Negative Politics in the Zhuangzi: Reframing the Personal in Zhuangzi’s Thought

• In Event: The Zhuangzi: Efficacy, Vulnerability, Negative Politics, and Anarchy

Abstract

One of the most consequential developments in the history of Chinese moral-political philosophy is the valorization of the public domain (gong) and its attendant values, e.g., public-spiritedness, selflessness, fairness, and justice, etc., against the private domain (si) and its associated values, e.g., personal freedom, self-advocacy, and personal integrity (according with one’s natural endowment and inclinations). The latter group is often dismissed as selfish or self-centered. Mencius famously condemned the Mohist advocacy of impartial care (jian ai) as unfilial (wu fu) and the Yangist value of self-advocacy (wei wo) as denying the monarch (wu jun). What is especially interesting in this Mencian denunciation of the Mohists and the Yangists was that he was focusing on the familial and the political domains, with the values of the personal domain completely reducible to the familial and the political ones. Zhuangzi’s philosophy was echoing the Yangist sentiments of valorizing the personal domain, especially personal freedom. The marginalization and internalization of the Zhuangist imaginaire of personal freedom in Chinese history means that the personal qua personal, not the personal qua familial-socialpolitical, was largely absent in the moral-political deliberations by many or even most Chinese thinkers in history, even though the reflection on the personal domain flourished in the spiritual discourse. In other words, there was little space for the personal domain in the pre-modern Chinese moral-political discourse. In this paper, I seek to explore a Zhuangist imagination of the personal realm within the moralpolitical discourse in order to make the Zhuangzi a more attractive, and indeed more viable, resource for the contemporary Chinese moral-political deliberations on the personal domain. I will argue that Zhuangzi’s rich deliberation on the personal dimension of our moral-political life can be better appreciated as the defense for the personal, against the stigma of selfishness automatically associated with it. Essentially, it is a way to retrieve a uniquely Zhuangist conception of a person that resists the suffocating socialization which entails internalizing prevailing social values. It is well known that Confucius considers the personal to be political in the sense that being virtuous in the private/familial domain is itself participation in the political domain. On the other hand, Zhuangzi is often interpreted to be anti-politics while enjoying the hermetic space at the margin of the social-political world. In this paper, I will make the case that such an understanding of the Zhuangist project is insufficient. Instead, I will argue that Zhuangzi very much agrees that the personal is political, similar to Confucius. Their difference can be more fruitfully understood as the following: whereas for Confucius, personal is political in the positive sense (positive politics), for Zhuangzi personal is political in the negative sense (negative politics). Negative politics places a constraint on the operation of positive politics and its attendant norms and values, characterized in my earlier work at a contestation between partialist humaneness and impartialist justice in the context of early Chinese moral-political philosophy.

Author

• Tao Jiang, Rutgers University