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jocp_1706 139..156

guoping zhao

THE SELF AND HUMAN FREEDOM IN

FOUCAULT AND ZHUANGZI

Abstract

Foucault and Zhuangzi share important insights on the role of

knowledge practices play in the pursuit of human freedom. This
article investigates Foucault’s discussion of the subjectivation truth
games of the ancient Greeks and Romans, and in light of the discus-
sion, reconsiders Zhuangzi’s approach to knowledge practices. It also
examines the notion of self and freedom embedded in the knowledge
practices of Foucault and Zhuangzi and suggests that, when trying to
get away from the metaphysical subject, there is an inherent problem
associated with Foucault’s embrace of the Western notion of freedom
as autonomy. The conclusion suggests that Zhuangzi’s notion of
freedom as breaking through our limits and entering into the larger
whole; his notion of the self as non-being may make the human
pursuit of freedom more successful.

Foucault and Zhuangzi, two seemingly unrelated figures distant from

time and space, have no perceivable crossing point. Yet, looking at
how they conceive human knowledge in relation to the self and the
important role they ascribe to knowledge practices in the pursuit of
human freedom, they seem to share significant insights and concerns.
They both have systematic views of what should count as useful
knowledge for human lives, and how knowledge practices should not
be about acquiring objective truth, but about rendering humans free.
From the vantage point of post-modern Western philosophy, Foucault
is particularly critical of the modern development of “intellectual
knowledge” and the modern notion of the subject, and he has pro-
posed a reconsideration of the ancient Greek and Roman practice
of knowledge for the purpose of reconfiguring the self and freedom.
Questions remain, however, about whether he is successful in his
project. I argue that Foucault is caught between his passionate
embrace of the Western notion of the freedom of the subject and an
ardent rejection of the modern subject. On the other end, Zhuangzi’s
pursuit of selfhood as non-being and his notion of human freedom

GUOPING ZHAO, Associate Professor, Social Foundations of Education, School of

Educational Studies, Oklahoma State University. Specialties: comparative philosophy,
philosophy of education, cross-cultural studies of education. E-mail: zhaog@okstate.edu
Journal of Chinese Philosophy 39:1 (March 2012) 139–156
© 2012 Journal of Chinese Philosophy
140 guoping zhao

intend to transcend what is fixed in us and entering what is unlimited

may make human freedom closer to our reach.

I. Foucault’s Notion of Freedom and Truth Games

Foucault, one of the most influential philosophers of the contempo-

rary time, is alleged to have provided “[t]he twentieth century’s most
devastating critique of the free subject.”1 For a long time, his works
exposed the dominating, normalizing, and oppressing purposes of the
power/knowledge apparatuses in Western societies. In an archeologi-
cal investigation of discourses in The Order of Things, Foucault held
that discourses produce the very existence of humans, consciousness,
and origins just as they “give birth to man as an object of knowledge
for a discourse with a ‘scientific’ status.”2 In Discipline and Punish,
Foucault further claimed that the subject is “the present correlative of
a certain technology of power over the body.”3 In this account of the
subject, as Alan Schrift notes, human beings are merely the “nodes
through which institutionalized power relations are transmitted.”4
One of the major difficulties with such an account of the subject
is that it is almost impossible to locate the source of individual resis-
tance, even though Foucault insists that resistance exists. Thus a
seeming consensus in Foucault scholarship underscores the determin-
istic, object-like, and passive features of Foucault’s subject, where
resistance is ultimately just “a ubiquitous, metaphysical principle.”5
There seems no room left for human freedom.
However, in Foucault’s last years, from his study of Hellenistic
and Roman Antiquity, a new conceptual framework emerges. Now he
claims that the main concern of his lifelong project has not been
power, but truth games.
I have tried to discover how the human subject entered into games of
truth, whether they be games of truth which take on the form of
science or which refer to a scientific model, or games of truth like
those that can be found in institutions or practices of control. . . . Up
to that point, the problem of the relationship between the subject and
the games of truth had been faced in two ways: either beginning with
coercive practices—(as in the case of psychiatry and the penitentiary
system)—or in forms of theoretical or scientific games.6

He identifies a third mode of truth games, the mode of subjecti-

vation, mainly in volumes II and III of The History of Sexuality7 and
in his last lectures at the Collège de France, The Hermeneutics of
the Subject. Foucault’s lectures were held every Wednesday from
January 6 to March 24, 1982, at the Collège de France, Paris. In The
Hermeneutics of the Subject, Foucault notes that, throughout Greek
 the self and human freedom 141

and Roman culture, “the care of the self” remained a fundamental

principle, the justification, the framework, and the ground for the
truth games of knowing the self.8 Only after the “Cartesian
moment”9 is the principle forgotten/discredited, the only focus
becomes the objective knowledge of the self through the practices
of the “knowing of the self.” In the last two volumes of The History
of Sexuality, he also notes a change that occurred from the aesthetic
of existence to the Socrato-Platonic erotic. The former is preoccu-
pied with the deontological question of “how the two partners ought
to conduct themselves;” the latter is an “ontological inquiry” into
“the very being of . . . love.” The question becomes “What is the
essential nature of Love?”10
In this transformation from the truth game of “ethics,” by which
Foucault means, in particular, the “practice of the self,” to the
modern truth game of the metaphysics of the self, the episteme,
the condition for what is possible and acceptable as knowledge,
changed. We in the modern times have always assumed that truth
practice is concerned with “the production of true statements,” or
with “the epistemological controversy over correspondence and
coherence.”11 But Foucault maintains that all truth games are about
“dividing and excluding, . . . constraining and liberating.”12 Truth
games are not neutral but political or ethical in nature. For Foucault,
the objectification of the subject in modern truth discourse, the
confession, the study of the interiority (and the self-renunciation
coming with it), psychology and psychoanalysis, etc., marks the
major techniques of dominance and oppression in the modern West.
But in the truth games of ancient times, the concern is about the
care of self. There is no post-Cartesian discrete, rational knower
and objective reality/world to be known. The practice of truth and
knowledge is for transforming the self.
Thus by looking at truth practices from this perspective and
especially in his discussion of subjectivation truth games, Foucault
attempts to retrieve his long dismissed pursuit of human freedom,
understood, however, the same as in modern times, as self-mastery
and autonomy. Human beings are no longer just the passive products
of truth games but they have the freedom to constitute and determine
the form of the self—the freedom to be who they are, and the freedom
to determine their own course of action. As Foucault sees it, while
the modern practice seems to confine the self within a straitjacket of
truth, the subjectivation practice has the liberation of the subject at
stake. I share Paras’s observation that the identification, emphasis,
and advocate of subjectivation truth games only disclose Foucault’s
“overwhelming passion for life and an inextinguishable belief in the
primacy of human liberty.”13
142 guoping zhao

II. Human Freedom and the Configuration of the Self

The reemerged quest for freedom in Foucault’s later work is made

possible through a reconfiguration of the self. When power is the all
encompassing theme in his analysis, the self is conceived as an object
to be examined and constituted, the passive product of techniques of
domination, but when freedom rises to the surface, the self is capable
of, and actively engaged in, his or her constitution of his/her self
for the purpose of self-mastery. After editing The Hermeneutics of the
Subject, Gros observes,
So long as Foucault was studying the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, the subject, as if by a natural tendency, was reflected as the
objective product of systems of knowledge and power, the alienated
correlate of these apparatuses of power-knowledge from which the
individual drew and exhausted an imposed, external identity beyond
which the only salvation was madness, crime, or literature. From the
eighties, studying the techniques of existence encouraged in Greek
and Roman Antiquity, Foucault let a different figure of the subject
appear, no longer constituted, but constituting itself through well-
ordered practices.14
Foucault has claimed that the modern notion of the self, the subject,
is “an invention of recent date, and one perhaps nearing its end.”15 The
modern concept of man as a sovereign, founding subject, “a universal
form . . . to be found everywhere”16 has only ended up oppressing and
normalizing the individual.Against the notion of the self as “meaning-
bestowing ‘subject,’”17 Foucault proposes that the self is only “an
achievement, not an initial principle”;18 it is constituted, not a priori, or
“fashioned, not discovered.”19 Foucault maintains that only when we
see the self as changeable forms, instead of substance,20 can we open
up the possibility of an aesthetic of existence and practice of liberty.
What I refused was precisely that you first of all set up a theory of the
subject . . . [and] beginning from the theory of the subject, you come
to pose the question of knowing. . . . What I wanted to know was how
the subject constituted himself, . . . I had to reject a certain a priori
theory of the subjects in order to make this analysis of the relation-
ships which can exist between the constitution of the subject or
different forms of the subject and games of truth, practices of power
and so forth.21
What Foucault is against is the long metaphysical tradition of the
West since classical Greek times. As many have noted, the West has a
history of conceptualizing human beings as having some sort of char-
acteristics that distinguishes human beings from other beings. It is a
sort of “essential endowment that resides within [human beings] as a
potential to be actualized,”22 or a priori theory of the subject in
Foucault’s terms. The classical Greeks have “a psyche or soul” as a
“self-identical characteristic” of humankind.23 In the seventeenth and
 the self and human freedom 143

eighteenth centuries liberal-democratic thinking, the essence of our

being becomes our rational subjectivity and free will. This conceptual-
ization of human beings has been central in the modern project of
human emancipation and the conquering of natural environment and
the “others.”
With a predefined essence, however, the modern theory of the
subject enables the normalization of human beings. As has been
noted, the modern notion of the self involves a dualistic metaphysics.24
On the one hand, there is the human will and subjectivity providing all
the agency, autonomy, and freedom to the person. On the other hand,
the human self, and human body in particular, has been made the
object. Charles Taylor, in searching for the historical sources of the
Western modern sense of self and identity,“reiterates what many have
said—that Cartesian subjectivity is a uniquely modern concept of
human agency,” but at the same time, he also “links this to the equally
‘modern’ proclivity to make one’s ‘self’ the object of methodical
development.”25 It is in this context that Foucault contends that the
modern concept of man, in the name of emancipation, has made him
the object of examination, normalization, and domination, and it is
this concept of man that Foucault has fervently rejected, to the extent
that he has proclaimed that the man as we know it in the modern
times has come to an end.
The problems with the modern concept of human beings may
have been the most prominent in history, yet they are not unique to
the modern time. It is the search for the essence of human beings, the
“original principle,” the search to define and locate human uniqueness
substantially, that has caused the problem. As Ames remarks, even
though many of the best minds of the Western tradition have worked
on this problem, “An interesting irony . . . is that it is precisely this
classical commitment to arche transcendent, originative principle,
which makes human freedom, autonomy, creativity, and individuality
problematic.”26 Thus Foucault’s retreat to the Greco-Roman self
does not seem to free him from these difficulties. The whole point of
the care of the self that Foucault was so inspired by came from the
popular Greek/Roman belief that the self was a discreet and autono-
mous entity or substance that would preserve death and live in an
afterlife. So what Foucault exactly means when he claims his notion of
self is different from the modern notions is unclear. He maintains that
the self is not a substance but forms because it is different “when you
constitute yourself as a political subject who goes and votes or speaks
up in a meeting, and when you try to fulfill your desires in a sexual
relationship.”27 But this description only reminds us of Goffman’s
theory of presentation of the self in everyday life,28 where a hidden
center of the substantial self is behind all the different forms. One also
144 guoping zhao

wonders how a constituted, changeable form turns back to initiate the

constitution of itself. Does he really have no “a priori theory of the
subjects” or see no “essential endowment” of human beings? Or does
he actually believe that there is an essence and origin of the human
being, but it’s just impossible to capture?
By defining the subject centrally in his/her activities of constituting
his/her own self, I would argue, Foucault is already implying a priori
characteristics of the subject. Even for Foucault, it seems, the self is
given a certain prior essence that makes the pursuit of freedom and
liberty possible. As I see it, Foucault has hit an impasse because he is
trying to reject the modern notion of the subject while embracing its
notion of,and passion for,freedom and the human liberty of the subject.
Perhaps, to dismantle the notion of the modern subject, we have to also
reconsider the notion of human freedom that comes with it.
Foucault has believed that the subjectivation procedures of the self
“no doubt exist in every civilization, offered or prescribed to individu-
als in order to determine their identity, maintain it, or transform it in
terms of a certain number of ends, through relations of self-mastery
or self-knowledge.”29 By suggesting that, though, he is assuming that
every civilization will have some sort of idea of the subject—so that
“subjectivation” is possible. But this is clearly not the case. In Chinese
civilization, the Daoist tradition seems to embrace a notion of no-self,
or a notion of self that is radically different from the subject. Foucault
is right, though, that there are knowledge practices even in Daoism
that are intended, not to acquire objective truth of the self, but to
render the self free. Foucault’s insight into ethical truth games may
help shed lights on the puzzling knowledge practices of Zhuangzi,
arguably the most fascinating and inspiring philosopher in Chinese
thought and its ultimate defender of individual freedom. In the rest
of this article, therefore, I analyze how the practices of knowledge of
Zhuangzi provide an avenue for the pursuit of human freedom, how
freedom is defined in Zhuangzi, and how the notion of self as non-
being helps with such pursuit.

III. Zhuangzi’s Notions of Freedom and Self

For a long time, Zhuangzi and his work received little attention in the
West. Not only did his beautiful and yet ungraspable texts elude many
Western interpreters but also Western bias had led to the dismissive
interpretations of it, which often described the Zhuangzi as “mysti-
cal” or “prelogical.”30 Zhuangzi and Daoism, characterized as passive,
feminine, and quietist, were embraced mainly by artists, recluses,
and religious mystics.31 In recent decades, however, a sea change has
occurred. Western comparative philosophers have taken great inter-
 the self and human freedom 145

est in Zhuangzi and immense attention is paid to his texts, especially

the second chapter of Zhuangzi, Qiwulun. What sparked the interest
is the apparent inconsistency in Zhuangzi’s epistemology. Compara-
tive philosophers try to see him as a philosopher (instead of a myste-
rious anti-rationalist) expressing the ideas and attitudes of skeptics,
relativists, or other familiar figures. But the interpretations have
encountered great challenges: the Zhuangzi does not seem to square
well with any of the classifications. As Brook Ziporyn observes,
There has been considerable diversity of opinion in understanding
Zhuangzi as a philosopher, somewhat exacerbated by recent attempts
by Western readers to fit him into a familiar Occidental philosophical
category. Is Zhuangzi as represented in the Inner Chapters, a mystic?
A Skeptic? A metaphysical monist? A spirit-body dualist? An intu-
itionist? A theist? An agnostic? A relativist? A fatalist? A nihilist? A
linguistic philosopher? An existentialist? Or perhaps a poet uncom-
mitted to any particular philosophical position? All of these have been
suggested and aggressively argued for, and indeed none of these
interpretations is without support in the text.32
Apparently, the effort to subsume the Zhuangzi under a “familiar
Occidental philosophical category,” especially from an epistemological
perspective, is a futile one. At times, Zhuangzi seems to advocate
radical skepticism and relativism, but at other times he is making
factual claims and endorsing and condemning various ways of living.33
The inconsistency in Zhuangzi’s skepticism and the difficulty in solving
the inconsistency may indicate that Zhuangzi’s stance is beyond the
episteme of the modern time and thus cannot be easily explained away
by our familiar categories. Knowledge for him may not be the kind of
“intellectual knowledge”34 we understand in modern times, and his
epistemology may not fit well with what we understand as epistemo-
logically sound. Indeed, it has also been suggested that the underlying
project in the Zhuangzi is something more than epistemology, more
than our accurate or objective knowledge of the self and the world.
Robert Allinson suggests that “the project of self-transformation” is
“the central project of the Zhuangzi.”35 An Yanming also observes
that, in the Zhuangzi, epistemological concepts become a “source of
ethical standards rather than . . . a key to reality.”36
Hence I suggest that, considering Zhuangzi’s lifelong passion for
human freedom, rather than looking in the Zhuangzi for epistemo-
logical clues and judging it by the criterion of “intellectual knowl-
edge,” perhaps we should view Zhuangzi’s project, just like Foucault
views the ancient Greeks and Romans, as purposed to overcome the
traps and falls of human perceptions and to set us free through our
relationship to knowledge, a knowledge project for human freedom.
In Chinese culture and philosophy, Zhuangzi is known for his advo-
cacy of freedom of the mind and the heart. He has helped building the
146 guoping zhao

Chinese soul in the face of great oppression and constraints. As Hyun

Höchsmann notes,“Zhuangzi’s contribution to Chinese moral philoso-
phy consists in his . . . affirmation of freedom. . . . As a defender of
individual freedom against the imposition of authority and tradition,
Zhaungzi is unparalleled.”37 Berling also suggests that Zhuangzi is “the
champion of the individual.” He “advocates freedom from the restric-
tions of public obligations and raises a standard against ‘wan confor-
mity.’”38 For Zhuangzi, nothing brings more happiness to life than
enjoying oneself in the illimitable. What he is ultimately concerned
about is that people are constantly constrained by internal passions
and external obstacles, fearful and worried, and their happiness
depends on external conditions. For Zhuangzi, as for the ancient
Greeks and Romans, epistemologically sound or not, knowledge is
meaningful “insofar as this knowledge can serve as the principle of
human conduct and as the criterion for setting us free.”39 His statement
that “There must first be a True Man before there can be true knowl-
edge”40 clearly indicates that true knowledge is not the objective,
“autonomous development of knowledge”41 but the knowledge that
can transform the person and guide the “art of living.”42 A link exists
between spirituality and knowledge. His purpose for practicing knowl-
edge, then, like Foucault observes in the Greek/Roman antiquity, may
be to “transform the subject (who was filled with fear and terror before
nature and by what he had been taught about the gods and things of the
world) into a free subject who finds within himself the possibility and
means of his permanent and perfect tranquil delight.”43 “[T]he whole
purpose of accessing and practicing true discourse is to prepare the
subject to confront external events and internal passions.”44
Yet Zhuangzi’s notions of freedom and self are radically different
from those of Foucault and the ancient Greeks and Romans. Like the
Greeks and Romans, Zhuangzi is concerned with a way of living that
is not restricted by social conventions and is freed of stress, anxiety,
passion, illness, and a shortened life span, and his search for freedom
emphasizes that freedom cannot be taken away by any external
constraints or internal passions. But unlike the ancient Greeks and
Romans, he does not see the self’s ultimate goal as to achieve self-
mastery on the basis of reason’s reign over passions. Along with other
Chinese thinkers of his time, Zhuangzi does not share the ancient
Greek belief that the self is “an irreducible entity”45 that needs to be
preserved and worked upon to maintain its self-mastery and freedom.
Rather, self is conceived more as something that permits “change and
transformation,” as Chung-ying Cheng notes.46 Zhuangzi is also not so
much interested in self-sufficiency and independence in the sense that
the self is capable of handling its own matters, which are values
underlying much of Greco-Roman thought. For Zhuangzi, as for
 the self and human freedom 147

other thinkers in Chinese tradition, the self is not an independent

being separate from all other beings. “Relatability,”47 either to other
human beings or to the larger cosmos, as Cheng maintains, is part of
the Chinese understanding of the self. Therefore, knowledge practices
for human freedom in Zhuangzi entail significant differences from
those of the ancient Greeks and Romans.48
Particularly, it has been suggested that Zhuangzi embraces a notion
of no-self. Zhuangzi’s statements such as “the zhi ren has no self,”49
“now I have lost myself,”50 “Without an Other there is no Self; without
Self, no choosing one thing rather than another,”51 and “If you treat
yourself too as ‘Other,’ they do not appear”52 have been taken to
mean that Zhuangzi has abandoned an attachment to the self or has
embraced a notion of no-self, which is often interpreted as having
no sense of self at all. Hall and Ames suggest, for example, from a
Western perspective, “The Chinese are, quite literally, ‘selfless.’”53
Yet some believe that Zhuangzi does have a notion of self when he
proposes, for example, “fasting of the mind” (xin-zhai), where one is
“laying down, forgetting, or putting outside of oneself the extraneous
layers, feelings, and concerns which characterize the socialized self,
and moving towards or uncovering the inner core of spirit or inborn
nature (Tao).”54 Some suggest that Zhuangzi recognizes a “true
self” above the false, the physical, or the unauthentic self55 and believe
that the statement “the ultimate man has ‘no self,’” actually refers to
a step on the way to realization of the true self.56 This line of inter-
pretation has been criticized by some as revealing “a surprising
degree of unconscious acceptance of Western dualistic, developmen-
tal, and other assumptions related to selfhood.”57
The difficulty in understanding Zhuangzi’s notion of self comes
partly from Zhuangzi’s writing that at times refers to an experiential
sense of self but at other times clearly decries the existence of the
idea of self, and yet declares a spiritual state of mind in Dao.The terms
he uses to describe something related to the Western notion of the
self can also be misinterpreted and misleading. Do Zhuangzi’s wo, wu,
and ji mean the same thing as the Western self? In Jochim’s investi-
gation of the key terms in the Zhuangzi, not surprisingly, he found
little correspondence between the ancient Chinese terms and the
English terms.58 Wo and ji are often used as first person pronouns
or pronouns used in a reflexive or emphatic sense, not in the sense of
a substantive entity, which is implied in the Western term self. Also
shen (“body, person, and the reflexive ‘self’”), xin (“heart-mind”) are
frequently used to refer to “something physical, namely, the human
heart . . . [and cover a] range of emotional and mental functions.”59
But the linguistic mismatch does not have to lead us to abdicate
possible shared experience. As Chung-ying Cheng points out,
148 guoping zhao

“Seeking the seemingly direct referent of the term . . . could be

pushed to the extreme and thus . . . important insights into reality
based on genuine experiences of man can be denied.”60 Edward Sling-
erland, in a study of Zhuangzi’s conception of the self using concep-
tual metaphor analysis, which is a kind of “ ‘descriptive or empirical
phenomenology’ aimed at sketching out a ‘geography of human expe-
rience,’”61 found that “despite the surface differences between, say,
the Cartesian and Zhuangzian conceptions of the self, both of these
philosophical conceptions grow out of and make use of a deeper
metaphysical grammar that has its roots in a common human embod-
ied experience,”62 such as “the idea of self-control as object-control,”
or the idea that “every object has ‘within it’ an essence that makes it
the kind of thing it is.”63
The terms and the metaphors used in the Zhuangzi seem to indi-
cate that even people who embrace a notion of no-self share some
existentially common experiences of the self. As Mauss remarks,
“There has never existed a human being who has not been aware, not
only of his body, but also at the same time of his individuality, both
spiritual and physical.”64 The notion and concept may differ cross-
culturally, but the phenomenological “sense of ‘self’”65 may be very
similar across cultures. The clear articulation in the Zhuangzi declar-
ing deconstruction/cancellation of the self thus can be understood as
a way to conceptualize the self for cultural and moral purposes.
Zhuangzi has always been concerned with boundaries and attach-
ments, which for him bring people constraints, inequalities, and
unfreedom. His underlying project of freedom intends to lead people
to an understanding that all things in the universe are in constant
transformation so that persons can cut loose from their attachments
along with the anxieties, fears, and worries coming with the attach-
ments. But the realization that life is in constant transformation and
that everything has the trace of the other and there is “interchange-
ability between a thing and its other”66 necessarily deconstructs a
notion of substantial, separated, and bounded self-identity. In addi-
tion, as in other Eastern traditions such as Buddhism, Zhuangzi, and
other Daoist thinkers are critical of human ego and consciousness.
Brook Ziporyn has commented that, for Zhuangzi, “our understand-
ing consciousness can never know why it sees things one way rather
than another, can never ultimately ground its own judgment, and is
actually in no position to serve as a guide for living.”67 To cut people
loose from their attachments, Zhuangzi attempts to break down the
boundaries erected by our minds and desires, and ultimately, to put
aside and to lose the minds and wills all together. So we become an
existence that is back to the primordial whole (hun tun), the infant, for
whom there is no consciousness, intelligibility, representation, concep-
 the self and human freedom 149

tion, and language. Thus, I suggest, his notion of the self is not no-self,
per se, but a self as non-being, a self whose ego and consciousness is
dissolved in the pre-ego wholeness, a self that cannot set itself up in
reflection and recognition, a self that cannot be in this sense.
Such a non-being self, certainly, does not indicate a state of absolute
void and death. The nothingness or non-being that Daoists identify
with the Dao, which the dissolved self is part of, is the basis of every-
thing. In Laozi’s Dao De Jing, it is stated that being originates
from nothingness/non-being (you sheng yu wu). After examining the
etymological meaning of the Chinese character wu, Guenter Wohlfart
suggests that wu or nothingness “is obviously not a matter of the
marking of a final establishment or persisting, but much rather of the
characterization of a passing or (in the future) emerging, that is, a
matter of a process or a changing into one another, or of a becom-
ing.”68 “That which is called non-being is the beginning of things and
the completion of affairs.”69 So the conception of the self as non-
being/nothingness is the Daoist way of conceptualizing the self in
transcending all limited entities and beyond all boundaries and yet
generating, completing all things. In fact, when Heidegger was search-
ing for the meaning of being, when his project in Being and Time
“could not succeed with the help of the language of metaphysics,”70 he
found the Daoist notions of non-being and emptiness inspiring and
essentially important. As someone who had denounced the Western
metaphysical tradition that identifies the essence of being through
essential endowment, and as someone who believed that being is not
an entity, not a being or beings, the Daoist notion of nothingness and
emptiness provided a completely different avenue he could not resist.
Thus he claimed that “In this [genuine] in-between [of things] dwells
the human,”71 and “Tao could be the way that gives all ways.”72 “The
original human dwelling or human nature cannot be found in any
objectifiable or ‘useful’ being except within that in which it prevails
the ‘great usefulness of the useless.’”73
Thus, the Zhuangzian notion of no-self or a self of non-being,
breaking through all the metaphysical constraints that Foucault
struggles with, may prove an essential part of his project of knowledge
practices for human freedom. Such a non-being self does not provide a
priori theory for the subject and will not confine the self within a strait-
jacket of truth as Foucault was so concerned about. Freedom, under-
stood in this context, is not about free will and autonomy either, nor
about imposing ourselves on the world, but about breaking the con-
straints of ourselves, the constraints set by our desires and judgments
and societal conventions, and being infused or guided by the infinite.
Freedom is about transcending from what is fixed in us and entering
what is unlimited. The non-being self is led by the infinite, encompass-
150 guoping zhao

ing, and unfathomable spirit of the universe and therefore is open and
in unity with infinity, embodying transcendence and spirituality.

IV. Zhuangzi’s Knowledge Practices for Human Freedom

Zhuangzi’s main purpose of knowledge practices is to cut people

loose or free them from external and internal constraints and burdens,
and he sees that the way to do it is to loosen up the attachment and
discriminations caused by societal value structures. To achieve this
goal, he provides a new worldview that sees everything as equal, as
only part of the “continuum of all that exists in the constant trans-
formation of life.”74 In a famous story about the death of his wife,
Zhuangzi offers a new knowledge of life and death.
Death is probably the greatest fear of human beings. Death is
unknown and unknowable; the only thing known is its absolute inevi-
tability. It is beyond our control as humans.The anxiety and apprehen-
sion caused by death is so great the existentialists called angst, death
anxiety. It is one of the existential conditions we human beings have to
live in. To be free, we have to be able to freely and peacefully face this
great inevitability. How can we “make up the soul’s necessary equip-
ment, which enables individuals to confront, or anyway to be ready to
confront, all the events of life as they occur”?75 Unlike Epicurus, who
uses the loss of feeling when death comes to help overcome the fear,
Zhuangzi formulates a new perspective that breaks down the great
divide between life and death and looks beyond the time span of a
person’s life. Here life is a continuous process with natural changes;
death is not the fearful end but only one of the changes.
In the midst of the jumble of wonder and mystery a change took
place and she had a spirit. Another change and she had a body.
Another change and she was born. Now there’s been another change
and she’s dead. It’s just like the progression of the four seasons,
spring, summer, fall, winter.76
Looking from this perspective, there is no need to treat death as the
great end. So “the True Man (zhen ren) . . . knew nothing of loving
life, knew nothing of hating death.”77 Understanding death as being a
natural part of life, one of its endless transformations, is intended to
prepare us to maintain our “tranquil delight”78 in front of the great
inevitability. What is involved here is “a liberation from what we do
not control to what we can control [in the sense that we can look at it
in different ways] . . . so that [the self] is no longer enslaved, depen-
dent, and constrained”79 by death and by our fear of death. In this
case, Zhuangzi’s notion of a non-being self enables him to see the
continuity, the flux of life where the death of the person marks no
fundamental or essential difference for the self.
 the self and human freedom 151

Zhuangzi’s Chapter 2, “Seeing all things as equal” (Qiwu Lun),

is the chapter that is most debated by comparative philosophers.
It is mainly because of this chapter that Zhuangzi is identified as a
“relativist” and “skeptic.” Messages such as the following are readily
interpreted as conveying a skeptical epistemology and a relativist
position.
Monkeys pair with monkeys, deer go out with deer, and fish play
around with fish. Men claim that Mao-ch’iang and Lady Li were
beautiful, but if fish saw them they would dive to the bottom of the
stream, if birds saw them they would fly away, and if deer saw them
they would break into a run. Of these four, which knows how to fix
the standard of beauty for the world? The way I see it, the rules of
benevolence and righteousness and the paths of right and wrong
are all hopelessly snarled and jumbled. How could I know anything
about such discriminations?80

Yearley’s interpretation is that Zhuangzi believes that knowledge is

“perspectival”:81
That is, most important distinctions between the good and the bad
arise from and depend upon the position, the perspective, from which
a person views the world. Moreover, no fully objective way exists to
decide which of the conflicting perspectives is correct because any
decision is bound to reflect a perspective.82

If we are used to or feel compelled having an objective perspective

to hold onto, Zhuangzi seems indeed to point to the unusual,
even uncomfortable, thinking of perspectivists. But a perspectivist
would hold that from a different perspective one gets different knowl-
edge; therefore, knowledge depends on the perspective one takes.
Zhuangzi’s message goes beyond that point. What Zhuangzi is trying
to say is not just that knowledge depends on perspective but also that
no perspective is not limited and all perspectives should be looked
upon with suspicious eyes. We cannot and should not hold onto any
of the perspectives. For Zhuangzi, this “loosening up” of our hold on
perspectives brings enlightenment to our common social discrimina-
tions and attachments that have caused us toil, sorrow, and suffering.
He is pushing our limits so that we give up our conventional commit-
ments and judgments that make us discriminative and preferring.
When describing the highest spiritual state of humanity as being
without feelings, Zhuangzi states, “When I talk about having no feel-
ings,I mean that a man doesn’t allow likes or dislikes to get in and do him
harm. He just lets things be the way they are and doesn’t try to help life
along.”83 Zhuangzi’s ultimate concern in “seeing all things as equal,”
therefore, is to free people such that they are not trapped and harmed
by their discriminative minds and conventional attachments. The
whole point of realizing that all knowledge is only perspective is to
152 guoping zhao

emphasize that we are not bound by any perspective that causes us to

like or dislike. From the perspective of “intellectual knowledge,” Zhua-
ngzi is denying the objectivity of common forms of knowledge and only
acknowledging relative knowledge. But Zhuangzi realizes that we all
prefer beauty over ugliness, wealth over poverty, and glory over obscu-
rity, and because of these attachments, we become slaves of social
conventions and we are not free.To transform our being to achieve the
utmost freedom, Zhuangzi deconstructs the worldly standards and
prejudices and urges us to overcome our desires and rise above the
conventions. Perhaps at times he does sound like some Greek skep-
tics,84 but we should be reminded that skepticism for the Greeks is
more of a mental attitude that keeps the cause of anxiety at bay than it
is a theoretical standpoint. The purpose of skepticism “is not to estab-
lish a truth but to bring about a change of mind in the reader from a
state of belief to one of suspense. . . . Suspension of judgment is valu-
able because it and only it provides peace of mind.”85 In this sense,
Zhuangzi and the Greek skeptics share the same purpose.
Zhuangzi’s Chapter 2 ends with a famous story about Zhuangzi’s
dream:
Once Chuang Chou dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and
fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He
didn’t know he was Chuang Chou. Suddenly he woke up and there he
was, solid and unmistakably Chuang Chou. But he didn’t know if he
was Chuang Chou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly
dreaming he was Chuang Chou. Between Chuang Chou and a but-
terfly there must be some distinction! This is called the Transforma-
tion of Things.86
The interchangeability of Zhuangzi and the butterfly challenges
our tight grip on our self.The naturalness of our dreams is also enough
to question and challenge the certainty we credit to our knowledge.
So why seek for and hold onto an objective form of knowledge? For
Zhuangzi, knowing is never just about the “autonomous development
of knowledge.”There are different ways of knowing and some of them
set us free and some bind us. The great knowing, or great knowledge
(da zhi), as Raphals notes, is “identified with ming and dao.”87 It is the
spiritual knowledge that transforms people and guides their living
in accordance with the Way, “abiding alone” in the midst of natural
transformation. It is the kind of knowledge Foucault observes in the
ancient Greeks and Romans: “Useful knowledge, knowledge in which
human life is at stake, is a relational mode of knowledge that asserts
and prescribes at the same time and is capable of producing a change
in the subject’s mode of being.”88
Eventually, Zhuangzi asserts that the ultimate freedom comes
when a person reaches the stage of ultimate being, or non-being in the
Dao. If Foucault’s stubborn metaphysical notion of self allows the self
 the self and human freedom 153

only having the freedom he or she can attain as a bounded self against
the world, which is the freedom as a master/subject over his or her
own passions and environment, Zhuangzi’s notion of a self as non-
being allows a freedom that has no boundaries and limits and allows
the self to go beyond herself. In Cook Ting’s story,89 he describes
how, when a person reaches the Dao, the practice of cutting the ox is
conducted as if following the Way’s natural path and there are no
more obstacles. The self as non-being becomes part of nature’s spon-
taneous process and therefore is no longer constrained by the internal
and external impediment. This self dissolves the fear, the worries, and
the burdens that trap humanity in this world and enters the illimitable
and the transcendent, and this is the human freedom that Zhuangzi is
ultimately after. Zhuangzi’s self as non-being and his radical notion of
freedom make his project of knowledge practices for human freedom
possible. Using characteristically beautiful prose and poetic language,
Zhuangzi describes such persons:

The Perfect Man is godlike. Though the great swamps blaze, they
cannot burn him; though the great rivers freeze, they cannot chill
him; though swift lightening splits the hills and howling gales shake
the sea, they cannot frighten him.A man like this rides the clouds and
mist, straddles the sun and moon, and wanders beyond the four seas.
Even life and death have no effect on him, much less the rules of
profit and loss!90

V. Conclusion

In this article I have investigated the striking insights Foucault and

Zhuangzi share about knowledge practices and their role in the
pursuit of human freedom. Such investigation not only helps us better
understand Zhuangzi and his project, particularly as expressed in
Zhuangzi Chapter 2, but also helps us look at knowledge practices
in a completely different light. It reminds us that there are ways of
practicing knowledge of ourselves that do not lead to objectification
and normalization of ourselves. More importantly, in this investiga-
tion, examining the different notions of self and freedom embedded in
Foucault and Zhuangzi makes it clear that Foucault’s uncritical adop-
tion of the Western notion of freedom as self-mastery has made his
knowledge practices for the human freedom project difficult.
What has become transparent from this study is that the modern
entanglement in Western philosophy of the metaphysical subject and
the pursuit of freedom and human liberty cannot be reached within
the framework of the Western notion of a separate, irreducible self
or the notion of freedom as autonomy. To escape the metaphysical
tradition of being as a fixed presence, we may have to, like Zhuangzi,
154 guoping zhao

conceive of human subjectivity as non-being, as open and related to

something larger, instead of as an enclosed, individualized entity in
seeking its own autonomy. Consequently, we may also have to come
up with a different understanding of human freedom: freedom as
breaking through the confines of what is already in us, as the possi-
bility of reaching the unknown and beyond.

OKLAHOMA STATE UNIVERSITY

Stillwater, Oklahoma

Endnotes

The writer would like to acknowledge and thank the important comments provided by the
anonymous reviewer, Editor-in-Chief Professor Chung-ying Cheng, and other editors of
this journal. Their comments have strengthened some of my ideas.
1. Eric Paras, Foucault 2.0: Beyond Power and Knowledge (New York: Other Press,
2006), 158.
2. Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1984), 171.
3. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan
(New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 29.
4. Alan D. Schrift, “Foucault’s Reconfiguration of the Subject: From Nietzsche to Butler,
Laclau/Mouffe, and Beyond,” Philosophy Today 41 (1997): 153–9.
5. Peter Dews, “Power and Subjectivity in Foucault,” New Left Review 144 (1984): 72–95.
6. Michel Foucault, “The Ethics of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom, an
Interview with Michel Foucault on January 20, 1984,” conducted by Raúl Fornet-
Betancourt, Helmut Becker, and Alfredo Gomez-Müller, trans. J. D. Gauthier, S. J., in
The Final Foucault, eds. James Bernauer and David Rasmussen (Cambridge: The MIT
Press, 1988), 1–2.
7. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 3: The Care of the Self, trans. Robert
Hurley (New York: Pantheon Book, 1985); Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality,
Vol. 2: Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1988).
8. Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France
1981–1982, ed. Frédéric Gros (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 8.
9. Ibid., 14.
10. Michel Foucault, Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Book,
1985), 236.
11. Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 533, 534.
12. Ibid.
13. Paras, Foucault 2.0.
14. Frédéric Gros, “Course Context,” in Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 513.
15. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences
(London: Tavistock, 1970), 387.
16. Michel Foucault, “An Aesthetics of Existence,” trans. Alan Sheridan, in Michel
Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture, Interviews and Other Writing 1977–1984, ed.
Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Routledge, 1988), 50.
17. Thomas R. Flynn, “Truth and Subjectivation in the Later Foucault,” The Journal of
Philosophy 82 (1985): 531–40.
18. Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject.
19. Flynn, “Truth and Subjectivation in the Later Foucault,” 536.
20. Foucault, The Final Foucault, 10.
21. Ibid., 10.
22. Roger T. Ames, “The Chinese Conception of Selfhood,” in A Companion to World
Philosophies, eds. Eliot Deutsch and Ron Bontekoe (Malden: Blackwell Publishers,
1997), 149.
 the self and human freedom 155

23. Ibid., 148.

24. Brian Morris, Anthropology of the Self: The Individual in Cultural Perspective
(London and Boulder: Pluto Press, 1994).
25. Chris Jochim, “Just Say No to ‘No Self’ in Zhuangzi,” in Wandering at Ease in the
Zhuangzi, ed. Rogers T. Ames (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 38.
26. Ames, “The Chinese Conception of Selfhood,” 149.
27. Foucault, The Final Foucault, 10.
28. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York:Anchor Books,
1959).
29. Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 513.
30. Benjamin Schwartz, The World of Thought in Ancient China (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1985), 216–7. Also see Raphals’s discussion of how Lucien Levy-
Bruhl’s notion of primitive mind is “widely applied to Chinese thought in general and
to the Zhuangzi in particular.” Lisa Raphals, “Skeptical Strategies in the Zhuangzi
and Theaetetus,” in Essays in Skepticism, Relativism, and Ethics in the Zhuangzi, eds.
Paul Kjellberg and Philip J. Ivanhoe (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1996), 42.
31. Roger T. Ames, “Introduction,” in Wandering at Ease in the Zhuangzi, ed. Roger T.
Ames (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998).
32. Brook Ziporyan, Zhuangzi: Essential Writings, with Selections from Traditional Com-
mentaries (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2009), xvii.
33. Eric Schwitzgebel, “Zhuangzi’s Attitude towards Language and His Skepticism,” in
Essays in Skepticism, Relativism, and Ethics in the Zhuangzi, 68.
34. Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 308.
35. Robert E. Allinson, Chuang-Tzu for Spiritual Transformation: An Analysis of the
Inner Chapters (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 144.
36. An Yanming, “Liang Shuming and Henri Bergson on Intuition: Cultural Context and
the Evolution of Terms,” Philosophy East and West 47, no. 3 (1997): 337.
37. Hyun Höchsmann, “The Starry Heavens Above—Freedom in Zhuangzi and Kant,”
Journal of Chinese Philosophy 31, no. 2 (2004): 235–52.
38. Judith Berling, “Self and Whole in Chuang Tzu,” in Individualism and Holism: Studies
in Confucian and Taoist Values, ed. Donald Munro (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese
Studies, University of Michigan, 1985), 101.
39. Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 241.
40. Zhuangzi, Chuang Tzu, Basic Writings, trans. Burton Watson (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1996/1964), 73.
41. Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 25–6.
42. Berling, “Self and Whole in Chuang Tzu,” 101–20.
43. Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 241.
44. Ibid., 333.
45. Chung-ying Cheng, New Dimensions of Confucianism and Neo-Confucian Philoso-
phy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 155.
46. Ibid., 153.
47. Ibid., 155.
48. I would like to thank Linyu Gu, one of the editors of this journal, for introducing
related reference in Chung-ying Cheng and Brook Ziporyn.
49. Zhuangzi, Chuang Tzu, Basic Writings, 26.
50. Ibid., 31.
51. Zhuangzi, in A. C. Graham, Chuang-tzŭ: The Inner Chapters (Indianapolis: Hackett
Publishing Company, 1989), 51.
52. Ibid., 52.
53. David L. Hall and Roger T. Ames, Thinking from the Han (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 1998), 23.
54. Berling, “Self and Whole in Chuang Tzu,” 113.
55. Jochim, “Just Say No to ‘No Self’ in Zhuangzi,” 1998.
56. Wu Yi, Xiaoyao de Zhuangzi (The Carefree Wandering Master Zhuang) (Taipei:
Dong Da Tushu, 1984); see also Liu Guangyi, Zhuangxue Zhong de Chanqu (Taiwan
Shangwu Yinshuguan, 1989).
156 guoping zhao

57. Jochim, “Just Say No to ‘No Self’ in Zhuangzi,” 41.

58. Ibid.
59. Ibid., 50.
60. Cheng, New Dimensions of Confucianism and Neo-Confucian Philosophy, 130.
61. Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: the Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination and
Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), xxxviii.
62. Edward Slingerland, “Conceptions of the Self in the Zhuangzi: Conceptual Metaphor
Analysis and ComparativeThought,”Philosophy East andWest 54,no.3 (2004):322–42.
63. Ibid., 328, 332, 333.
64. Marcel Mauss, “A Category of the Human Mind: The Notion of Person; the Notion of
Self,” trans. W. D. Halls, in The Category of the Person, Anthropology, Philosophy,
History, eds. Michael Carrithers, Steven Collins, and Steven Lukes (New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1985), 3.
65. Ibid., 3.
66. Wang Youru,“Philosophy of Change and the Deconstruction of Self in the Zhuangzi,”
Journal of Chinese Philosophy 27, no. 3 (2000): 345–60.
67. Ziporyan, Zhuangzi: Essential Writings, xvi.
68. Guenter Wohlfart, “Heidegger and Laozi: Wu (nothing)—on Chapter 11 of the
Daodejing,” trans. Marty Heitz, Journal of Chinese Philosophy 30, no. 1 (2003): 39–59.
69. Ying-shih Yü, “Individualism and the Neo-Taoist Movement in Wei-Chin China,” in
Individualism and Holism, 134.
70. “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” 1949, p. 250. Available at http://ia600703.us.archive.org/30/
items/HeideggerLetterOnhumanism1949/Heidegger-LetterOnhumanism1949.pdf
71. Quoted in Xiangling Zhang, “The Coming Time ‘between’ Being and Daoist Empti-
ness: An Analysis of Heidegger’s Article Inquiry into the Uniqueness of the Poet via
the Lao Zi,” Philosophy East and West 59, no. 1 (2009): 71–87.
72. Heidegger, quoted in Guenter Wohlfart, “Heidegger and Laozi,” 52.
73. Heidegger’s comments on Zhuangzi concerning “a huge tree that is useless,” quoted
in Zhang, “The Coming Time,” 80–81.
74. Hyun Höchsmann, “The Starry Heavens Above—Freedom in Zhuangzi and Kant,”
241.
75. Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 416.
76. Zhuangzi, Chuang Tzu, Basic Writings, 113.
77. Ibid., 74.
78. Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 241.
79. Ibid., 210, 212.
80. Zhuangzi, Chuang Tzu, Basic Writings, 41.
81. Lee H. Yearley, “Zhuangzi’s Understanding of Skillfulness and the Ultimate Spiritual
State” (1996).
82. Ibid., 156.
83. Zhuangzi, Chuang Tzu, Basic Writings, 72; emphases added.
84. Lisa Raphals, “Skeptical Strategies in the Zhuangzi and Theaetetus,” 1996; also see
Paul Kjellberg, “Sextus Empiricus, Zhuangzi, and Xunzi on ‘Why Be Skeptical?’,” in
Essays in Skepticism, Relativism, and Ethics in the Zhuangzi (1996), 1–25.
85. Kjellberg, “Sextus Empiricus, Zhuangzi, and Xunzi on ‘Why Be Skeptical?’,” in Essays
in Skepticism, Relativism, and Ethics in the Zhuangzi (1996), 7.
86. Zhuangzi, Chuang Tzu, Basic Writings, 45.
87. Raphals, “Skeptical Strategies in the Zhuangzi and Theaetetus,” 41.
88. Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 238.
89. Recent interpretations suggest that Zhuangzi is asserting the value and social func-
tionality of a complex of skills (Robert Eno, “Cook Ding’s Dao and the Limits of
Philosophy,” in Essays in Skepticism, Relativism, and Ethics in the Zhuangzi, 127–51)
or asserting “the practical good of what we shall call ‘skillful living’ ” (Kjellberg,
“Sextus Empiricus, Zhuangzi, and Xunzi on ‘Why Be Skeptical?’,” 13). Skills seem to
be at the center of the consideration.
90. Zhuangzi, Chuang Tzu, Basic Writings, 41–42.