VII.
For a conclusion, it is fitting to note that Confucius also
appears in the Zhuangzi, though his
many appearances are anything but reverential. Usually, Zhuangzi appropriates
Confucius’s likeness and influence to subvert it and, in doing so, locate the formal disjunctions between Confucianism and his own proto-Daoism. Especially important in the context of this essay is one appearance of Confucius in which he relates the following story: “I was once in
the state of Chu on a commission, and I saw some piglets trying to suckle from
their dead mother. After a while, they started up and left her. She did not
seem to notice them and so they no longer felt any affinity with her. What they
loved about their mother was not her body but what gave life to her body.”[i]
These lines are notable because the Confucius of the Analects would never have
spoken them. The passage unworks the
qualitative distinction between human and animal inasmuch as Confucius
anthropomorphizes the behavior of the piglets and, consequently, animalizes the
behavior of humans: pigs have the capacity to “notice,” to feel “affinity” for
others of their own kind, to “love.” In other words, this passage enacts a
fragile articulation between human and animal, and, by
creating the necessary conditions of their coincidence, Zhuangzi calls into question these very
categories. For Zhuangzi, philosophy takes place precisely in the moment of the
flight of an animal, in the kitchen the “gentleman” is taught to avoid, in the
hyphen that connects “human” to “animal” in the phrase “human-animal relation.”
To put it simply, the Zhuangzi is a
book that asks its reader to follow the piglets. Only by following these
loose animals can one lose “the animal” and forget the human will to power over
animal life. Therefore, to speak of animal/ized ethics is to learn
from an animal that “the animal” does not exist.
[i] The Book of Chuang Tzu, 42.
