V.
If Confucianism’s complicity with sovereign power and
ambiguous, seemingly contradictory stance on human responsibility toward
animals would be problematic for the ethical grounding of animal welfare
initiatives today, one can seek an alternative model in other schools of
Chinese philosophy. Indeed, my argument that animal ethics, especially as
configured in classical Chinese philosophy, is integrally tied to issues of language
and categorization reaches its most intense expression in the Zhuangzi, which, I will argue, may
provide a possible theoretical basis for a new ethics of human-animal relation.
The Zhuangzi’s
primary target seems to be language and the way it is used to limit human
thought and structure human experience. The animal thus becomes for Zhuangzi a
site of possibility for a way of living outside of the normalizing constraints
of language; “The animal,” Irving Goh writes, “points the way toward thinking the
Way.”[i]
Furthermore, Goh argues that Zhuangzi’s writings prefigure Gilles Deleuze and
Felix Guattari’s notion of “becoming-animal,” which, as developed in A Thousand Plateaus and Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature,
expresses “a desire for [human] thought to pass through the animal.”[ii]
Indeed, there is a faint resemblance, though Deleuze and Guattari never
explicitly make use of the Zhuangzi.[iii]
But, similarly to Zhuangzi, for Deleuze and Guattari the leave-taking of the
subject from subjectivity marks a departure from the limits imposed by
anthropocentric modes of thought, especially identified with state politics:
“To the inhumanness of [politics], there is the answer of a becoming-animal: to
become a beetle, to become a dog, to become an ape, ‘head over heels and run
away,’ rather than lowering one’s head and remaining a bureaucrat, inspector,
judge, or judged.”[iv] With
Deleuze and Guattari as his starting point, Goh goes on to examine such
well-known passages as Zhuangzi’s dream about the butterfly and Huizi and
Zhuangzi’s conversation about the “happy fish,” though, as Goh himself
stresses, the Zhuangzi follows the
animal throughout the text, in both the inner and outer chapters. In what
follows, I will make use of two additional examples.
In the Zhuangzi,
Deleuze and Guattari’s “run[ning] away” is mirrored by a desire to depart from
normativity that often takes the form of the literal fleeing of animals. One
early chapter contains a fictitious exchange between Wang Ni and a disciple in
which Wang Ni says, “People said that Mao Chiang and Li Chi were the most
beautiful women in the world, but fish seeing them dived away, birds took off
into the air and deer ran off. Of these four, who really knows true beauty? As
I see it, benevolence and righteousness, also the ways of right and wrong, are
completely interwoven. I do not think I can know the difference between them!”[v] At
work in such passages is a radical desire for human ontological displacement
similar to that of the better known “butterfly dream,” in which perspectival
difference comes with a challenge to preconceived notions and received wisdom.
Rather than being portrayed in negative light (as in the Xunzi), the chaos and confusion that
necessarily results when mutually exclusive categories enter into an intimate
indistinction becomes the productive site of a new politics of human-animal
relation. As Zhuangzi writes, “In this time of perfect Virtue [至德], people live side by side with the birds and beasts,
sharing the world in common with all life. No one knows of distinctions such as
nobles or peasantry!”[vi]
This image, drawn from the utopian imagination, is rarely registered in the
text as a “return” to some imagined state or time of perfection but rather as a
perennial, continually open (or open-able) possibility that emerges from the
fissures of any attempt at a systematized political program or paradigm. It is therefore this utopian image that one must seek to activate or actualize in
the context of modern systems.
[i]
Irving Goh, “Chuang Tzu’s Becoming-Animal,” Philosophy
East and West 61.1 (2011), 110.
[ii]
Ibid., 111.
[iii]
Deleuze and Guattari do, however, at one point make a perfunctory reference to
Daoism, though it has no relevance for the current discussion. See A Thousand Plateaus, trans. by Brian
Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 157.
[iv]
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka:
Toward a Minor Literature, trans. by Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1986), 12.
[v] The Book of Chuang Tzu, 17.
[vi]
Ibid., 73.
