Abstract
Beyond the possible historical significance of the reference to Lao Dan (or more famously Laozi), this passage from Chapter 3 (“Nourishing the Master of Life”) invites reflection on Zhuangzi’s understanding of friendship—its nature, value, and necessity. If we can define friendship generally as an intimate personal relationship based on the concern and affection of each friend for the welfare of the other for the other’s sake, the relationship between Qin Shi and Lao Dan seems to frustrate many of our common assumptions about friendship, particularly in regard to the nature of care and concern among friends and the relative significance of the historical relationship in the constitution of the friendship. Although Qin Shi reveals that he indeed was a “friend” (you) of the master, the relationship seems to have been premised not on the kind of personal concern (i.e., concern for the friend qua friend) and intimacy that we customarily associate with friendships but rather on a shared vision of human flourishing and a commitment to living a life that expresses this vision. For Zhuangzi, it is this shared vision of the Way and our normative responses to it (i.e., attunement to the Way) that forms the bond of relationship between friends.
When La Dan passed away, Qin Shi went to mourn him, wailing three times and then taking his exit.
A disciple asked, “Were you not a friend [you 友]of the master?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Then is this the proper way to mourn for him?”
“It is. At first I used to think of him as a man, but now I no longer do. When I entered to mourn, there were elders mourning as if for their own sons, and young people mourning as if for their own mothers. Among those that were assembled, surely there were those who uttered words they did not want to utter and wept tears they did not want to weep. But this is to hide from Heaven and indulge in our sentiments, forgetting what we received. This is what the ancients called ‘the punishment for hiding from Heaven’. When it came time to arrive, the master was on time; when it came time to leave, the master went with the flow. Being at peace with the time and settled in the flow, sadness and joy cannot enter. The ancients called this Di’s loosening of the bonds.” (3/8/17–21)1
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Notes
See Gregory Vlastos, Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 203.
Nancy Sherman, “Aristotle on Friendship and the Shared Life,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 47.4 (1987), 595.
Philia, for the ancient Greeks, was not limited to voluntary relationships of the kind that we imagine today but could be applied to relations among family members as well as among fellow citizens. On the etymology of philia, see David Konstan, “Greek Friendship,” American Journal of Philology 117 (1996), 71–94.
See also John Cooper, “Aristotle on Friendship,” in Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, ed. by Amelie Oksenberg Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 301–340.
On the subject of citizenship in Aristotle’s political works, see Dorothea Frede, “Citizenship in Aristotle’s Politics,” in Aristotle’s Politics: Critical Essays, ed. by Richard Kraut and Steven Skultety (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 167–184.
See also Donald Morrison, “Aristotle’s Definition of Citizenship: A Problem and Some Solutions,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 16 (1999), 143–165.
See Cecilia Lindqvist, China: Empire of Living Symbols, trans. by Joan Tate (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 1991), 37. Besides you, other common characters for friend were peng 鹏, originally meaning two strings ofcowries and then later as a measure term for a string or group of friends, and jiu 舊 and gu 故 (both separately and as a compound), both meaning old, most often in reference to a relationship with a history.
See Maria Khayutina, “‘Friendship’, in Early China,” 13th Conference of the Warring States Working Group (Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA: October 13–14, 1999), 2. On the formal structure of Western Zhou bronze inscriptions, see Edward L. Shaughnessy, Sources of Western Zhou History: Inscribed Bronze Vessels (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
On Western Zhou kin terminology, see Paul Vogt, Between Kin and King: Social Aspects of Western Zhou Ritual, PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 2012.
See also Lothar von Falkenhausen, Chinese Society in the Age of Confucius (1000–250 BC ): The Archeological Evidence (Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archeology, University of California, Los Angeles, 2006).
David Konstan, Friendship in the Classical World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 1.
Aat Vervoorn, “Friendship in Ancient China,” East Asian History 27 (2004), 2.
Yiqun Zhou, Festivals, Feasts, and Gender Relations in Ancient China and Greece (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 141.
Ambrose King, “The Individual and Group in Confucianism: A Relational Perspective,” in Individualism and Holism: Studies in Confucian and Taoist Values, ed. by Donald Munro (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985), 58.
Cf. Xiufen Lu, “Rethinking Confucian Friendship,” Asian Philosophy 20.3 (2010), 225–245.
Roger T. Ames, Confucian Role Ethics: A Vocabulary (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2011), 114.
See also David Hall and Roger T. Ames, “Confucian Friendship: The Road to Religiousness,” in The Changing Face of Friendship, ed. by Leroy Rouner (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), 77–94;
and David Hall and Roger T. Ames, Thinking from the Han: Self, Truth, and Transcendence in Chinese and Western Culture (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1998), esp. 254–268.
On notions of “flourishing” in early Chinese thought, see Bryan Van Norden, Virtue Ethics and Consequentialism in Early Chinese Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
On the dangers of attributing Western notions of systematicity to Confucius’s corpus, see Bryan Van Norden, “Unweaving the ‘One Thread’ of Analects 4:15,” in Confucius and the Analects: New Essays, ed. by Bryan Van Norden (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 216–236.
P. J. Ivanhoe, “Reweaving the ‘One Thread’ of the Analects,” Philosophy East & West 40.1 (1990), 24.
Book/page/line references from the Mencius are from D. C. Lau and Chen Fong Ching, eds., A Concordance to the Mengzi 孟子逐字索引, ICS Series (Hong Kong: Commercial Press, 1995).
Book/page/line references from the Xunzi are from D.C. Lau, Ho Che Wah, and Chen Fong Ching, A Concordance to the Xunzi 荀子逐字索引, ICS Series (Hong Kong: Commercial Press, 1996).
See Elizabeth Telfer, “Friendship,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 71 (1970–1971), 223–241.
John Knoblock and Jeffrey Riegel, trans., The Annals of Lu Buwei (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 308.
See Eric Henry, “The Motif of Recognition in Early China,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 47.1 (1987), 5–30.
On death in the Analects, see P. J. Ivanhoe, “Death and Dying in the Analects,” in Mortality in Traditional Chinese Thought, ed. by Amy Olberding and P. J. Ivanhoe (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2011), 137–152.
See Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York: Doubleday, 1967), 23: “Death presents society with a formidable problem not only because of its obvious threat to the continuity of human relationships, but because it threatens the basic assumptions of order on which society rests. In other words, the marginal situations of human existence reveal the innate precariousness of all social worlds. Every socially defined reality remains threatened by lurking ‘irrealities’. Every socially constructed nomos must face the constant possibility of its collapse into anomy.”
Brian Lundberg notes that friendship for Zhuangzi also possesses the potential to take one away from egoistic and narcissistic concerns: “Developing a friendship is, in essence, a training in looking outward beyond and away from self-interest—only one step away from letting go ofpersonal preconceptions, a prerequisite for the expansion of insight.” See Brian Lundberg, “A Meditation on Friendship,” in Wandering at Ease in the Zhuangzi, ed. by Roger T. Ames (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1998), 213–214. While I agree generally with Lundberg’s observation about the ways in which friendship can take us out of forms of egoism, I would argue that friendship can also reinforce it by expanding the sense of self to include others as a part of one’s own projects and ends. In other words, since the good of my friend becomes my good, I am in essence pursuing my own good as I pursue hers. This tension between egoism and friendship will be addressed more fully below.
On Hui Shi’s relationship with Zhuangzi, see A. C. Graham, Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1989), 76–82, 174–175. See also Lisa Raphals, “On Hui Shi,” in Wandering at Ease in the Zhuangzi, 143–162.
David Brink, “Eudaimonism, Love and Friendship, and Political Community,” Social Philosophy & Policy 16 (1999), 270.
Jennifer Whiting, “Impersonal Friends,” The Monist 74 (1991), 7.
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Lee, J.H. (2014). Travelers on the Way: Friendship in the Zhuangzi . In: The Ethical Foundations of Early Daoism. Palgrave Macmillan’s Content and Context in Theological Ethics. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137384867_4
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