish? It seems like he's just confirming that Huizi is asking him about.

9:23 Seth: I understand. This is what's confusing about it, because at the end he says, let's go back to the starting point. You said, whence do you know the happiness of fish? Since your question was premised on your knowing that I know it, I'm not

9:35 Dylan: getting the distinction that you're making.

9:37 Theo: It might be that it's on a kind of pun in the Chinese, which is always kind of hard. Okay, so it's like, on what grounds do you say this? So it has both the kind of idea of like standing on a ground

9:50 Dylan: from memory when italics is a pun with the fact that I'm standing on the bridge. That's where I know. That's why it's a joke. So you have to imagine that waiting for Godot kind of situation.

10:04 Mark: Good job. The footnotes, which I'm not going to reread or quote here. But it's a long footnote. Right, Right, exactly. But it's saying that this says something about the way that our different subjectivities relate. And just looking at other things in the book, it can't be just we can have knowledge of the world. Because in fact Zhuangzi is very much in this sort of Cratylist position elsewhere, by which I mean we use words, but words only make sense, are only understandable, only provide truth and meaning if they refer to things that don't change.

But the Cratylist Heraclitus position was that you can't step in the same river once things are constantly changing. So the most we could know is, is I can make an observation right now. Sure looks like those fish are happy. But if I want to sort of make anything philosophical out of it, if I want to elevate this to a principle about, you know, then it's much more difficult because the fish are constantly changing and are being not fish or whatever and stuff like that. I guess I'm arguing against Dylan's initial interpretation that this is an anti skeptical argument.

I think it's much more likely that he just doesn't want to take. Can you be a skeptic but yet not take Huizi's type of skeptical suggestion, demand for explanation seriously? We're going to be casual sloppy skeptics rather than systematic troubling skeptics that the whole point of skepticism, even in for like Sextus, is put aside all the philosophical troubles because that's just our little minds trying to do more than what their little minds can do, reside in a state of contentment because you don't burden yourself with such argumentation.

11:38 Theo: I, I think Zhuangzi would think that he has put aside philosophical knowledge, but the knowledge that the fish are happy is not that type of knowledge. That's not a troubling knowledge. And it's also, as you say, knowledge that is maintained within the way of walking by the Hao River. So it's very limited in the sense of theoretical knowledge. But he might say that's the richest type of knowledge because it's the one that's closest to the way, closest to immediate relationship with the world. I don't know if it makes complete sense. I agree with you. But he does want to make this move. I think that true skepticism is not the skepticism of Huizi, who is much more consistent thinker.

12:18 Seth: Ultimately what we should get out of this is that skepticism about the existence of the external world or other consciousness, other subjectivities in it is unhelpful because this whole thing, they seem to be talking past each other in every single line. They seem to be talking past each other in this parable.

12:37 Mark: Right.

That kind of skepticism is silly. But the reason that I was sort of objecting to Dylan's formulation is because I don't want this to be seen as then, like a Cartesian overcoming of skepticism, that now we can have a foundational knowledge or something. Yes, you can know the fish are happy right now, but this doesn't mean you can know capital K, anything much. I don't know if that distinction is particularly motivating. You had pointed us, Theo, at a part where we see Huizi's. Sorry, is that his name?

13:07 Theo: But don't, don't quote me on the pronunciation, okay?

13:11 Mark: His own philosophy. And I don't want to read from that part. But it was the kind of stuff of, you know, that when Zhuangzi is saying, how can you crow on about hardness and whiteness? That he's referring to these logicians, these logical traditions that he's responding to that get too caught up in defining terms and you know, the kind of thing that just careful thinking. It's not what Taoism is about, that is shallow somehow.

13:34 Theo: Well, I think this kind of brings in the existential elements of Zhuangzi, in that it's a source of real anxiety or tiring out the soul. You often have Huzi turn up throughout the Zhuangzi elsewhere, sometimes is collapsed over his table, just worn out by thinking. So that is one way to, I think, maybe take that or that Huizi fell into making a name for himself by clever argumentation. So the trap of caring too much about his arguments, not that his arguments were wrong, but that he had the wrong relation to his thinking that was ultimately destructive.

14:11 Mark: Well, certainly caring about reputation, we've established, is supposed to be something that's shallow. I know I'd read some other stuff about fish today when I was going through chapter six. He talks about when the springs dry up, the fish have to cluster together on the shore, blowing on each other to keep damp and spitting on each other to stay wet. But that's no match for forgetting all about one another in the rivers and lakes. So the idea is when we get ourselves out of our natural element, like when we say we're all going to be trained Confucians or elevate ourselves and be super civilized, then we're always worrying about each other's behavior.

14:46 Theo: But.

14:46 Mark: But if you throw that stuff away and you take the Daoist path instead, then it's more individual. In fact, you don't even have to be compassionate to one another. It's because life is fleeting, you know people are going to die. So it's a sort of a love of faith and just be in your point of view and exist there. Don't worry so much even about other

15:08 Theo: people bringing the ethical. And of course, his use of cripples and outcasts is. He also thinks that the Confucian way blinds you to real encounters with people. So even though the Daoist doesn't set out to be ethical, he does have genuine encounters with people that are otherwise dismissed. So I think there are things in here, like if you somehow, God forbid, end up serving a cruel tyrant, well, then you be tyrannical with them. Or some things that remind you a bit of the Lao Tzu. If the way is doing terrible things, then do terrible things. But there's also an ethical point about the Taoist position opens up a realm of encounter and the ethical that I think Zhuangzi thinks Confucianism and a lot

15:56 Mark: of these other schools close off another Chapter six. Those who create and are created in the course simply do nothing for one another, do nothing for any particular goal, and the life in them becomes stable. So it's just part of wu Wei. Like, if you're doing wu Wei, if you're not consciously taking up a goal, laying down a path and trying to follow that, then, yeah, you're not going to be super ethical, at least in the Confucian way. Even if you are in a sort of natural, oh, I see somebody in my path and I will treat them, you know, I'm certainly not going to butcher them to my own ends. That would not be very Wu Wei of me. I'm going to be pretty passive and accepting, but perhaps interested. Maybe that's a more authentic, I don't know, a way of dealing with each other than compassion or something, or certainly not duty. Duty is definitely not it.

16:47 Dylan: The way you're describing it, Mark makes it almost indistinct from stoicism. Is that right?

16:52 Mark: I'm not sure. I mean, stoicism puts a lot of value on your own personal honor and your own personal integrity, which might say a lot about what your duties are towards other people. Definitely you don't want to get pulled into their garbage. And so if they have, you know, are starting a war, you don't join their war. If they have a very strict moral code that they want to impose on everybody, you're not going to join in that either. You're going to say that is. Yeah, I think it's very stoic in that it's sort of your personal telos, that each thing should pay attention to its personal telos, its tendencies, where it wants to go, and that's how everything is going to be in balance. Not by being a busybody or accepting a standard imposed by another.

17:33 Theo: I'm thinking that friendship, also, like the story of walking by with Huizi, Huizi is a friend and he's not doing anything in particular with Huizi. And part of that dialogue is also about their relationship as friends. And I think there's a lot of examples of. There was a story about three Daoist masters and then delighting in each other's transformations. I think one of the hand turns into a wheel. And if we approach relationships with the ideas of duty and an end to relationships, then that's not right, or that's not the Zhuangzi way. But I do think it's all about relationships, the cultivation of friendships. There's definitely a very strong individualistic element, but yet I think there's still always. There are always groups, and there's a way in which free flowing is essential for this.

18:30 Mark: Well, you had pointed us at another passage in chapter 28 that said, don't hide, don't exile yourself. I just thought it was relevant to the ethical stuff that we're talking about now, and also maybe about the point made about your individual point of view, that there's a lot of Nietzschean stuff that I'm seeing in here sort of become yourself. Like if you were going to choose a dao that's right for you, you'd have to see the you beforehand in order to choose it for yourself. So it's all about developing your individual telos. But part of this is this wandering, that wandering between points of view.

19:07 Dylan: Right?

19:07 Mark: Sort of the way that you could know that fish are happy is because there's no fundamental distinction between you and a fish, that everything is sort of part and parcel of everything else.

19:16 Dylan: Let me just read the end of the first paragraph. Zhuangzi refers to the utmost person. And at the beginning he says, if a person has the capacity to wander, can anything keep him from wandering? And if he has no capacity to wander, can anything set him wandering? And so it ends up being a question of figuring out the world, understanding themselves, understanding the world, and what inclines someone to do that or not do that, and can they be drawn to do that activity if they don't do that and where the capacity comes from? And he appoints to this characteristic or this category of the utmost person.

Hence it is said that an utmost person does not remain walking on any one road and does not stick to any one practice. And at the end of the paragraph, but is only the utmost person who can wander through the world without going awry, following along with others without losing himself, not imitating the teachings of others, receiving ideas from them without becoming one of them. And then he goes and characterizes different senses that the utmost person has of clear vision, of keen hearing, of acute smelling, of penetrating through unblocked objects to the sweetness of tasting.

For the mind to penetrate through unblocked by its objects is real knowing. So I mean, it goes on like this, right? And it just seems unavoidable to me that you're talking about this. Adaptability and flexibility in the utmost person is also part of getting at the way the world is. I don't see how you interpret any of those characteristics of keenness. And Nietzsche does this kind of thing too, the noble soul and stuff like that. There is something that they're pointing to about a way of naturally being and adjusting to the context of the world as getting to the truth about the world and your true relationship.

And I mean true, like just aligned with the way things are. All of which implies that there is a way the things are and there's an ability to get aligned with them. I don't see how you avoid it.

21:18 Mark: Well, let's maybe a little later we can pull up some of the particularly skeptical sounding passages or nihilistic or whatever. But in here. So it was the second sentence that was the ethically relevant one, but aspirations to exile oneself into hiding in practices designed to cut oneself off from everything. Alas, these are certainly not the doings of utmost wisdom and abundant intrinsic virtuosity. So the way to sort of stick to your own telos is not to become a hermit.

21:43 Dylan: It's not to become a hermit, but it's also not to follow what everybody else is doing.

21:46 Mark: This is making me think of our Kierkegaard discussion about becoming don't drift. So being a wanderer is not being a drifter. A drifter is pulled around by things like, I'm studying under a Mohist, and I'm really into Mohism, and now I'm studying under Confucius. I'm really into Confucianism. It wouldn't be that kind of thing. It would be I am me and I can be open to all these ideas, but I don't want them to block my vision so the next paragraph, after everything you just read, is sort of the version of in the Tao Te Ching, the see all without seeing, know all without.

There was something like that of the best senses are the ones that can't sense anything. Cut all the senses off. Anyway, I. I don't remember the exact quote, but for the eye to penetrate through unblocked by its objects is clear vision. For the ear to penetrate through unblocked bias object is. Is keen hearing. And he goes through this, which I guess I'm interpreting as maybe it is what you're saying. Dylan, cutting through to the truth means not letting the first thing you see then occlude your vision from seeing other things. So, you know, you learn Confucianism and you see everything through a Confucian lens and you just go around judging things.

The modern equivalent is just that Wes likes to complain about is only looking through texts for racism, like being blind to any other literary value or whatever that they might have have. Only is this out of date because they're expressing things that are, you know, expressing a view from nowhere or a master mentality or something like that. So always be open to new things. That's what the wandering is about.

23:20 Dylan: It's being open to new things, but while having a kind of intentionality and integrity of where you're at. That was the whole point of the beginning of what you said.

23:28 Mark: I mean, an integrity, definitely an intentionality. I'm not sure about that, because that might sound like a plan.

23:34 Seth: There's a sense of perspectivalism that you're talking about, but there's also an aspect of what I see as, because of my background, a Heideggerian ontology of truth. Right. So he's not just saying that you are habituated to see things in certain ways and that prevents you from seeing other things. It sounds like he's saying when you make certain assumptions or when you take on certain conceptual apparati or take a certain perspective, you literally efface. It's the Heideggerian notion of truth is an uncovering. So, yeah, you see something, but you're hiding something else.

It's more active than just being indifferent or neglectful or something like that. It's essentially that you have to take a position. That position will necessarily limit your scope of vision, what you can experience and see. And so transformation is essential to the process of life. Because if you don't transform, you not only will not gain additional perspectives, you will miss certain realms of experience that are going to be essential to inform I don't want to say the term understanding, because I don't. But you're not going to be able to find the way if you don't transform.

And transformation changes not only the position from which you see, but what you are actually capable of seeing and experiencing.

24:58 Theo: I think that's right on. It reminds me of the second chapter and he's talking about his dislike of argumentation and that people think, if you understand the argument, that one person is saying this and then the person who is saying that. But the argument itself disguises reality. Another reason why he may not like the logicians, that their argumentation closes off too many aspects of existence.

25:24 Mark: Yeah, I feel like the mentionings of this and that are pretty enormous here. Page 14. This ness emerges from thatness that is then already itself. Both this and not this, both are right and wrong. But this is already itself both this and not this. I think it repeats itself. So is there any really any this as opposed to not this, any right as opposed to wrong? I know I'm saying this out of context, but there's not a lot of context.

25:52 Dylan: Can we back up a little bit? Because this is all premised on this notion of the illumination of the obvious at that section. It is confusing and I want us to talk about it. And on the surface of it seems to me to be about the deformation between thinking about affirmation and denial, thinking about being and non being. But it's in the context of this thing called the illumination of the obvious on page 12 of the book, which is whatever is 51. It starts in this question of identity. Understanding what a thing is, both what you are and what other things in the world are.

All of which is sort of in the face of constant change. What is the source of that change? What is any being's identity? Just as a flavor. And the last full paragraph on 12, it says even when its ability to act has been so reliable, it shows no definite form. It would have to be some kind of reality that lacks any definite form or reality without any single identity. This is the kind of environment we're in right now is that there is a reality, but there is no identity to that reality. Which is a statement that's full of tension. Right. If it's real, then why is it not of this?

27:03 Theo: He does use the metaphor. This is back on page, I think, 11 of the wind blowing through hollows to create different identities. But the wind having no noise, as it were. So I had no identity in itself.

27:19 Dylan: Yeah. So Shoestrap of South Wall in the third paragraph on page 11 says, how good is it that you question the Zeon? So maybe we go back and just start from the beginning. Sir Swimmy faceformed asks, who or what is this here? Can the body really be made like a withered tree? The mind like dead ashes? What leans against this armrest now is not what leaned against it before. And Sir Shustrap says, how good is it that you question this? What's here now is this. I have lost me. But could you know who or what that is? You hear the piping of a man without yet hearing the piping of earth.

You hear the piping of earth without yet hearing the piping of heaven. And that you don't know anything without having heard it from heaven. And the footnote is having us read piping as knowing. So there's like kind of Meno's paradox here. How do you know anything without having known it already? How do you learn anything without having known it already?

28:18 Mark: I find this metaphor very difficult when interpreted metaphysically, which is the wind is blowing through all the 10,000 things. And you know, it's just like when it blows through the different length pipes on a panpipe and they give different pitches. And like that's why Dylan is Dylan and I'm me. And so page 12 he says, the end. So what identity can there be for their rouser? Every last identity is only what some thing picks out for it. So the wind, this, you said this, Theo. The wind has no identity in itself. Which I think is to say that the Dao or God is not a distinct thing that makes us what we are.

It's entirely sort of just the state of being of the world of constant change and the things exerting themselves. But I'm taking this hollowness, you know, like the pipes in it, very seriously, that it's not like we are these self contained. I know what I was saying before about each thing having its own telos. Sounds like each thing is an Aristotelian substance with its own past and future and destiny sort of all marked out of it. But if you take seriously like this, I have lost myself, it is to say that identifying me, you know, this sounds very Buddhist with this one self, this one biological being.

There's something a little arbitrary about it. You know, he says repeatedly in this text, like, I'm just in this body for now, you know, it's just a sort of an accident. So I identify my sense of self, as we were saying last time, is identified with the full world, with the 10,000 things my circle of concern. This is why I don't care about death, because I just identify with the larger creation. Each thing should pursue its own good and its own destiny. But don't get hung up on you being just one of those things. Or what point of view we have within the system is a little arbitrary.

I'm not sure how it could be. But that's why I was saying me as different from the fish is actually not particularly different. Like, we're all just empty pipes that something is blowing through. And so that's supposed to make me feel equally akin to, but equally sort of indifferent about all the other different points of view. Like, I can sort of flit between them and spend time. This is the wandering. And not just feel like I am me and I have to do my thing.

30:28 Seth: This resonates with a passage from later on, chapter five, page 46. Let me propose a response to you, Mark. He says, 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 or the ears. You just release the mind to the play in the harmony of all virtuosities, seeing what is one and the same to all things.

Nothing's ever felt to be lost. That's related to the guy who's got his foot chopped off and him being a sage. But with respect to this parable that we're talking about on page 14, the this ness and the thatness is very much from the perspective of difference. And if you take the perspective of sameness, the thisness and the that ness go away. And then if you are essentially saying, okay, if there is no this, if I'm not a this or that and you're not a that, we are a one, what would that be? What is that thing? And he's using the metaphor of the wind and the harmonies and so forth to try to describe it.

But because to talk about sameness as a this is, in a sense, not talking about sameness.

31:54 Dylan: Because you always have to have a that. If you're going to have same, you have to have a this and a that.

31:58 Seth: If you're going to have difference, you have a this and a that. But if you have sameness, there is no this and that.

32:04 Dylan: Well, I don't get that at all. That's not possible, right? Because you can't even talk about same unless you have a listen to that, right? There's at least a putative this into that otherwise, right?

32:12 Mark: Sameness is not unity.

32:14 Seth: I'm sorry, okay. I'm thinking in terms of oneness. I apologize. Not sameness. I said it wrong.

32:19 Mark: But it's an ambiguity in the term. It's sameness in quality. In other words, you need two separate things or sameness in substance. The front and the back are the same, are parts of the same thing. I'm sure there's different ambiguities in Chinese.

32:33 Seth: I mean, ultimately, what I think he's trying to do here is trying to disrupt this notion of identity.

32:38 Dylan: The bottom of page 13 is like this, right? I agree with you completely that he's trying to disrupt this notion of identity where particularly identity is something that is everlasting or eternal or whatever. Because he's going hard on the fact that. About there being differences or not. So just before the beginning of that paragraph. But human speech is not just a blowing of air. Speech has something of which it speaks, something it refers to. Yes, but what it refers to is particularly unfixed. So is there really anything to speak of? Or has nothing ever been spoken of?

You take it to be from the chirping of baby birds. Is there really any difference or is there no difference? Is there any dispute going on there or is there no dispute? Is there anything demonstrated by it? Or is there nothing demonstrated by it? How could any course of activity become so concealed and unnoticed that there could be any question about whether it is a genuine or false course? How could any act of speaking become so concealed and unnoticed that there could be any question about whether it is right or wrong to say, after all, where could any course veer off to without that course thus being present there?

Where could any speaking be present without that speech thus being deemed acceptable?

34:00 Mark: So there's a weird move in that. You know, it starts off with the cratilist point. How could our words refer to something when the metaphysical world is constantly changing? Our words really have no reference. Thus this undermines. Just like Plato said, like, if you want to go with the cratilist thing, then words don't have any meanings. Plato specifically said, you undermine the difference between good and bad, between virtue and vice. And Zhuangzi is saying, yes, that is exactly the point in this case is this and that. Yeah, this move to like, how could any course of activity be so concealed or unnoticed?

There could be any question, is it a genuine or false course? I'm not sure that I Understand that, you know, that it seems to be moving from. There is no fixed reference to words. So really it is. Everybody's words are just like the peeping of baby birds, because there's no reference. Two, when you choose a path, somebody else might come along and say, that was the wrong move you just made. But really, how could it be the wrong move? You know, it's the thing that you did. And thereby you've asserted. I'm sort of thinking existentialist terms. You've asserted that this is an appropriate.

By just doing it, you're asserting its rightness. And you're right, because from your point of view, you wouldn't have done it.

35:16 Dylan: Its existence as an action means that it's right. That's a kind of claim that anything that exists has some truth to it. And there's. The way we're interpreting it right now is the fact of an action means that there's something right about it, because that presumes that all wrong actions are prevented. There's no such thing as a wrong action in that way of talking about it, because all wrong actions would be impossible.

35:41 Mark: In the last sentence, where could any speaking be present without that speech thus being deemed acceptable there? I mean, that doesn't mean that everything you say is true, but everything you say was motivated in some way, just like any other action it establishes. I guess this was valuable because I did it. Guess it's just a variation on the Everybody pursues what they see to be the good. It's not the case that everybody, if they're following their own lights, will actually pursue what they feel to be the good. They might be just ground down and taught something else that makes them lose sight of what their natural lights would tell them. Do we want to read any more on this 1415 or we want to move on? Because it is horseness.

36:22 Dylan: The bottom of page 14. This whole thing is pretty interesting. A state where this and not this, right and wrong, so explicitly combining. I mean, I don't know. And maybe, Theo, you can tell me if not this is the same as that or not. Because if I just say this and not this, then I think of being and not being as opposed to two different things as this and that. Right and wrong are no longer coupled as opposites is called course, as axis, the axis of all courses. So course is the word here for dao, or way. And so the way is axis, the axis of all ways. When this axis finds its place in the center, it responds to all the endless things it confronts, thwarted by none. For it has an endless supply of rights and an endless supply of wrongs. Thus, I say nothing compares to the illumination of the obvious.

37:17 Mark: Can we say what the illumination of the obvious. That's how you introduce. Oh, Dylan, we got to get into this by saying how he starts with the illumination of the obvious. But nothing that we've said has said what that means. I think. I mean, the obvious doesn't need to be illuminated.

37:30 Dylan: It's the word Ming. Maybe Theo can help us out here. Footnote 12, which is illumination.

37:37 Theo: I think if I'm thinking of the right character, it also has implications of fate. But I could be wrong. But it has illumination.

37:44 Mark: There is a glossary. So, yeah, clarity, light, understanding. The character is composed of a graph juxtaposing the sun and the moon. Its most basic meaning is simply light, brightness. It also means to make manifest, to understand or what is manifest. The obvious.

37:58 Theo: Yeah. So it's like sun and moon, very bright. Put those together as to the this and that ness and this and not that. So I think both is like a this and a that as in two things. But also by stipulating a this, you have a not that. So you are also in saying a this, you at the same time stipulate a non existence or a absence of something. So both of that is going on

38:22 Dylan: here, the first full paragraph on page 15. So you can use the act of indication as an illustration of the unindicated that belongs to all indication. Okay. So whenever you point something out, you're also pointing out the things that aren't being pointed out. This is no match for using the unindicated itself as an illustration of the unindicated that belongs to all indications. So when you point to an entity, you also point all the not entities that are around. But that's no match for pointing to not entities itself as an illustration of. I'm trying to understand it.

To me, it's pointing to the notion that whenever I point to a being or I point to a this, there is a gigantic amount of not this that's out there. That's sort of a. Well, a source for all of the things that could belong to other indications that are all indicatable. So when you indicate one thing indicated this, there is implied in all of the not. This is all the rest of the indications of the world. So the whole world sort of. Now I'm at horses.

39:31 Mark: Is anybody thinking about Lacan, the symbolic versus the real that whenever you. You symbolize and you point out this is a this, this is a horse, then that has a background of all the unarticulated things, unarticulatable things, that it only makes sense even to articulate a particular thing against the background of the rest of them. I don't know if that implies that you're sort of carrying the baggage. Whenever you say horse, you're carrying the baggage of all that is not only the distinct objects that are not horses, but all the unarticulable things that cannot be even a thing at all. I mean, it seems like both of those play a role here.

40:12 Seth: Let's take this very mundane example and see how it plays out. So the four of us are standing in front of a pig and I say, that's not a horse. And you say, how do you know it's not a horse? And I turn and I point to a horse and I say, well, because that's a horse. Understanding the non horseness of the pig is easy from the perspective of saying there's a horse. But if I said that's not a horse and you said, how do you know? Or what do you mean? Say, well, how do you refer to non-horseness as a property? Because it's not just the pig that has non-horseness as a property.

Right. The chicken has non-horseness as a property. Like it's almost like a definite description or something. He's pointing out to the absurdity and the limits more the limits of certain types of referential moves in language and that we use the negative in reference to the positive and it only really has meaning. The this only has meaning in reference to the that. Because you can't really point at the that without the this. You can't talk about non-horseness without talking about the horse. Because non horseness isn't really a thing. Does that make sense?

41:16 Dylan: It does. And I would add to it, but the way horses have all of it have both of those.

41:22 Mark: Yeah. I feel like we've read people recently, Aristotle, Ellis, some other folks that would have definite responses to this to say, well, the horseness is an intrinsic property. It's not. Being a pig is an extrinsic property. It's a relational property. For Ellis, it's not a property per se. It's not in the ontology at all. If being a horse is a natural kind, it's. Then you could say, yes, you could actually define horseness without reference to anything else, because you're only concerned with the tendencies that this object is going to have in different situations. You're not concerned with the rest of the world when you're describing it. And for Aristotle for even something to be a this is to be a definite this, you know. So the property of being a horse might be a thing, but the property of not being a horse is not really a thing.

42:09 Dylan: I agree certainly about the interpretation of Ellis and company, but what's going on here is something about the DAO is holding both of those things. There's a. It's simultaneously a source for the distinction.

42:21 Mark: Well, let's see if we can make sense of that in part two of the discussion, after we take a little breather for supporters of the Partially Examined life through our website or through Patreon. That should be in your feed coming up next. Otherwise, wait till next week. If you'd like to become such a supporter, just go to partiallyexaminedlife.com support thanks.