Episode 16 of “This Is the Way”: The Zhuangzi on Uselessness

In this episode, we talk about the theme of uselessness in the Zhuangzi, one of the great foundational texts of philosophical Daoism. What exactly determines whether something is useful or useless? Is usefulness largely or fundamentally a matter of perspective? Does the text’s apparent recommendation that we be “useless” (in some sense) entail some sort of realism or objectivism about value? We explore these themes together with our guest, Chris Fraser, a major scholar of the Zhuangzi.

Key passages

“The Useless Tree”

惠子謂莊子曰:「吾有大樹,人謂之樗。其大本擁腫而不中繩墨,其小枝卷曲而不中規矩,立之塗,匠者不顧。今子之言,大而無用,眾所同去也。」莊子曰:「子獨不見狸狌乎?卑身而伏,以候敖者;東西跳梁,不避高下;中於機辟,死於罔罟。今夫斄牛,其大若垂天之雲。此能為大矣,而不能執鼠。今子有大樹,患其無用,何不樹之於無何有之鄉,廣莫之野,彷徨乎無為其側,逍遙乎寢臥其下?不夭斤斧,物無害者,無所可用,安所困苦哉!」

Huìzǐ said to Zhuāngzǐ, ‘I have a big tree that people call a stink tree. Its trunk is too gnarled and knotted to apply an ink line, its branches too curved and crooked to apply a compass or set square. Were it growing right in the road, a carpenter wouldn’t give it a glance. Now your words are big and useless, rejected by everyone alike.’

Zhuāngzǐ said, ‘Are you the only one who’s never seen a wild cat? It crouches down to lurk in wait for prey; it pounces east and west, leaping high and low; and then it falls into a trap and dies in the net. But now a yak, it’s as big as clouds hanging from the sky—this creature is able to be big but unable to catch rats. Now you have a big tree and are troubled that it’s useless. Why not plant it in the land of nothing-at-all, in the wilds of vast emptiness, and hang out doing nothing by its side, or meander about falling asleep beneath it?

Its life won’t be cut short by axes;
Nothing will harm it.
There being no use for it,
How could any distress come to it?’ (1/42–47)

Zhuangzi, chapter 1, Chris Fraser’s translation

     “The Goose That Couldn’t Honk”

莊子行於山中,見大木,枝葉盛茂,伐木者止其旁而不取也。問其故。曰:「無所可用。」莊子曰:「此木以不材得終其天年。」

Zhuāngzı̌ was travelling through the mountains when he saw a great tree with flourishing branches and leaves. A woodcutter stopped by its side but didn’t fell it. Zhuāngzı̌ asked the reason, and he said, ‘There’s nothing it can be used for’. Zhuāngzı̌ said, ‘This tree gets to live out its natural lifespan because it’s worthless’.

夫子出於山,舍於故人之家。故人喜,命豎子殺鴈而烹之。豎子請曰:「其一能鳴,其一不能鳴,請奚殺?」主人曰:「殺不能鳴者。」

The master emerged from the mountains and lodged for the night at an old friend’s home. The friend was delighted and ordered a servant to kill a goose and cook it. The servant asked, ‘One of the geese can honk and one can’t. Which should I kill?’ The host said, ‘Kill the one that can’t honk’.

明日,弟子問於莊子曰:「昨日山中之木,以不材得終其天年;今主人之鴈,以不材死。先生將何處?」

The next day, Zhuāngzı’s disciples asked him, ‘Yesterday the tree in the mountains got to live out its natural lifespan because it was worthless. Now the host’s goose died because it was worthless. Where would you position yourself, sir?’

莊子笑曰:「周將處夫材與不材之間。材與不材之間,似之而非也,故未免乎累。若夫乘道德而浮游則不然。無譽無訾,一龍一蛇,與時俱化,而無肯專為;一上一下,以和為量,浮游乎萬物之祖;物物而不物於物,則胡可得而累邪!此黃帝、神農之法則也。

Zhuāngzı̌ laughed and said, ‘I’d position myself between worthy and worthless. But a path between worthy and worthless only resembles the apt approach without being it, and so you won’t avoid entanglements that way. If you ride along with the Way and Virtue, drifting and wandering…on the other hand…that’s not the case. Without praise or criticism, now a dragon, now a snake, transform along with the times, without stubbornly committing to a single direction. Now above, now below, taking harmony as your measure while you drift and wander with the ancestral source of the myriad things, thinging things without being thinged by things—then how could anything entangle you? This was the norm the Divine Farmer and the Yellow Emperor followed.

若夫萬物之情,人倫之傳,則不然。合則離,成則毀,廉則挫,尊則議,有為則虧,賢則謀,不肖則欺,胡可得而必乎哉?悲夫!弟子志之,其唯道德之鄉乎!」

‘As to how the myriad things actually behave and the customs of human relations, on the other hand, they’re not this way. Joining leads to separation, success to ruin, honesty to frustration, honour to criticism, endeavour to loss, talent to scheming, ineptitude to cheating—how can we take anything for certain?! Sad! Students, remember this: make your home only in the Way and Virtue!’

Zhuangzi, chapter 20, Chris Fraser’s translation

Sources and phrases mentioned

• The Mozi 墨子 (Mohist text)
• The Wenzi 文子 (non-canonical Daoist text)
Garry Kasparov (chess grandmaster who lost to a supercomputer)
Chris Fraser (our guest)
Zhuangzi: The Complete Writings (Fraser’s translation of the Zhuangzi)
• Chris Fraser, Zhuangzi: Ways of Wandering the Way (see especially chapter 8)
• Huizi 惠子 / Hui Shi 惠施 (Zhuangzi’s friend)
de 德 (virtue, perhaps agency)
The Cook Ding story (in Zhuangzi, chapter 3)
The skull passage (in Zhuangzi, chapter 18)
tong 通 (flowing freely, connecting straight through)
shi 適 (fit)
The monkey-trainer passage (in Zhuangzi, chapter 2)
Yan He is assigned to tutor a vicious crown prince (in Zhuangzi, chapter 4)
Huizi’s giant gourds (in Zhuangzi, chapter 1)
zhuo 拙 (stupid, clumsy)
Zhu Xi 朱熹 (the Neo-Confucian philosopher we mentioned near the end of the episode)
• The Xunzi 荀子
Zhuangzi: A New Translation of the Sayings of Master Zhuang as Interpreted by Guo Xiang (translation of the Guo Xiang commentary by Richard John Lynn)

4 replies on “Episode 16 of “This Is the Way”: The Zhuangzi on Uselessness”

  1. This is fantastic–thanks for taking the time to do this.

    Fraser really flourishes when discussing ZZ in this sort of relaxed setting. I hope he continues with this style of engagement. It’s moments like these that one can feel genuinely delighted with the progress in Anglophone ZZ studies.

    Also, if you read this blog: congrats on the highly fluent ZZ translation. I have been reading it with great joy.

  2. I would like to add, at the risk of utterly humiliating myself, that Fraser’s point about trying to work out what the text is about without necessarily subscribing to or advocating it is an extremely important one.

    If one’s style of doing the history of philosophy is to assume the perspective of a work and then to work one’s way out of it, be careful with ZZ. It is not to be taken lightly and can leave one out at sea despite its playful ethos. Like the legendary “walk of Handan” (from ch. 17), engaging with the text risks destroying one’s original intellectual framework and capacities without guaranteeing a stable alternative. This destabilisation is not something that happens all at once, and it can manifest beyond one’s philosophical activities in the daily course of trying to navigate one’s life. Whether or not this is inevitable and whether or not this needs to be distressing are separate matters, but my concern is that the playful nature of the work belies a philosophical experience that might irrevocably alter your intellectual and existential coordinates. (On traditional readings the trouble is mitigated, as there is a sort of faith in cultivating non-intellectual features of our natures providing us with a new orientation. But sans that faith, which I personally lack, one can find oneself in a perpetually disoriented place. )

  3. This might be my favorite episode so far- which I did not expect, as I’m one of those people who like Mozi and love Xunzi but find Mencius and Zhuangzi impenetrable. Presenting the Zhuangzi in such a careful, systematic way was immensely helpful to me. (The same goes for your episodes on Mencius.) I’m going to be listening to this at least once or twice more.

    The “what would you say to a moral nihilist” objection is a fun tool in the metaethicist’s toolbox. But I wonder if it can sometimes derail things. The way I see it, there are two ways to take the challenge:

    1. Does your ethics provide a way to convince the amoralist that their position is wrong?
    2. Does your ethics provide a way to give a rationally satisfying response to the amoralist’s position?

    With regard to 1, I agree that no ethical system can pull this off, *if* you assume that the amoralist is amoral due to a mental defect, i.e. they’re a psychopath. But I worry that that begs the question: of course if you assume someone is irrational, it will turn out that you can’t reason with them. Also, anecdotally, there are plenty of non-psychopath amoralists who later change their position (e.g. some religious conversions), and in many cases a process of reasoning or argument appears to play a role.

    There are ways you can respond to all that (e.g. by saying that it’s really life experience or emotions doing the heavy lifting in those conversions; or that the sane amoralist doesn’t really count for some reason). But even if those work, I worry that (2) is still a live concern. Even if I can’t convince another person that, e.g., killing people for fun is wrong, my ethics should still be able to give an account of why it is without sneaking in principles it purports to reject. I worry that the “they’re a tiger” response, even if it answers (1), doesn’t adequately respond to (2).

    (Analogy: Just because I can’t convince someone that chairs are real doesn’t mean I don’t have an adequate response to radical skepticism.)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.