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Perhaps these studies had amounted to nothing. But they are very close to that nothing which alone makes it possible for something to be useful – that is, to the Tao. This is what Kafka was after with his desire “to hammer a table together with painstaking craftsmanship and, at the same time, to do nothing – not in such a way that someone could say

‘Hammering is nothing to him,’ but ‘To him, hammering is real hammering and at the same time nothing,’ which would have made the hammering even bolder, more determined, more real, and if you like, more insane.”

Walter Benjamin Between those joints there are spaces and the edge of the knife has no thickness. When you insert what has no thickness in where there are spaces, then the knife is bound to have more than enough space for its vast wandering. That is why after nineteen years the edge of the knife is as if it just came from the grindstone.

Zhuangzi

Care for life

Faced with the increasing emphasis on technical action and the accelerating drive towards completion (cheng) in the Warring States period, Zhuangzi insists that a non-technical way of action is open to human beings. This non-technical way of action is not aimed at completion but carried by the ceaseless flow of life (sheng), so that it nourishes life or cares for life (yangsheng
) in its very movement and avoids the decline of humanity into the world of man (ren).

For Zhuangzi care for life does not mean care for biological life, or human life (renzhisheng). Zhuangzi does not advocate techniques to ensure longev-ity or immortallongev-ity, for, according to Zhuangzi, the desire for immortallongev-ity is just another example of our identification with our outer form, and if prolonging human life becomes our main concern then we forget the source

that generates human life. Therefore the Zhuangzi says, “How sad, that people of the world think that caring for their form ( yangxing
) is sufficient to preserve life” (19/3). In Zhuangzi to care for life is not to care for some form in the outer realm, it means to care for the inner experience of the ceaseless, self-generating life of Heaven.

Zhuangzi, of course, does not imply that we should not care for human life. Zhuangzi advises that we do not exhaust our life (wusheng
), that is to say, our limited human life, in the pursuit of knowledge and fame, which will dangerously entangle us in the outer (wai) world of man (ren).

We should strive rather, through some kind of inner training, to preserve our body (baoshen
) and complete our (human) life (quansheng
), that is to say, live out our full span of years (3/1–2). Zhuangzi certainly wants us to take care of our psycho-physical well-being, and if he had seen how popular taijiquan
 and qigong
 exercises have become in the West, he would probably have approved of these ways of caring for one’s life. But our human life is not the life of Heaven, and for Zhuangzi the higher aim is to care for the life of Heaven. If we do not make this crucial distinction we will fall into the common misunderstanding that Zhuangzi seeks to live in safe harmony with the social and natural order, much like it is envisioned by our New Age philosophies.

The Chinese literati held a similar view of Zhuangzi. The commentators Guo Xiang and Cheng Xuanying
 ( fl. 630–60) both explain that in Zhuangzi to care for life (yangheng) means to stay within the confines of one’s allotted place and the limits of one’s allotted life. The idea is that if one coincides with one’s limits, then the limits are no longer a constraint but an expression of one’s spiritual freedom (Guo 1982: 115–16). Some import-ant modern Chinese scholars follow a similar interpretation (Tang 1973:

355–64, Mou 1963: 205–8). We should bear in mind, however, that there is always considerable pressure on human beings to imagine that their limited human life is in fact the life of Heaven. The Chinese literati used Zhuangzi as consolation in their unpredictable fortunes under a totalitarian state; the modern Western subject uses Eastern philosophies to escape the pressures of the relentless and equally unpredictable changes of modern risk societies.

Zhuangzi himself was not at all interested in such consolation and escapism;

he calls rather for the unraveling of the very center of power and submission.

How is it possible to care for transcendental life, or the life of Heaven? To answer this question let us turn to Zhuangzi’s celebrated story of the masterful Cook Ding
, who performs his task of cutting up an ox as if it were a dance.

Whatever his hand touched, wherever his shoulder leaned, where his foot stepped, where his knee pushed,

Swish! The flesh would fall from the bone; the zips! and zaps! of the slicing knife all hit the note and combined in the dance of “The Mulberry Grove” and hit the rhythm of “The Fox Head” song.

(3/3–4) When Lord Wenhui sees the cook’s performance he exclaims: “Oh, excel-lent! That skill should attain such heights!” But Cook Ding answers, “That which I am fond of is the Way, which goes beyond skill” (3/4–5). First, note that Cook Ding does not say that that he is fond of our (human) life (wusheng), but of the Way, which is the experience of the life of Heaven.

Second, it is decisive for our understanding of the whole story how we understand the phrase jinhuji
 . Do we take it to mean that the Way

“proceeds from skill,” or do we take it to mean that the Way “goes beyond (or transcends) skill”? The first reading is grammatically possible, but, in my opinion, it is incompatible with the rhetorical structure of the passage and with Zhuangzi’s thought in general.

Just as the experience of the Way, or the life of Heaven, presupposes a religious conversion, the force of the argument of the story of Cook Ding depends on a complete conversion of view. Lord Wenhui expects to learn about skill ( ji), for that is what is within his horizon of understanding, but instead he gets from the cook a lesson in caring for life ( yangsheng). Through this rhetorical move Zhuangzi indicates that to understand the action that cares for life we must give up the common view that human action is neces-sarily aimed at mastery through skill. Skilled technical action pertains to human life (we do x in order to get y) but not to the Way, or the life of Heaven.

This conversion of view is directly related to the turn from the outer (wai) to the inner (nei). That a person is skillful is readily observed from the outer behavior, but whether a person cares for the life of Heaven – or the Way that is the ceaseless self-emergence of life – is not so easily determined from the outside, for this care is a matter of inner experience. Lord Wenhui is unable to see beyond Cook Ding’s outer skill – which admittedly is dazzling – and only after Cook Ding’s explanation does he see that the cook’s action is qualitatively different from skill mastery, namely the kind of action that cares for transcendental life. At the end of the cook’s explanation, Lord Wenhui exclaims: “Excellent! From hearing the words of the cook, I have learned how to care for life ( yangsheng)” (3/12).

In a sudden reversal of view the outer display of Cook Ding’s superior skill mastery turns into an entirely different configuration, namely the move-ment of the Way or care for transcendental life. This happens in much the same way that the well-known drawing of two meeting faces suddenly flips into a picture of a vase, and then back again, without any continuity between the two pictures (it is either one or the other and never both). The whole point of the story is precisely this reversal: what looks like technical mastery

suddenly flips into a picture of authentic action without any continuity between the two pictures. For Zhuangzi only a total break with the perspective of technical mastery brings to view the action that cares for transcendental life, or the life of Heaven.

Some scholars take Zhuangzi’s Way (dao) to be a form of skilled coping with the world (Hansen 1992, Eno 1996); others see it in some important way to be connected with skill-mastery and claim that there is continuity between skill mastery and Zhuangzi’s idea of care for life (Cai 1985, Ivanhoe 1993, Yearley 1996). In my opinion, such readings remain within the perspective of Lord Wenhui. This becomes clear when we read how Cook Ding explains his way of action:

When I first began to cut up oxen, where I looked there was nothing but oxen. Three years later I never saw a whole ox. These days I meet it with the spirit and do not look with the eyes. The senses know where to stop and the spirit moves as it pleases.

(3/5–6) Apparently Cook Ding went through some process of learning, perhaps something like contemporary inner training (neiye), before he attained his outstanding level of mastery. We should not, however, jump to the conclu-sion that this is Zhuangzi’s central point. Zhuangzi is highly ironic when he describes inner training, and he often flatly denies such training can lead to the Way. Zhuangzi is a religious thinker and not just a transmitter of the instructions in meditation manuals, and what makes Zhuangzi a religious thinker is precisely the philosophical weight of his rhetorical gestures and the figures of thought he employs. Furthermore, Zhuangzi is here address-ing one of the most urgent and difficult questions of religious thought, namely the relation between human life and transcendental life, or the life of Heaven, and we cannot expect his explication to be transparent to a quick reading eager to draw its conclusions. Cook Ding explains further:

I rely on Heaven’s texture. I strike at the big hollows, guide the knife through the great cavities. I follow what is inherently so. In my skill [with the knife] I have never passed through where the meat adheres to the bone and how much less a big bone.

(3/6–7) The point to emphasize here is that Heaven’s texture (tianli
) and the inherently so (guran
) do not refer to an objective and normative order in the outer (wai) world. Like the Way the inherently so is not a thing; it is nothing objective or outer (it has no form) but refers to the inner experience of the ceaseless coming-into-being of things, the spontaneously self-so (ziran) that is also Heaven’s texture. Since it is not an objective order one can adapt

to more or less skillfully, it takes no skill to follow the inherently so. There-fore in the following and most crucial passage of the story Zhuangzi deconstructs the image of skillful cutting. Cook Ding says:

A good cook changes his knife once a year because he hacks. A mediocre cook changes his knife once a month because he smashes.

Now I have had this knife for nineteen years and have cut up several thousand oxen, and the edge of the knife is as if it just came from the grindstone. Between those joints there are spaces and the edge of the knife has no thickness. When you insert what has no thickness in where there are spaces, then the knife is bound to have more than enough space for its vast wandering. That is why after nineteen years the edge of the knife is as if it just came from the grindstone.

(3/7–10) Cook Ding’s knife is really extraordinary. It is a knife whose edge “has no thickness.” Since the edge of any actual knife, however sharp, is bound to have some thickness, Cook Ding’s knife is strictly speaking no knife at all, or, perhaps it is a non-knife in the same way that Cook Ding’s action is non-action, that is to say, non-technical action. It is crucial to see that Zhuangzi’s image of this non-knife is not just literary hyperbole, that it has philosophical significance. As is often the case, at the most crucial points in his argument Zhuangzi resorts to a rhetorical gesture in order to indicate what cannot be said directly. And what is it that cannot be said directly?

Cook Ding is certainly not a bad cook; but the point of the story is not that he is a good or even an extraordinarily good cook. All these technical dis-tinctions between good and bad, right and wrong, skill and clumsiness, are drawn only in the realm of man (ren). It is in this realm that Lord Wenhui so confidently can say, “Ah there is a cook of superior skill!” But Cook Ding has transcended the realm of man (ren), the outer symbolic order where we with a false sense of confidence (for it is really a dream) say, “Ah, there is a ruler! Oh, that is a shepherd!” (2/83) or “That’s a cook!” The point is not that Cook Ding “cuts apart” ( jie
) better than any other cook but that he “unravels” ( jie, same word) precisely these distinctions that define human life and releases his action into the life of Heaven. Like wandering and non-action, this unraveling is not a technical accomplishment, for all technical action depends on the distinctions that structure the realm of man (ren).

How then did the unraveling happen? Zhuangzi cannot say how it hap-pened. For if he could explain how the transcendence happened, then there would be a technical procedure, a method, by which we can pass from human life to the life of Heaven. But techniques and methods pertain only to human life, in fact they define that life, and they cannot go beyond their

proper field of application. Even the celebrated “flow experience” that occurs at the height of skill mastery is entirely inscribed in human life and the horizon of technical action. The flow experience occurs when skills are evenly matched with a specific set of goals. In such a setting skill mastery may be perfected to a point where is seems perfectly spontaneous (Csikszentmihalyi 1991) – but it remains in its setting.

So for good reasons Zhuangzi does not and cannot spell it out for us how Cook Ding comes to care for transcendental life. And yet he indicates it by rhetorical means. For the transition happens the moment the knife become a non-knife and the action non-action. An ontological difference comes into play, and the cutting itself – dazzling as it is in the outer world – becomes nothing. It is as if Cook Ding’s whole performance, the outer form of the action, becomes transparent, and we get a glimpse of life beyond the form:

the transcendental life that is an inner experience for Cook Ding. Like the knife, Cook Ding’s action dissolves in “its vast wandering.” This is the moment of care for transcendental life. For human action now transcends technical doing (wei) and is recognized as being engendered by Heaven.

We will now look closer at this remarkable form of action that transcends technical action and the drive towards completion.

From potentiality to actuality

For Zhuangzi human life, in so far as it is generated by Heaven, is poten-tially ceaseless and infinite life, but when human beings are in the grip of the drive towards completion, then their every act and every word limits their originary potentiality. In the end all that is left are names (ming) and objects (shi
), action (wei) and accomplishments (gong
). Zhuangzi wants to avoid this closure, and he suggests that it is possible to find a way of passing from potentiality to actuality – a way of action, for it is action that mediates between the two – that does not negate potentiality but retains potentiality in actuality.

A saying from the Laozi can exemplify what Zhuangzi has in mind: “When the uncarved block is split up, it is made into vessels” (pusan ze weiqi


) (Laozi 28). The uncarved block (pu
) is the pure potentiality of life.

The vessels (qi
) are useful things brought into actuality through making or doing (wei). It is the ontological fate of human beings to transform life into things, but the problem is that this movement from the uncarved block to the vessels – the fall into the technical – limits or even (as in Xunzi) negates potentiality. According to Laozi and Zhuangzi, it would be better if the uncarved block splits itself up and in sacrificing its pure potentiality to not be split retains this potentiality in its movement “into” actuality (the vessels). On this understanding of the movement from potentiality to actuality the saying must be read as does Kah Kyung Cho: “when the uncarved block splits itself then it becomes vessels” (Cho 1987: 326, my

italics). The different translations hinge on the reading of the word wei, which can mean either “to make” or “to become.” The decisive point is, as Cho points out, that on the second reading,

the emergence of the vessel is seen as the possibility inherent in the uncarved wood itself. The transition from the uncarved wood to the vessel is then no longer a transformation imposed by force from the outside, but an inner, perhaps even necessary development, the way of being of the Dao itself.

(1987: 326) These two readings of the sentence from Laozi show the difference between inauthentic and authentic action. In inauthentic action the uncarved block is carved up by man and made into an object. In authentic action the block of potentiality splits itself up as it passes into actuality; it gives up its pure potentiality to not be split in the movement of the Way (dao), the movement from potentiality to actuality in which pure potentiality is preserved.

But how is it possible to retain pure potentiality in the act that brings something into actuality? To fully appreciate what is at stake in Zhuangzi’s notion of authentic action, it is helpful to consider Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of the relationship between potentiality (dunamis) and act (energeia) in Aristotle. In order to explain potentiality in itself as an effective mode, Aristotle distinguishes between two states of the potential: one where it immediately passes into actuality and one where it does not pass over into actuality. The first is the potentiality to do or be, the second is the potenti-ality not to do or be, or what Aristotle also calls im-potentipotenti-ality (adunamia).

Aristotle writes: “What is potential can both be and not be. For the same is potential as much with respect to being as to not being” (Agamben 1998:

45). Now, as Agamben points out, the potentiality that exists “is precisely the potentiality that can not pass over into actuality.” But how can some-thing exist without passing into actuality? Agamben explains that the poten-tiality that exists “maintains itself in relation to actuality in the form of its suspension; it is capable of the act in not realizing it, it is sovereignly capable of its own im-potentiality [impotenza].” To be sure, in passing into

45). Now, as Agamben points out, the potentiality that exists “is precisely the potentiality that can not pass over into actuality.” But how can some-thing exist without passing into actuality? Agamben explains that the poten-tiality that exists “maintains itself in relation to actuality in the form of its suspension; it is capable of the act in not realizing it, it is sovereignly capable of its own im-potentiality [impotenza].” To be sure, in passing into