The Zhuangzi course is finished. We had our final meeting on Friday, and the papers (all but one) have been turned in. We got somewhere in our eight weeks, though I'm not sure if it's a sign of success or even greater success that each student found something different. We went in with the promise that this was a text which philosophers construed in widely varied and apparently incompatible ways - mystical, agnostic, perspectivalist, relativist, fatalist, nihilist, existentialist! Most of the students got that, whatever the Zhuangzi is saying, it says it by not saying only that.
For my part, I have a sense of it... lucky I didn't have to write a final essay, too! I'm partial to the view that the Zhuangzi is a playful pranksterish text, which works by the pitch perfect way it presents all sorts of different views and by the impossibility of saying just when they turn to parody.
There is a beginning. There is a not yet beginning to be a beginning. There is a not yet beginning to be a not yet beginning to be a beginning. There is being. There is nonbeing. There is a not yet beginning to be nonbeing. There is a not yet beginning to be a not yet beginning to be nonbeing. Suddenly there is nonbeing. But I do not know, when it comes to nonbeing, which is really being and which is nonbeing. Now I have just said something. But I don't know whether what I have said has really said something or whether it hasn't said something. (ch 2, trans Watson)
I like Ziporyn's idea that the Zhuangzi works as a sort of "wild card" allowing one to participate fully in social life without taking it so seriously as to be damaged by it, what some other recent interpreters call "genuine pretending." But it's more than that, a cacophony of sounds from the Great Clump coursing through the hollows in things, an initiation into a world of ongoing transformation.
If I teach it again - and I'm thinking I'd like to - it will be a somewhat different format, but that may be for the best. Instead of seven meetings there will be ten. This should help me address the one big problem we had this time. Despite everything I know about the problems with reading texts as Great Books, presumed accessible without knowing anything about their context of emergence or reception, and about the red herring of a "philosophical Daoism" distinct from the rituals and myths of Daoist "religion," we wound up understanding it as a book, if an ironic and shifty one.
Next time, students will get that this is more then a general shiftiness and irony. They'll know that the "Confucius" of the Zhuangzi isn't the Confucius of tradition, for instance! Or that this text isn't just about the paradoxes of language and consciousness, but is about life bobbing in streams of 氣 qi. But I also don't want to present it as a culturally inaccessible text, one one could not hope to understand without years of specialist training or insider knowledge. Context and reception will come in installments. So here's how I'm thinking I might proceed, building around the current structure.
Week 1: Welcome, with an activity - perhaps calligraphy
Week 2: Inner Chapters 1-3
Week 3: Inner Chapters 4-7, film about Daoist ritual
Week 4: Some Daodejing and Analects, with an activity
Week 5: Presentation on a passage from Inner Chapters, using commentaries and Laozi or Confucius, as relevant; Outer Chapters 8-10
Week 6: Remaining Outer and Miscellaneous Chapters in Ziporyn
Week 7: Introduction to the cosmology of Yijing, with an activity
Week 8: Reread Inner Chapters; choose text for final presentation
Week 9: Zhuangzi beyond words; in class read together Chapter 20
Week 10: Presentations of process and outcome of final papers
For my part, I have a sense of it... lucky I didn't have to write a final essay, too! I'm partial to the view that the Zhuangzi is a playful pranksterish text, which works by the pitch perfect way it presents all sorts of different views and by the impossibility of saying just when they turn to parody.
There is a beginning. There is a not yet beginning to be a beginning. There is a not yet beginning to be a not yet beginning to be a beginning. There is being. There is nonbeing. There is a not yet beginning to be nonbeing. There is a not yet beginning to be a not yet beginning to be nonbeing. Suddenly there is nonbeing. But I do not know, when it comes to nonbeing, which is really being and which is nonbeing. Now I have just said something. But I don't know whether what I have said has really said something or whether it hasn't said something. (ch 2, trans Watson)
I like Ziporyn's idea that the Zhuangzi works as a sort of "wild card" allowing one to participate fully in social life without taking it so seriously as to be damaged by it, what some other recent interpreters call "genuine pretending." But it's more than that, a cacophony of sounds from the Great Clump coursing through the hollows in things, an initiation into a world of ongoing transformation.
If I teach it again - and I'm thinking I'd like to - it will be a somewhat different format, but that may be for the best. Instead of seven meetings there will be ten. This should help me address the one big problem we had this time. Despite everything I know about the problems with reading texts as Great Books, presumed accessible without knowing anything about their context of emergence or reception, and about the red herring of a "philosophical Daoism" distinct from the rituals and myths of Daoist "religion," we wound up understanding it as a book, if an ironic and shifty one.
Next time, students will get that this is more then a general shiftiness and irony. They'll know that the "Confucius" of the Zhuangzi isn't the Confucius of tradition, for instance! Or that this text isn't just about the paradoxes of language and consciousness, but is about life bobbing in streams of 氣 qi. But I also don't want to present it as a culturally inaccessible text, one one could not hope to understand without years of specialist training or insider knowledge. Context and reception will come in installments. So here's how I'm thinking I might proceed, building around the current structure.
Week 1: Welcome, with an activity - perhaps calligraphy
Week 2: Inner Chapters 1-3
Week 3: Inner Chapters 4-7, film about Daoist ritual
Week 4: Some Daodejing and Analects, with an activity
Week 5: Presentation on a passage from Inner Chapters, using commentaries and Laozi or Confucius, as relevant; Outer Chapters 8-10
Week 6: Remaining Outer and Miscellaneous Chapters in Ziporyn
Week 7: Introduction to the cosmology of Yijing, with an activity
Week 8: Reread Inner Chapters; choose text for final presentation
Week 9: Zhuangzi beyond words; in class read together Chapter 20
Week 10: Presentations of process and outcome of final papers
