Publication details
Usefulness of being useless: reading the narratives in the Zhuangzi
| Authors | |
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| Year of publication | 2014 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | The Zhuangzi, like many other early Chinese texts, is a composite text consisting of relatively short textual units. Despite its composite nature, the Zhuangzi is usually approached as a philosophical work, which (at least in part) can be viewed as philosophically coherent. Any reading strategy approaching the text from “one philosophical vision“ point of view necessarily integrates individual units into the philosophical vision it constructs, which is supposed to be the general framework all parts of the text must fit in. In this paper an alternative reading strategy is explored and tested on the Zhuangzi narratives on “usefulness of being useless”. The proposed reading primarily establishes meanings of the individual units. It is suggested that many units contain information establishing specific context for the unit’s content (a narrative about “usefulness of being useless” in this case). The paper argues that diverse contexts can be reconstructed for seemingly similar textual units. The idea of “usefulness of being useless” is viewed not as a peculiar concept of human existence advocated by the text (the text’s author/s), but as an argumentative tool that can be used in various contexts for various purposes. The paper demonstrates that the received Zhuangzi can be read as an evidence of the process of putting ideas in context and using them for various purposes. The paper concludes that the proposed “unit-by-unit” reading highlights and retains meanings that are necessarily obscured by any reading reducing the text into one worldview |