Steve Watson

Zhuangzi’s Skeptical Arguments

We are familiar, I suppose, with the general arguments for skepticism in the Western tradition – if only from our memories of the Cartesian argument. There are traces of something like that same skeptical procedure in the Zhuangzi, with the notable exception of the very first step in which we are urged to doubt the veracity of our own senses. It cannot have escaped the notice of thinkers at any time that we may be mistaken about the things we believe we see or hear, and yet there is no good evidence that this was felt to be an important epistemological limit by Chinese philosophers before the introduction of Buddhism in the 1^st C AD.[1]

The Problem of Dreams

Descartes’s second step was to question whether he could distinguish between the fantasies that come as dreams and the experiences that come in waking life:

How often, in the still of the night, I have the familiar conviction that I am here, wearing a cloak, sitting by the fire – when really I am undressed and lying in bed! … When I think more clearly about this, I see so plainly that sleep and waking can never be distinguished by any certain signs, that I am bewildered …[2]

And Zhuangzi made precisely the same point, though more picturesquely:

I, Chuang Chou, once dreamed that I was a butterfly flitting about. I did whatever I wanted! I knew nothing about any Chuang Chou. Then I suddenly awakened as Chuang Chou with all his normal trappings. Now I don’t know whether Chuang Chou dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly is dreaming that he is Chuang Chou.[3]

The Problem of Reason

Descartes recognised, however, that even if we couldn’t be sure that we were not dreaming, still there were things that were true even so. Things like red being a colour, bodies having extension, and so on. Similarly, St Augustine at this point in his own treatment of skepticism declared that we could still not doubt that logical truths were true or that mathematical or geometrical truths still held.[4]  

The Third Cartesian step was to introduce the possibility of a deceptive Demon whose power was such that it could force us to make errors even in acknowledging those facts. If you wonder how that is possible you need to simply ask yourself how it is that you are certain that 1 + 1 = 2: it isn’t by repeated experience of that being the case, because we just don’t think that we get mathematical or logical truths by extrapolating from experience. (If we did, we’d have to find it conceivable that some experience could tell us that 1 + 1 = something other than 2; and we don’t. If no experience can contradict it then it wasn’t experience that told us it was true.) Apparently we just have an intuition of the truth of such matters, and an intuition, being a subjective phenomenon, has no independent guarantee of truth.

Zhuangzi has nothing like the Demon, but he does have an argument that makes the related suggestion that our intuitions about rationality are less than infallible.

Suppose that you and I debated and you bested me, would it mean that you were naturally right and I was naturally wrong? Or even vice versa? Or would one be partially right and the other partially wrong? Or would both be both right and wrong? And if you and I cannot come to a mutual understanding, others assuredly will experience the same difficulty, so who can we get to set things straight? Anybody agreeing with me will only repeat my own arguments, and we shall still be in the dark. Somebody differing with both of us merely offers another point of view, and somebody agreeing with both of us brings us back to the starting point. So, if neither you nor I nor another man can come to a mutual understanding, shall we await a fourth?[5]

And if we cannot rely upon the results of reasoned argument any more than we can rely upon our experience of the world (which may be just a dream,) then it must seem that there is no way to be sure of how things are.

[1] Graham, A. C. (1989) Disputers of the Tao, Open Court, p. 84

[2] Descartes, R. Meditations I (Anscombe & Geach (1954) Descartes: Philosophical Writings, London: Thomas Nelson, p. 62)

[3] Zz 2.95

[4] Augustine, Against the Academicians, 3.10.23

[5] Zz 2.85 ff