Abstract
This chapter explores the thought of Guo Xiang, with special attention to his complex views concerning knowledge (知zhi) and deliberate action (為wei). It is due to the complexities of Guo’s key idea of “the self-so” (自然ziran), serving as the crux of both his ontology and his axiology, and stipulated to be both the direct antithesis to both knowledge and action and also the ultimate source enabler of both knowledge and action that he is able to simultaneously repudiate both and affirm both without contradiction, and thereby provide a cogent global theory ethics and epistemology of high originality and immense subsequent influence. Of special importance for making his theory work is Guo’s conception of the self-so as the unchangeable but constantly changing “nature” of each and every entity, the source of its self-affirming value and of its being at every moment.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
See Liu Xiaogan’s chapter in this volume for a detailed discussion.
- 3.
I.e., the teaching concerned with the names corresponding to various social roles, and hence the ethics of human interaction; the term is probably ultimately derived from the concept of the “rectification of names” (正名zhengming) in early Confucianism, whereby the actions of individuals were to correspond with their named social roles. Cf. Analects 13:3 and Xunzi, “Zhengming pian.”
- 4.
See Tang 1983: 66–70, for an elegant elaboration of this point.
- 5.
The binome appears five times in the Wang Bi Daodejing. In four of these occurrences (chaps. 17, 23, 51 and 64), it clearly means “what is so without external compulsion.” The other usage, in chap. 25, is somewhat more controversial: “Man models himself on earth; earth models itself on heaven; heaven models itself on Dao; Dao models itself on ziran” (道法自然). This could be taken to mean there is something called ziran which stands above even Dao, providing the law of its being. Or it could be taken to mean the Dao models itself on its own essence in some way. But I think the most likely reading, in context, takes this as meaning something quite similar to the use of the term in Zhuangzi, chap. 5: “Consistently following along with ziran and not adding to life.” To “follow along with ziran” (yin ziran 因自然) is quite close to fa ziran 法自然, and both seem to mean taking as one’s model the way things themselves already are without interference, rather than deliberately trying to augment or control them. Hence I would read Daodejing 25 as bringing the discussion full circle, back to things themselves: “Dao models itself on the way each thing is of itself.”
The only other usage in the Inner Chapters of the Zhuangzi (shun wu ziran 順物自然: following the self-so of things) means roughly the same thing, and is even more explicit in referring this to the self-so of things. The term appears six times in the remaining chapters of the Zhuangzi (not counting the occurrence in chap. 17, which is really a coincidental use of the same characters for another meaning, albeit one which would be extremely important for Guo Xiang: self-affirmation, considering oneself right). The only place it seems to mean anything other than the condition of things contrasted to deliberate or extrinsic action upon them is in the discussion of music in chap. 14. The term does become more central and substantialized in the Hanfeizi commentary to the Daodejing, and in Han Daoist-tinged writings like the Huainanzi and the Wenzi, which has an entire chapter with this title.
- 6.
The former meaning is emphasized by Guo’s use of the term zi’er 自爾, and the latter by the terms zide 自得 and zidang 自當, interchangeably with ziran in certain contexts. This usage is prominent in chap. 2 of the Zhuangzi, and the term ziran is used in chap. 17 to mean “affirmation of their own rightness, approval of themselves” as opposed to “disapproval of each other” (xiangfei 相非).
- 7.
This view, which does seem to be put forward in parts of the Zhuangzi and is a commonplace of later Daoist thinking, is ascribed to Guo in Chan 2003.
- 8.
Since different editions arrange the text of Guo’s commentary in different formats, sometimes separating them line by line and sometimes clustering his comments together at the end of the relevant Zhuangzi section, I have added ellipses only in places where something is omitted form Guo’s own comments, considered as one continuous text.
- 9.
Huran 忽然. This term, which normally means simply “suddenly,” has a rather extended meaning in Guo Xiang. The hu here also implies to not pay attention, to neglect, unconsciousness. Moreover, the ran has a sense of both being-so and affirming, embodying a particular point of view.
- 10.
- 11.
See, for example, Mizoguchi 1994, where this move from external to internal determining principle Is identified as Guo’s distinctive contribution to the development of the theory of “principle” in Chinese intellectual history.
- 12.
It is true that Guo will sometimes say that the traces of a self-so event are merely its “external forms.” But this is not to be taken as if internal and external were opposed in the obvious sense, where the agent himself alone knows his true nature, and those outside him do not, and see him only externally and know only his traces. He himself knows only his traces; knowing per se can pertain only to traces.
- 13.
Some variation of this view is taken in Su 1980, Zhuang 1998, Wang 2006, Huang 2007 et alia. It is the standard doxa of Guo Xiang studies, although as I argue in this essay and elsewhere it can easily be shown to be based on a superficial misreading of his work. A view closer to the one developed here appears in Wang Deyou 1987 and Fung 1933. Fung attributes to Guo the view that the way any thing is to the totality of existing conditions (rather than invoking the thing’s unchaning “nature”), without delving into the further details of how to interpret the rest of Guo’s pronouncements. (Fung, pp. 120–121.) Tang 1983 offers a more complex account which stands somewhere in between these two views: on Tang’s account, all things have an unchanging nature, but they are also made what they are by the totality of other events in the universe, which makes inquiry into those events in principle fruitless: “To say that any and every condition is a condition of its existence is tantamount to saying that its existence is unconditioned.” (Tang, p. 294). It is their unchanging nature to be dependent on this totality of other things in a specific way. With a slight modification, Tang’s position is equivalent to what I am arguing here: instead of seeing “its own unconditioned uncreated nature” and “its uncondtionality because determined to be conditioned by all things in a certain way” as two separate facts, I view them as synonyms. They are two ways of describing the same contents.
- 14.
A contrast with Buddhist ideas may be useful here. It may seem superficially that Guo’s insistence on constant flux makes his view similar to the early Buddhist notions of impermanence (annica) and “nonself” (anatta). But Guo does not deny the reality of the self; on the contrary, he affirms that there is always a self: whatever I regard as self is myself, and I may regard as self whatever is self-so. The Buddhists deny self because of the criterion of “selfhood” they are applying: to be a self, for Buddhists, means to be an independent, self-determining, unconditional agent, which through its own power can determine its own fate at will. Since nothing meets this definition, nothing is a self. Guo, on the other hand, does not share this criterion. For him, what is self-so is self, when one is able to “vanish into it” undisturbed by “traces.” The criterion for selfhood, for Guo, does not require that the self have this ability to make things so at will, or to exercise a determining power over anything: as quoted above, things are “simply self-generated, not generated by the self” (zisheng er; fei wosheng ye 自生耳; 非我生也) (Guo 1983: 50). Guo, unlike the Buddhists, thus asserts a true self at any moment, though one defined by this “zi” rather than this “wo.” Nor does Guo’s view exactly accord with the later Buddhist view that all things are my self, although it more closely resembles this view; Guo would say instead that any situation may be my self, depending on how I relate to it. In this sense, Guo position is a kind of antithesis to Buddhism, although his view would exert considerable influence on later Chan modifications of Buddhist doctrine, particularly in the Hongzhou school of Chan which likewise denies the relevance of theoretical knowledge and identifies every and any momentary “function” (yong), if undisturbed by cognitive purposes which “seek outside” itself, with the true self or Buddha-nature.
- 15.
This is why Guo does sometimes sound like he considers the determinacy of things to be fixed, for example when he says, “This passage means to say that the determinacies of things have their different allotments and roles (fen); thus the intelligent await their end holding on to their intelligence, while the stupid await death embracing their stupidity; how could they change their innate determinacy in the middle?” (Guo 1983: 59). But in the light of his entire system, his emphasis on change and transformation, his admission of unfixity of worldly conditions which alone express determinate differences, we may rather interpret such assertions to mean that at any given moment one is just what one is and cannot be otherwise, that one’s determinacy in that moment is self-so and absolute, not that one must literally be the same in every subsequent moment. For Guo makes it abundantly clear elsewhere that xing does not mean something eternally fixed: “Benevolence and righteousness are the determinate nature (xing 性) of man; but man’s determinate nature changes (ren xing you bian 人性有變), it is different in the past and in the present” (Guo 1983: 519). Whatever changes happen to occur to one’s determinacy are also self-so, and hence are also one’s “nature.” “To follow one’s present determinacy and move directly forward (zhiwang 直往) is self-so. To so move and harm that determinacy, and the fact that the determinacy (xing 性) once hurt can change, are also self-so” (Guo 1983: 281). Here we see clearly that xing is something that can and does change; in fact, in light of Guo’s general view of the uninterrupted all-pervasiveness of change, it must change.
- 16.
For a fuller discussion of these points, see Ziporyn 2003.
- 17.
We may further ask why there should be in the world any memory or consciousness which does in fact look at past moments and other beings in this way, why there is this deluded kind of cognition at all—and to this I think Guo can give no answer except his blanket response that this, like all else, is self-so, inexplicable, something simultaneously free, necessary, and arbitrary.
- 18.
In statements such as this we do get a clue of a possible derivation of the appearance of traces from an inherent acceptance of the old Daoist idea of the mutual creation of opposites: it is precisely the perfection of the sages that creates the greatest calamity of traces and imitation, in accordance with the implicit broader rule that evil is born from good and vice versa.
References
Chan, Alan K.L. 2003. Guo Xiang (Kuo Hsiang). In Encyclopedia of Chinese philosophy, ed. Antonio Cua. New York/London: Routledge. (An excellent and concise overview of Guo’s thought, giving a balanced and judicious treatment of the most salient ideas in Guo’s worldview. While I take issue with the attribution of the “share of qi” and immanent principles to Guo here, this is in general a good introduction to Guo’s way of thinking.)
Chan, Wing-tsit. 1963. A source book in Chinese philosophy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. (A standard history of Chinese thought from its beginnings to the twentieth century, offering interpretations, excellent translations of primary texts, and an effective narrative overview of the development of Chinese intellectual history.)
Fung, Yu-lan, Trans. 1933. Chuang Tzu: A new selected translations with an exposition of the philosophy of Kuo Hsiang. Shanghai: Commercial Press. (The earliest English-language translation and interpretation of Guo’s comments appear in this work, which is rudimentary but still a valuable resource.)
Guo, Qingfan 郭慶藩 (ed.). 1983. Collected explanations of the Zhuangzi 莊子集釋. Taipei: Muduo chubanshe. (A late Qing work that collects the entirety of the Zhuangzi text, all of Guo Xiang’s commentary, and two Tang works—Cheng Xuanying’s subcommentary to Guo, and Lu Deming’s philological glosses—making this an indispensable primary source for the study of Guo Xiang’s thought.)
Huang, Shengping 黃聖平. 2007. A study of G uo Xiang’s Xuanxue: Tracing the reasoning from the theory of original nature 郭象玄學研究: 沿着本性論的理路. Beijing: Hualing chubanshe. (A comprehensive study of Guo’s thought, interpreting it as focusing on the notion of a real “original nature” in each entity. An extensive study of Guo’s life and thought, also holding to the view that Guo advocates a theory of a fixed internal “nature” endemic to each creature.)
Knaul, Livia (Livia Kohn). 1985. Kuo Hsiang and the Chuang-tzu. Journal of Chinese Philosophy 12(1985): 429–447. (A valiant early attempt to summarize Guo Xiang’s ideas in English.)
Mizoguchi, Yūzō 溝口雄三. 1994. Chūgoku ni okeru riki-ron no seiritsu 中国における理気論の成立. In Sekai-zō no keisei—Asia kara kangaeru 7 世界像の形成-アジアから考える7, ed. Mizoguchi Yūzō 溝口雄三, Hamashita Takeshi 浜下武志, Hiraishi Naoaki 平石直昭, Miyajima Hiroshi 宮嶋博史. Tokyo: Tokyo University shuppankai. (A general history of the development of the conceptions of li [principle] and qi [vital force], the key terms in Song Neo-Confucianism, in Chinese intellectual history, in which Guo Xiang is given the decisive role of first conceiving of principle as “immanent.”)
Su, Xinwu 蘇新鋈. 1980. Critical discussions of Guo Xiang’s study of the Zhuangzi 郭象莊學評議. Taipei: Xuesheng shuju. (A critical evaluation of Guo Xiang’s relation to the Zhuangzi, also offering a strong and convincing analysis of Guo’s modifications of the work Xiang Xiu.)
Tang, Yijie 湯一介. 1983. Guo Xiang and Wei-Jin “dark learning” 郭象與魏晉玄學. Hubei: Renmin chubanshe. (A comprehensive philosophical monograph on Guo’s thought in the context of the Xuanxue movement, with subtle and detailed analyses of the premises and implications of his thinking.)
Wang, Deyou 王德有. 1987. A few points about Guo Xiang’s philosophy and several related concepts 郭象哲學的幾點及相應的幾個概念. In Literature, history, philosophy 文史哲 1987.1. (An astute and closely argued analysis of Guo’s use of terms, particularly insightful in its treatment of the question of change and its relation to the “nature.”)
Wang, Xiaoyi 王曉毅. 2006. Collected critical biographies of Chinese thinkers, 36: A critical biography of Guo Xiang 中國思想家評傳叢書36-郭象評傳. Nanjing: Nanjing daxue. (A comprehensive discussion of Guo Xiang’s life and work.)
Zhuang, Yaolang 莊耀郎. 1998. G uo Xiang’s Xuanxue 郭象玄學. Taipei: Liren shuju. (A general overview of Guo’s thought.)
Ziporyn, Brook. 2003. The penumbra unbound: The Neo-Taoist philosophy of Guo Xiang. Albany: State University of New York Press. (An English-language book-length study of Guo’s philosophy, in the context of both Chinese thought and comparative philosophy.)
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Ziporyn, B. (2015). Guo Xiang: The Self-So and the Repudiation-cum-Reaffirmation of Deliberate Action and Knowledge. In: Liu, X. (eds) Dao Companion to Daoist Philosophy. Dao Companions to Chinese Philosophy, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-2927-0_17
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