“While Zhuangzi teaches us to transcend all knowledge and opinions, Nietzsche urges us to reverse the truth back to the real world of appearance” (Ge Ling Shang – Liberation as Affirmation p 112)
As explained on the page titled “Wuzhi: Equalizing Opinions is the Way of True Knowledge,” the words “truth” and “knowledge” must be understood in their philosophical sense of what has been sought in the West from the standpoint of everyday discriminative/objective consciousness, in contrast with being a lived coalescence with (or embodiment of) reality from the intuitive standpoint of no-mind (wuxin 無心). In Shang’s words, “Truth refers traditionally to the knowledge that corresponds objectively and properly to the reality or thing-in-itself—God, Dao, Being, the Good, etc. Zhuangzi and Nietzsche have made their point clear that human knowledge or wulun is but limited and perspectival opinions and interpretations which can only carry some temporal and provisional meaning or reference. Knowledge is a product of human-all-too-human aspirations for appropriating things (zheng) and convincing others (bian), which reflects on our social and moral relationships,” and then, “after we have formed our knowledge or opinion we forgot it was our invention and estranged ourselves into believers in and slaves of it, prostrating ourselves before what we have created and henceforth waging wars against ourselves as original interpreters, creators, and legislators. Knowledge, especially the beliefs in metaphysics, theology, and even the sciences, is therefore something that confuses and devastates us; it is a symptom of decadent cultures and weary minds.”
Shang adds that, for Nietzsche, “knowledge is what appeals to sick people …Underneath the love of knowledge there is ‘profound nausea’, hatred of life and ‘the will to nothingness’—all that makes one say No to life. “Psychologically, too, science rests on the same foundation as the ascetic ideal: a certain impoverishment of life is a presupposition of both of them” (GM, III, 25). Inasmuch as the standard or thing-in-itself cannot be found, different opinions or interpretations are equally mere opinions or interpretations. This is what Zhuangzi called Qi Wu-lun, equalizing or identifying opinions, and what Nietzsche called perspectivism.”
Beyond this common distrust of language, however, there are significant differences between Zhuangzi and Nietzsche when it comes to how we could overcome humankind’s “cognitive fault.” Whereas Zhuangzi tells us that a “kind of genuine knowledge (zhenzhi, 真知)” is accessible beyond common and rational opinions, … Nietzsche has no desire to cultivate disinterest or a pure state of mind to replace illusions and urges us to remove thoroughly the belief in truth as the most delusory mask of human sickness and decadence.”
“Three steps are set up by Zhuangzi to attain genuine knowledge (zhenzhi, 真知)”
Zhuangzi lived at a time and place where lineages of sages teaching self-cultivation were still active in seeking this “genuine knowledge.” It was said to be possessed by the “enlightened and liberated minds: zhenren (真人, true person), zhiren (至人, completed person), shenren (神人, spiritual person).” It still remains, though, that Zhuangzi played a decisive role in enhancing already existing teachings and ensuring their perennity. Shang explains: “Three steps are set up by Zhuangzi to attain genuine knowledge.The first step is to know the limits and borders of knowledge in order to equalize (qi) or ‘level out’ all opinions of rights and wrongs and be free from endless arguing.The second step is to know how to stop knowing what cannot be known. The third step is to know not at all. An enlightened mind (yiming) empties everything within, reaches the ultimate stage of the genuine knowledge which is the knowledge without knowledge.” Zhuangzi holds that this was the way our ancestors naturally lived. Genuine knowledge as “merging with Dao” can be gained through several practices: “‘sitting-forgetting’ (zuowang 坐忘), ‘fasting-the-mind’ (4/1), ‘losing-self’ (2/1), ‘perfect integrity’ (caiquan, 才全, 5/4), ‘staying-in-the-middle’ (shouzhong, 守中, 2/3), and ‘walking both ways’ (liangxing, 两行, 2/4). Without intentional strife (wuwei) everything will transform and complete itself; without using knowledge (wuyong) the utility of things will function perfectly by itself. In other words, to embrace all functions or utilities by not using or utilizing them; this is what Zhuangzi called ‘being enlightened’ and throughness of One (yiming and tong, 2/4)’.”
Shang agrees that Nietzsche would have agreed with much of what Zhuangzi wrote. For instance, Nietzsche called on philosophy and art to “concentrate” the unlimited “knowledge drive” (the innate human impulse to seek truth) and subdues it to unity.” Nietzsche admired Heraclitus and Parmenides whose philosophical views had remained rooted in a life-affirming emotional connection toward earthly existence and pinned on Socrates the breaking of this connection which opened the way for a flight into abstraction.
While Zhuangzi teaches us to transcend all knowledge and opinions, Nietzsche urges us to reverse the truth back to the real world of appearance”
“But in principle,” Shang says, “Nietzsche’s solution of overcoming knowledge is very different from Zhuangzi’s.”Having agreed that “everything which is knowable is illusion” Nietzsche argues that “Truths cannot be recognized (On Truth and Lies in an Extramoral Science). This assertion by Nietzsche echoes Zhuangzi’s claim that every truth is “illusion,” “error,” or “lie” with no real distinction whatsoever between true and false, right and wrong. But, unlike Zhuangzi, Nietzsche does not believe in our ability to access genuine knowledge through self-cultivation. He simply believe that “we must remove thoroughly the belief in truth as the most delusory mask of human sickness and decadence. While Zhuangzi teaches us to transcend all knowledge and opinions, Nietzsche urges us to reverse the truth back to the real world of appearance.” In the absence in Europe of a vigorous apophatic contemplative tradition seeking a mystical union with the divine, Nietzsche had no choice but to focuson“how to recover original human nature, such as instinct, affect, the body, and sexuality, which have been so far negated under the names of truth, knowledge, reason, and God. Lie, illusion, error are truer than truths.”
Still, Nietzsche went beyond this rather negative solution. Shang says that “Nietzsche’s ideal substitute for truth and knowledge is art.“ Because, Nietzsche writes: “Art treats illusion as illusion; therefore it does not wish to deceive; it is true. (On Truth and Lies in an Extramoral Science, 184; cf. The Gay Science, 59; 107). When they are closed, my eyes perceive countless changing images within themselves. Imagination produces these images, and I know that they do not correspond to reality. Thus I believe in them only as images, and not as realities. Nietzsche then concludes: “Our salvation lies not in knowing, but in creating! Our greatness lies in the highest illusions, in the noblest emotion.” “For Nietzsche, Shang adds, “only those cowardly persons are afraid of mistakes and errors; they cannot take life as it is so that they need to know the truth on which they can lean.”
So, for Nietzsche,“the value of truth is thus reversed: truths are illusions; illusions are truths. And thus we return to life as it is, a type of life that has been denied for millennia. At this point Nietzsche meets Zhuangzi again: life is a kind of art—‘a mocking, light, fleeting, divinely untroubled, divinely artificial art that, like a pure flame, licks into unclouded skies. . . .There are few things we now know too well, we knowing ones: oh, how we now learn to forget well, and to be good at not knowing, as artists” The Gay Science, “Preface for the Second Edition,” 3).
Shang believes that “Zhuangzi would likely have trouble celebrating with Nietzsche the world of illusions.” This is because, in Zhuangzi’s view, this would not put a stop to divisive arguments between sides defending positions that are mere illusions! May I add that, in our time, the post-modern assertion that all statements are mere narratives has certainly not put an end to endless arguments! One could, however, point out that the Buddhist tradition, which similarly regards all teachings as mere narratives, explicitly describes these as “skillful means” (upaya) used to help practitioners on their path to a genuine embodiment of Buddhahood. All it takes is to redefine words as “tools” for communication rather than the basis for “being,” what a thing is, rather than merely indicating that this thing exists in our perception of the world. And, of course, art is a great way to introduce this notion. Nietzsche was in his early twenties when Claude Monet’s work, Impression, Sunrise, launched the impressionist movement, which revolutionised the way reality was depicted, and it is easy to see how such art could inspire Nietzsche. Unfortunatly, only a few decades after his death, impressionnism, which had aimed at privileging the experiential over the intellectual, was displaced by a much less affirmative cubist approach where left brain thinking re-imposed its impoverished abstract view of the world. It remains that Nietzsche’s suggestion that creation – as art and I would think, in our lives, – would free us from our addiction to words, does amount to an equation of personal liberation with affirmation of reality.
Source:
Ge Ling Shang – Liberation as Affirmation: The Religiosity of Zhuangzi and Nietzsche (2006)