SOURCE: Kupperman, Joel. “Spontaneity and Education of the Emotions in the Zhuangzi.” In Essays on Skepticism, Relativism, and Ethics in the “Zhuangzi,” edited by Paul Kjellberg and Phillip J. Ivanhoe, pp. 183-95. Albany: State University of New York, 1996.

[In the following essay, Kupperman explores the key role of spontaneity in Chuang Tzu's philosophy.]

A working title of this paper had been “A Cicada Propounds Three Theses About Zhuangzi.” This had been intended not only to be modest, but also to allude to the perspectivism with which the Zhuangzi opens. Part of the greatness of the Zhuangzi is that it is rewarding from so many perspectives. This is not accidental: The strongest vein of skepticism in the Zhuangzi, if I am right, is skepticism about meanings, including skepticism about interpretations of itself. It would go against the spirit of the work to pretend to supply a definitive or a “very best” interpretation. It also would do violence to the deliberate openness of many of the meanings. In what follows, I will point toward a reading of three major elements of the work. In each case, a brief statement of an interpretation will be followed by explanation and elaboration. The longest of the three sections will be the third, concerned with the project of educating the emotions, partly because it seems to me that the most difficult and contentious issues lie here.

I

The underlying project of the Zhuangzi is, as Robert Allinson says, self-transformation (Allinson, [Kant's Theory of Freedom] 1989). This must be qualified. The author's project in producing the Inner Chapters—his project for himself, that is—very probably is not what we would normally term self-transformation, at least if that phrase is taken to refer to a drastic change in what one is. We are to assume that the author already has been transformed, before producing the Inner Chapters. Of course there will be further changes: there is no suggestion of a static ideal. But it seems likely that the point of producing the work, for the author, had a great deal to do with a free play of spontaneous psychic forces, the sort of thing indeed that is celebrated in various forms throughout the book. In chapter one, the possible use of an unmarketable calabash is described in terms of floating away over the Yangtse and the Lakes (Graham 1981 [A. C. Graham, Chuang-tzu: the Inner Chapters, Boston: Inwin Paperbacks, 1981], 47). This is a good metaphor for the use to which the act of creating the Zhuangzi put an unmarketable wisdom.

What Allinson is right about is the nature of the project for us, the readers, that must be central to any plausible account of the meaning of the book. We are encouraged to see the attractiveness of styles of life of which we very probably have no personal experience. At the same time, the folly of styles of life in which we very probably participate is gently exposed. There is no sustained exhortation. But the implication clearly is that one would be better off if one approximated the free and spontaneous life that is presented as a possibility.

The word “approximate” is important here. There is no suggestion that there is a single version of the very good life to be followed. Perspectivism applies to styles of life. Not only is it the case that what is good for a loach or a gibbon would not be good for a human being, and vice versa (Graham 1981, 57), but also there is no suggestion that Cook Ding the daemonic carver could just as well have the psychological skills of Chu Boyu or that Chu Boyu could be a daemon carver (Graham 1981, 63-64 and 71-72). In chapter five, Confucius is made to say that (spiritual) Power can stand out without shaping the body (Graham 1981, 80-81). It is consonant with this that Power would not obliterate the various psychological leanings that are at the root of our individualities, and hence that Power could be expressed in a variety of styles of life as well as in a variety of physical forms. [*Compare Ivanhoe's notion of “ethical promiscuity.”—Eds.]

Also a wonderful style of life, like the wonderful dancing of a Margot Fonteyn or a Nureyev, is not adequately captured in words. Someone who studiously masters a description is not thereby in a good position to approximate the quality of the life. One reason for this (which will be explored in the next section) is that while nuance, generally speaking, does not have a major role in morality, it does have a crucial role in the nonmoral assessment of styles of life. As Camus points out, someone who takes a very impressive life as an example to be followed, risks having a life that is, in fact, ridiculous.¹

A digression on philosophical method is appropriate here, after the jarring note of quoting Camus in an explication of Zhuangzi. There is a dilemma inherent in comparative philosophy as practiced by Western academics attempting to understand and explicate Asian philosophies. On one hand, any approach that attempts to suggest that Asian philosopher X is really just like Western philosopher Y is almost certainly going to be too primitive, giving us a cartoonlike image of X and ignoring X's intellectual and cultural context. On the other hand, Western readers of comparative philosophy are likely to approach any Asian philosophy as something like a second (rather than a first) philosophical language, for which at least some rules of translation into familiar terms would be useful. A deeper problem is this. Experience suggests that one better understands any philosopher, Western or Asian, if one has been thinking independently about similar problems: this enables one better to see the point of various remarks, assumptions, and philosophical moves. If so, then an effective Western student of comparative philosophy will be functioning, in some small way, as a Western philosopher herself or himself. Use of an alien philosophical framework, thus, will facilitate interpretation of an Asian philosophy (which is something positive), while at the same time multiplying the risks of error and distortion (which is something negative).

These risks exist, of course, even with regard to texts that are, broadly speaking, within one's own philosophical tradition. At the root is the fact that interpretation of a text is itself an activity for which there can never be entirely strict rules, and that always calls for leaps of judgment. Because of this, many literary critics have argued in recent years that there can be no such thing as a definitive set of meanings of any text.²

If the writer of a text already believes this, or has intimations of it, there are a variety of ways in which she or he can react. Someone who is disturbed by the fluidity of interpretation can attempt to counteract it by thickening the content at key places, say by laborious definitions of key terms and articulations of central claims, or by elaborate notes that say, “What I really mean is.” Someone who is resigned to the fluidity of interpretation may be far less strenuous in these matters. A writer who glories in the fluidity of interpretation, on the other hand, may act out a complicity with it, at key places saying, “Perhaps this is so; perhaps it is not,” and by constantly suggesting the possibility of variations of perspective. This is the strategy of Zhuangzi.

This is one reason for the humor, the jokiness, that runs through the Zhuangzi. Another reason has to do with the project of transformation of the reader. If one were to want to change a group of people so that they become devotees of a religious or political cult, then it might seem appropriate to pull hard on their attitudes to life and to give them formulas for what they should be loyal to. Zhuangzi's ideal and project of transformation are of very different sorts.

A fuller characterization of these will be pursued in the last section of this paper, but for present purposes it is enough to dwell on Zhuangzi's emphasis on freedom and spontaneity. It most certainly would not be appropriate to pull people hard in the direction of such a good, or to give them formulas for what are in the last analysis qualities that people have to come to of themselves. One may nudge them in the right direction, and gently ridicule what they presently have. A strong pull would be counter-productive, and also would risk substituting a more virulent form of something unnatural for what people start out with.

II

The transformation at the heart of the Zhuangzi cannot be understood in terms of moral improvement. To move in the direction of being more like a sage may well not involve becoming a morally more virtuous person. But it will involve having a better life.

This may well seem confusing as it stands, and it has led to a lot of confused talk about relativism. P. J. Ivanhoe has done, it seems to me, an exemplary job of clearing away mistakes in this area (Ivanhoe 1993 [Philip J. Ivanhoe, “Zuangzi's Conversion Experience,” Journal of Chinese Religions19 (1991): 13-25] 639-54). But it may be useful to look at the philosophical roots of the confusion. We can begin with a basic distinction, between morality and other aspects of a life that may be judged as better or worse. Failure to observe this has led to the worst mistakes.

The distinction in question is a modern Western one, which arguably reflects interest in morality as an instrument of social control—and perhaps even more strongly, reflects interest in carving out a territory (sometimes loosely identified with an area of privacy, or the part of life in which hypothetical imperatives alone govern) in which life can be better or worse which should not be viewed as subject to social control. It is often observed that no closely corresponding distinction occurs either in classical Greek or in classical Chinese philosophy, although this does not imply that we will be unable to find places in which an ancient Greek or Chinese philosopher treats certain matters in much the way in which we treat what we regard as moral matters. Arguably, for example, Confucian philosophy regards failure to mourn a dead parent for more than a few days much as we regard gross immorality.

One mark of what we consider to be immoral is, as John Stuart Mill observed, we think it deserving of punishment: if not actual legal punishment, then punishment from the force of society's condemnation or the internalized punishment of the malefactor's sense of guilt.³ There are some forms of behavior that we dislike or think tasteless, to which a normal response is then distaste, contempt, and/or shunning; the judgment that something is immoral is more akin to impulses to hit out. We can add that much of traditional morality focuses on actions that directly harm others. (Mill's revisionary proposal, in On Liberty, was that we narrow the boundaries of morality so that it focus on nothing but these, thus preventing “the tyranny of the majority.”) A morality can be most effective in discouraging such actions if it is able to be taught in the form of broad general rules that are able to be understood even by the very young and the very poorly educated. Nuances and subtleties thus cannot have a major role at the core of a viable morality. There is a contrast here with what a philosopher such as Aristotle or Camus can advise with regard to the most desirable kinds of life, in which the importance of nuances must be acknowledged and we cannot expect much show of precision.

P. F. Strawson has pointed out that there also is a great difference between the allegiance claimed by a social morality and that claimed by what he terms “individual ideals.”⁴ A social morality demands exclusive loyalty: one cannot make sense of the idea of a life genuinely governed by two conflicting moralities, whereas Strawson sees no comparable difficulty in the idea of a life governed by two conflicting ideals.

Most recent Western ethical thought has centered on the dialectical interplay between, on one hand, the society's control (legal, political, and moral) of the individual, and, on the other hand, the individual's right to preserves of independence. This has made it difficult for many philosophers to appreciate the distinction that has just been sketched: the temptation is to treat morality as the whole of ethics. But when, say, Aristotle argues that the contemplative life is the best for a human being, his thesis cannot be mapped onto what we think of as the territory of morality. There is nothing immoral, even in our terms, in a decision to lead an undemanding and humdrum life rather than to engage in the most desirable forms of human activity. (When we advise people not to drop out of college, we do not tell them that it would be morally wrong.) Similarly, it is impossible to get any sense of what is going on in the final chapter of G. E. Moore's Principia Ethica if one thinks that it is about morality.⁵

The Zhuangzi is, as far as I can see, not about morality. There is no clear suggestion that the sage either would violate, or would be sure not to violate, those socially sanctioned rules of conduct that most closely correspond to what the modern West thinks of as morality. There are, it is true, passages like the one in chapter six, in which Yan Hui is described as having “forgotten about Goodwill and Duty” (Graham 1981, 91). But this certainly cannot be construed as a decision to violate moral norms, and (for all that we are told) is compatible with a pattern of behaving in compliance with moral norms but not as a result of thinking about the norms. One reason for reading it as compatible is the passage earlier in the same chapter that observes that fish forget all about each other in the Yangtse and the Lakes, as men forget all about each other in the lore of the Way (Graham 1981, 90). The fish are not constantly bumping into each other, and it makes no sense to imagine the men as in anything like a Hobbesian state of nature.

The transformation at the heart of the Zhuangzi, then, is not necessarily or primarily a moral transformation. It is primarily a transformation in how one thinks and feels about the world, and in the behavior that expresses this. A key assumption is that even someone who loyally complies with all of the major recognized social norms, a “good” person, can have an inadequate and unsatisfying style of life, and should be motivated to transform herself or himself. There may be cases, of course, in which someone's inadequate and unsatisfying style of life includes what we would term immorality, and that enlightenment would have as one of its byproducts the elimination of the motivation for this immorality. This is not precluded by the Zhuangzi, but as far as I can see the work does not advertise increased moral virtue as one of the possible rewards of transformation.

III

The transformation at the heart of the Zhuangzi concerns primarily one's emotions and also the connections between emotions, on one hand, and motivation and conduct on the other. We can approach this by way of examination of something that figures repeatedly in the Zhuangzi, and that has been treated as a puzzle by some Western philosophers: spontaneity. What is spontaneity?

There are two connected ideas here. On one hand, there is a spontaneity that (at least arguably) is necessarily a feature of all human thought and action, so that one must come to thoughts and actions spontaneously or grind to a halt. On the other hand, there is a sense (which is clearly uppermost in the Zhuangzi) in which some people are more spontaneous than others, and indeed some are so lacking in spontaneity that their lives are deeply flawed.

Let us look first at the thesis that we are, so to speak, condemned to spontaneity. A general form of this is the claim that no set of rules by itself univocally compels the next step (partly because of the openness of interpretation), which is a major theme of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. Less generally, we may look at three theses: (A) The next thought is not compelled, (B) Desire does not compel preference, and (C) The next action is not compelled. All three theses arguably can be found in Kant, and the interested reader can trace discussions of spontaneity in Henry Allison's Kant's Theory of Freedom.⁶ But Kant is not the only Western philosopher with a strong interest in spontaneity, an interest that has led to some fissures in philosophical analysis.

We may begin from the point that, even if there are constraints (related, say, to space, time, and the categories) on anyone's system of thoughts, these constraints do not in general govern the order of one's thoughts and they most certainly do not determine whether, at any particular moment, one has a thought at all (rather than having one's mind blank). In addition, if one looks at the actual functioning of people's minds, it is striking that the stream of thought very often includes seemingly random, unbidden thoughts. There is Mozart's famous remark, quoted by Daniel Dennett, about his musical ideas, that they come from one knows not where.⁷ Remarks about the mysterious sources of ideas abound in the Zhuangzi. For example, “Pleasure in things and anger against them, sadness and joy, forethought and regret, change and immobility, idle influences that initiate our gestures—music coming out of emptiness … no one knows from what soil they spring” (Graham 1981, 50).

Some unbidden thoughts may be merely inconsequential; others may represent a hostility or a greed that is not one's dominant or considered attitude. There is a great temptation to say of the latter, as Mozart said of his musical ideas, that they are not my thoughts. This temptation is all the greater in that one repudiates such thoughts, and very probably would rather not have them.

This unwelcome spontaneity may impinge on one's sense of self. One major American philosopher of recent years, Harry Frankfurt, has devoted himself to resolving this tension. He has argued, with great skill and panache, that the self is formed as a result of higher order desires that have the effect of either incorporating or rejecting the first-order desires that one may happen to feel.⁸ This leads to the image of a coherent self as an island in the larger sphere of one's mind: beyond the self, much of the mind may be ugly and/or chaotic.

I have argued elsewhere that this is too intellectualized a picture of how people arrive at a character or a nature of their selves, and that such factors as habit can play a major role.⁹ But there is another objection that could be leveled equally at Frankfurt's and my accounts. It is that we are attempting to analyze and reconstruct something that verges on the pathological, a partitioning of the mind that easily can cut people off from the most interesting forms of spontaneity. In dreams and creative activities, it will be said, the boundary markers are down. Zhuangzi would surely concur with this objection. It is one of many reasons why dreams and transformations play such a role in suggesting the possibility of variations of perspective. This is the strategy of Zhuangzi.

We also can lead a coherent life without either cutting ourselves off from some of our desires or straightforwardly ratifying every one of them in our conduct. We may prefer not to act out a desire in any direct way, and neither our desires at the moment—nor our previous behavior—dictate what our next action will be. That neither preference nor action need be governed by desire is a major theme of many moralities, including Kant's. But it must be seen as the beginning, rather than the end, of a train of thought for Zhuangzi.

Here is an analogy that may help us to approach the problem of the relation between desire and preference. Commentators on the architecture of Sir Christopher Wren sometimes focus on the problem of the church steeple. This is round, before it tapers to a point, and is mounted on a square tower. The problem is in managing the transition from the square tower below to the roundness of the steeple without its seeming visually abrupt. This can be done through intervening (and visually intermediate) layers of construction between the squareness and the roundness. The steeple might be given an octagonal base, or one that is square but scalloped at the corners; the base might have more than one level, each one closer to round than the one below it. Wren, to the best of my recollection, never solved the problem twice in the same way, and his solutions are invariably both subtle and beautiful.

Similarly the transition from desire to preference should not be abrupt and jarring. Otherwise, as Zhuangzi makes Confucius remark in another context, the “tension might show in one's face” (Graham 1981, 67). One respect in which the analogy breaks down, though, is that the nature of one's desires, unlike the squareness of church towers, is not typically a given. Desires can be modified or eliminated, and by now, studies of Buddhism have made us used to the idea that the best solution to the problems of life is the elimination of desire. Might Zhuangzi's solution be, so to speak, a beautiful spire that is mounted on nothingness?

It is difficult to answer this with great confidence. But we should be cautious of imposing alien philosophical frameworks—Indian as well as Western—on Zhuangzi. We also need to be cautious in our handling of the English word “desire.” It is often used (the word “cravings” running second) as an English translation for what Buddha recommended that one eliminate. It is also used in much recent analytic philosophy for motivational thrusts in general, so that “desires” is treated as roughly synonymous with “wants” or “would like.” This reflects the crudity of a great deal of contemporary “philosophy of mind.” Annette Baier has pointed out (to my mind convincingly, at least as regards the meaning “desire” has had) that the meaning of “desire” is more narrow and specialized.¹⁰ The proper object of desire, she suggests, is “a thing or person in some future close relation to the desirer” (Baier [in Joel Marks, ed., The Ways of Desire] 1986, 60 n. 8). To this one might add that mild wishes are not likely to be called desires, and what gets translated as “desires” in Buddhist texts are at home in cases in which not getting what one would like is tantamount to suffering. The word can look out of place, conversely, in cases in which the response to not getting what one wanted is one of relative indifference.

Thus, even if it is true that Zhuangzi to some extent anticipated the advent in China of Buddhism, it would not follow that the spire of preference is mounted on nothingness. It can be mounted on wishes and urges that do not amount to desires. Indeed there is a passage that suggests that Zhuangzi's preferences, rather than resting on nothingness, rest on primal psychic chaos (Graham 1981, 97-98). (One may speak here of the shifting inclinations provided by one's qi, which may differ from conscious preferences in such a way that we risk frustration whether or not these conscious preferences are satisfied.¹¹) We will return to psychic chaos shortly.

My immediate suggestion is that both the basic Buddhist injunctions regarding the management of emotions, and the respects in which Zhuangzi may have anticipated the advent of Buddhism, are easily lost in translation: The word “desire” has become so problematized that even recent writings in English that center on the word can be, as it were, lost in translation from English to English. It does look as if Zhuangzi wants us, at the very least, to lessen the urgency of our desires. Thus he remarks that “wherever desires and cravings are deep, the impulse which is from Heaven is shallow” (Graham 1981, 84). This is consonant with the suggestion that it is best that a man “does not inwardly wound his person by likes and dislikes, that he constantly goes by the spontaneous and does not add anything to the process of life” (Graham 1981, 82). This is spoken of as being without “the essentials of man,” which strongly implies that it must be learned and that the learning will require effort. What is required is a “fasting of the heart,” which paradoxically is a source of increased energy, in that one is put in touch with “the tenuous which waits to be aroused by other things” (Graham 1981, 68).

So much for Zhuangzi's view of desires. What of preferences? It might look as if his recommendation is that there be none. Graham translates one passage that way: Confucius is made to say appreciatively to Yan Hui that “you have no preferences … no norms” (Graham 1981, 72).¹² However the discussion of the Self might give one pause (Graham 1981, 51). Without self there is “no choosing one thing rather than another.” Zhuangzi's view of the Self is not crystal clear; I think that one can read without irony his observation that “It seems that there is something genuinely in command, and the only trouble is that we cannot find a sign of it” (Graham 1981, 51). Hence I read him as holding that there is a self, and of course we choose one thing rather than another. In any event, the Zhuangzi is full of characters held up to our admiration who are doing what, in some sense, they prefer to do and are moving toward outcomes they prefer. One might, for starters, think of Cook Ding who clearly prefers not to wear out his chopper (Graham 1981, 63-64).

My interpretation of Confucius' appreciation of Yan Hui is that Yan Hui's choices are not governed by the rigid dictates of any code (“norms”), and that Yan Hui does not have preferences that are so strong that he is really disappointed if they are not fulfilled. In this sense he does not “wound his person by likes and dislikes” (Graham 1981, 82). The transition between desires (or wishes and urges), on one hand, and preferences on the other is made smooth first, by the fact that both elements are light rather than heavy, and secondly, that desires of any gross or antisocial sort (that might cause real trouble and tension if formed into preferences and acted out) have been lessened or transmuted by “fasting of the heart”.

This still does not get us far. There is more to Zhuangzi's education of the emotions than fasting of the heart, and the account we have given thus far of the shaping of preferences does not explain the nature and importance of the spontaneity that is recommended. It is time to look at the puzzling series of semimagical presentations of self described in chapter seven, Second Series. Huzi presents himself to a demonic shaman first “as I am when I hold down the impulses of the Power,” then as he was when “names and substances had not found a way in, but the impulses are coming up from my heels,” then “the absolute emptiness where there is no foreboding of anything” (which Huzi achieves when he levels out the impulses of the breath), and finally himself as “it is before ever we come out of our Ancestor … I attenuated, wormed in and out, Unknowing who or what we were.” The shaman is misled the first three times, and terrified the last (Graham 1981, 97).

One thing we might get from this sequence is that the psychic nature toward which the Zhuangzi points is both complex and fluid. We may be tempted, in general, to read any discussion that recommends what sort of person one should try to be in terms of a static picture of a soul, a sort of spiritual x-ray. This never entirely works: even the kind of harmony of psyche that is sketched in Plato's Republic, or the very different spiritual stability praised in Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling has to be understood in terms of sequences in which checks and balances or appeals to what is highest come into play. My suggestion, though, is that it works even more badly for Zhuangzi than it does for Plato or Kierkegaard. Some of Huzi's self-transformations might seem to refer to earlier stages of spiritual transformation, but the point to bear in mind is that they are still present as part of what he is. He is still—as people say—“in touch with” the impulses of very early childhood, which worm in and out, with no essential connection with any sense of self. To be in touch with these impulses is to be aware of them, to accept them for what they are rather than attempting to squash them, and sometimes (but I think not always) to ratify them in one's preferences and to act on them.

There is a much later Zen story in which a Zen master, challenged to perform a miracle, says, “My miracle is that when I feel hungry I eat, and when I feel thirsty I drink.”¹³ I think that the Zhuangzi points in this direction. Education of the emotions here includes being aware of, and comfortable with, basic wishes and urges, including even those that a small child would have. It also includes one's sometimes acting on them, again easily and comfortably, even in some cases in which norms of good manners might seem to dictate otherwise. It should be emphasized that the Daoist sage is not someone who always acts on impulse or, in the vernacular of the 1960s, “lets it all hang out.” But he or she will be someone whose preferences will not be at war with basic wishes or urges.

This psychic connectedness with early and primitive levels of one's mind has been emphasized as a factor in artistic creativity by Anton Ehrenzweig, who links finished works of art with a “deceptive chaos in art's vast substructure.”¹⁴ In Ehrenzweig's view, both the artist and the scientist deal with apparent chaos, which they integrate through unconscious scanning (Ehrenzweig [The Hidden Order of Art] 1967, 5). One mark of the process of unconscious scanning may be a blank stare. (One is put in mind of the vacant stare that David Hume's friends, including D'Alembert, cautioned him about, and that made Rousseau especially edgy.¹⁵) Unconscious scanning “in constrast to conscious thought which needs closed gestalt patterns—can handle ‘open’ structures with blurred frontiers which will be drawn with proper precision only in the unknowable future” (Ehrenzweig 1967, 42).

Ehrenzweig draws a number of lessons from this for the education of artists. Students must be taught, he argues, “not to wait for their inspiration and rushes of spontaneity, but to work hard at being spontaneous through choosing tasks that cannot be controlled by analytic vision and reasoning alone.” The objective constraints that are inherent in the tasks will trigger spontaneity (Ehrenzweig 1967, 146). This is, in fact, a perfect description of the work and professionalism of Cook Ding, who does not need a rush of creative inspiration to be spontaneous.

Anyone who reviews the literature referred to in this essay must be struck by the fact that no one attempts to provide a clear and direct explanation of what spontaneity is: not Zhuangzi, not Kant or Henry Allison, and not even Ehrenzweig. Here is such an attempt. Spontaneity, in the sense in which everyone has it, is the occurrence of a thought or an action, or the formation of a preference, in a descriptive and explanatory context in which it is anomalous. (I use the word “anomalous” in the sense it has in Donald Davidson's “anomalous monism.”¹⁶) Spontaneity, in the sense in which some people are much more spontaneous than others, has to do with the relation between one's preferences and actions, on one hand, and the layers of one's mind (going back to childlike wishes and urges) on the other. For some people there is rather little relation: they are governed by norms of conduct and of what they should prefer, and may be hardly aware of psychic elements that run in different directions. Ehrenzweig sees this as characteristic of the kind of artist we would term “academic,” who composes or paints by the rules. Someone who has a more easy and satisfying relation with these psychic elements, and is able to act in a way that is not only anomalous but also expressive and free from tension, is very spontaneous. For most of us it is not easy to be that kind of person. But Zhuangzi, who is not at all a relativist about values, clearly thinks that it is much better.¹⁷

Notes

1. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O'Brien (New York: Vintage Books, 1955), 50-51.

2. This is not to say that any interpretation is as good as any other. Some may be much more rewarding; some, on the other hand, may lack plausible connection with the text, the classic example being the interpretation of Hamlet that makes Claudius the victim of his crazy nephew. There can be, in short, critical standards even if there are not definitive interpretations. Analogous problems arise with regard to the objectivity of historical and social scientific accounts of sets of events, and I have discussed these in my “Precision in History,” Mind 84 (1975). Alexander Nehamas has pointed out that issues of interpretation become serious only in the presence of competing interpretations, and furthermore, that it is not easy to say whether interpretations are competing, in that elements of two or more interpretations can be combined. See Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life As Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 63.

3. John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, Chapter V, para. 14.

4. P. F. Strawson, “Social Morality and Individual Ideals,” Philosophy 36 (1961).

5. The foregoing remarks about the internal structures of ethics have been kept brief. I have given a fuller treatment, especially concerning the boundaries of morality, in chapter one of my Foundations of Morality (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983).

6. See Henry E. Allison, Kant's Theory of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). The sense in which someone's thoughts or actions are not compelled even though they fit a deterministic model of causation is a complex topic for Kant. It is related also to the question of whether causing something to happen is the same as what we think of as making it happen. It may be that Kant (for whom causation was a structural feature of phenomenal reality) associated causation more closely with predictable regularity than Hume in the last analysis did. See Galen Strawson, The Secret Connexion: Causation, Realism, and David Hume (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).

7. Daniel Dennett, Elbow Room (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984), 13.

8. Harry Frankfurt, The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 1988).

9. Joel Kupperman, Character (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991) chapter three.

10. Annette Baier, “The Ambiguous Limits of Desire,” in Joel Marks ed., The Ways of Desire (Chicago: Precedent Publishing, 1986).

11. I am indebted to the editors for this point.

12. Legge has “free from all likings” (Legge 1891 [James Legge, The Writings of Kwan-Tze, in The Sacred Books of the East: vol. XXXIX The Texts of Taoism,London: Oxford University Press, 1891], 257). Watson has, “You must have no more likes. If you've been transformed, you must have no more constancy!” (Watson 1968 [Burton Watson, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu, New York: Columbia Universtity Press, 1968], 91).

13. Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, compiled Paul Reps (Tokyo: Charles Tuttle Co., 1957), 91.

14. Anton Ehrenzweig, The Hidden Order of Art (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967), xii.

15. See Ernest Campbell Mossner, The Life of David Hume (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 477.

16. See Donald Davidson, “Mental Events,” in L. Foster and J. W. Swanson, eds., Experience and Theory (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1970).

17. Let me suggest that, on this topic at least, anyone who looks for a simple opposition between Confucians and Daoists will be disappointed. See my “Confucius and the Problem of Naturalness,” Philosophy East & West 18 (1968). A charming example of Confucius' spontaneity is his deliberate rudeness in Book XVII chapter twenty of the Analects. See Arthur Waley, trans., The Analects of Confucius (New York: Vintage Books, 1938), 214. It may be also that spontaneity is one of the values pointed toward by Mencius' observation that “The great man is he who does not lose his child's-heart” (6B12). See James Legge, trans., The Works of Mencius (New York: Dover Books, 1970), 322. Lau has “retains the heart of a new-born babe.” See D. C. Lau, trans., Mencius (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970), 130.