Hearing the Silent Harmony: Revisioning Ethics in the Zhuangzi

Abstract

“The social world,” according to Clifford Geertz, “does not divide at its joints into perspicuous we’s with whom we can empathize, however much we differ with them, and enigmatical they’s, with whom we cannot, however much we defend to the death their right to differ from us.”¹ This deep equivocality, the sense that the significant works of the human imagination “speak with equal power to the consoling piety that we are all like to one another and to the worrying suspicion that we are not,”² exhibits itself nowhere more than in those moments of cross-cultural inquiry where our subjects seem to be conceptually deaf to certain registers of our experience that seem to be so much with us, as in the following episode:

When I first began to do fieldwork among the Shona-speaking Manyika of Zimbabwe about ten years ago, I tried to find a word that would correspond to the English concept “morality.” I explained what I meant by asking my informants to describe the norms for good behaviour toward other people. The answer was unanimous. The word for this was tsika. But when I asked my bilingual informants to translate tsika into English, they said that it was “good manners.” And whenever I asked somebody to define tsika, they would say: “Tsika is the proper way to greet people,” or “Tsika is to show respect.”³