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EWING Y. CHINN [1]
ABSTRACT Chad Hansen is one of the strongest proponents of the view that the important second chapter of Zhuangzi's Inner Chapters (The Qi Wu Lun) reveals Zhuangzi to be a relativistic scepticist. Hansen argues that Zhuangzi is a sceptic because he is first and foremost a relativist. Hansen's argument is essentially that Zhuangzi's perspectivism, his belief that one's linguistic and conceptual perspective determines what one claims to know, makes him a thorough going relativist and sceptic. I agree that Zhuangzi is a perspectivist, but disagree with Hansen's portrayal of him as a relativistic sceptic. I first show that there is an important ambiguity in Hansen's argument. I then proceed to argue that important passages in the Qi Wu Lun (in particular the butterfly dream passage) reveal serious problems with Hansen's interpretation of Zhuangzi's philosophical stance, maintain that Zhuangzi is neither a sceptic nor a perspectival relativist. He is rather a perspectival realist.
I. Introduction
Is Zhuangzi a sceptic and/or a relativist? In what is generally regarded as the most philosophically acute and challenging chapter of the so-called "Inner Chapters" of the Zhuangzi, the "Qi Wu Lun" ("The Sorting Which Evens Things Out"), we find ample material to support the judgement that the author is at least a methodological sceptic, one who poses sceptical challenges for some ulterior purpose. [2] But is Zhuangzi a philosophical sceptic, one who subscribes to the doctrine that nothing can actually be known? Is such a doctrine, for example, being advanced in the following brief exchange between Gaptooth and Wang Ni?
Would you know something of which all things agreed "That's it"? How would I know that? Would you know what you did not know? How would I know that? Then does no thing know anything? How would I know that? However, let me try to say it-"How do I know that what I call knowing is not ignorance? How do I know that what I call ignorance is not knowing?" [3]
And is Zhuangzi speaking as a relativist when he asserts,
What is It is also Other, what is Other is also It. There they say `That's it, that's not' from one point of view, here we say `That's it, that's not' from another...