Abstract
Zhuangzi’s Butterfly Dream story can be read as a skeptical response to the Cartesian Cogito, ergo sum solution, for it presents I exist as fundamentally unprovable, on the grounds that the notion about “I” that it is guaranteed to refer to something existing, which Descartes seems to assume, is unwarranted. The modern anti-skepticism of Hilary Putnam employs a different strategy, which seeks to derive the existence of the world not from some “indubitable” truth such as the existence of myself, but from the meaning of some particular assertion I make. In this paper, I argue, however, that Putnam’s argument fails to deliver on the promise of showing the self-refuting nature of the skeptical hypothesis, as it relies on a double use of “I”, a fallacy of equivocation, reflecting an unsolved tension between the argument’s general premise, which is rather Zhuangzian in spirit, and his unwitting adoption of that unwarranted notion about “I”. I try to show further that the skepticism in Zhuangzi’s Butterfly Dream not only can be used to refute the proofs of the existence of the empirical I, but also is effective against accounts concerning the existence of the transcendental I.
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Notes
Giles (1926): 47. Although the Butterfly Dream episode is often rendered in English as a story told from the third-person perspective, I choose Giles’ first person translation for two reasons. (1) While in the original text, “Zhuangzhou” or “Zhou” (“Zhuangzi”), (and no pronoun), is used throughout as the name of the protagonist, given that as a style of modesty in classical Chinese authors routinely referred to themselves by their own names, to construe the story from the first-person perspective is perfectly permissible, and perhaps more plausible. (2) A first person rendition, I believe, makes the comparability between the Butterfly Dream and Descartes’ argument more conspicuous.
Burton Watson translates, “But he didn’t know if he was Chuang Chou [Zhuang Zhou] who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Chou [Zhuang Zhou].” Watson (1968): 49. The translations of that sentence by Graham and Allison are exactly the same: “He does not know whether he is Zhou who dreams he is a butterfly or a butterfly who dreams he is Zhou.” (Graham 1981: 61; Allinson 1989: 71) Möller’s translation differs significantly from the abovementioned: “One does not know whether a Zhou dreams and then there is a butterfly, or whether a butterfly dreams and then there is a Zhou.” (Möller 1999: 446) While Möller’s translation makes no commitment to the idea that the butterfly which dreams is me, it seems to eliminate completely the sense of doubting one’s own existence. To my knowledge, the only translation that captures the ambiguity in the original text is the one by James Legge: “I [Zhuang Zhou] did not know whether it had formerly been Kâu [Zhou] dreaming that he was a butterfly, or it was now a butterfly dreaming that it was Kâu [Zhou].” See Legge (1962): 197. However, in his Introduction to the translation, Legge gives an interpretation of it which is very much in accordance with the standard: “… he did not know whether he, Kwang Kâu [Zhuang Zhou], had been dreaming that he was a butterfly, or was now a butterfly dreaming that it was Kwang Kâu [Zhuang Zhou].” (Legge 1962: 130).
The 18th century philosopher and aphorist Georg Lichtenberg objects that rather than supposing an entity that is thinking, the most that Descartes could claim was “cogitatur” (“there is some thinking going on.”) He says, “We should say it thinks, just as we say it lightens. To say cogito is already to say too much as soon as we translate it I think. To assume, to postulate the I is a practical requirement.” See Lichtenberg (1990): 168. The view was quite prevalent among some prominent philosophers of the last century such as Earnest March and Bertrand Russell. Russell writes in his History of Western Philosophy, “Here the word ‘I’ is really illegitimate; he ought to state his ultimate premiss in the form ‘there are thoughts.’ The word ‘I’ is grammatically convenient, but does not describe a datum.” See Russell (1955): 567. But it has been disputed whether the “I” in “I think” must be interpreted as being used by Descartes as a referring expression, rather than as a mere indication of the subjective character of experience. See Newman (2005) Edition)
Anscombe (1994): 140.
Hintikka (1962): 14.
It should be noted that the necessity involved here is not a logical necessity. “I do not exist” is not a logical contradiction and “I exist” is not a tautology.
Gaynesford (2003): 111.
Strawson (1994): 210.
Anscombe, for example, explains (1) as thus, “The object an I-user means by it must exist so long as he is using I”. See Anscombe (1994): 151–2.
Putnam (1981).
This is supported by Putnam’s following remarks, “The question we are interested in is this: do their verbalizations containing, say, the word ”tree’ actually refer to trees? More generally: can they refer to external objects at all? (As opposed to, for example, objects in the image produced by the automatic machinery.)” (Putnam 1981: 1–21). Dell’Utri (1990) shares my understanding of the issue. According to him, Putnam shows that “though the BIV’s [a brain in a vat’s] causal connections could go beyond the images produced by the computer, their only causal connections which count as causal chains of reference are the ones restricted to those very images [caused by the computer], in such a way that the words in the sentence ‘We are BIV’ refer to objects in the image.” (86–7) However, this understanding is not universally accepted. For a different view, see Bruckner (Jan., 1992): 123, and (2004).
Kant (1929) writes, “The I think expresses the act of determining my existence. The existence is thereby already given, …” (B 157, n). But whether the transcendental account of I must include an account of the existence of the transcendental I is a question in dispute. David Carr contends, for instance, that transcendentalism involves no metaphysical commitments of any kind, it is purely methodological. See Carr (1999): 99–132. My paper, however, assumes a particular metaphysical commitment (to the existence of the transcendental I) just for the sake of argument, that is, in order to see how Zhuangzi would respond to it.
The transcendental ego in Kant and Husserl, as suggested by Carr, should be understood as neither an entity within the world, nor standing outside the world, outside nature, in some transcendent, supersensible domain. For Kant, for instance, to say that I am is just to say that the “I think” can accompany all my representations. The transcendental ego is not something that is causally responsible for all my representations. See Carr (1999): 33–66. This is very much the kind of transcendentalism in Zhuangzi’s Butterfly Dream, if it is to be interpreted in the transcendental way at all.
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Han, X. A Butterfly Dream in a Brain in a Vat. Philosophia 38, 157–167 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-009-9188-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-009-9188-2