Language: Where Literalism & Experience Meet

But it cannot be this simple, because if Zhuangzi’s words are to be taken at face value, then his message is self-defeating and really quite foolish. Laozi would be guilty of this as well, as amazingly, half of his Daodejing is devoted to describing the Tao (Liu 142). Luckily, we have theO’Brien 4 option of seeing past the face value and interpreting the deeper meaning here. One such interpreter is Chad Hansen, and his Contrast Theory of Language can help to solve the paradox of speech in relation to Tao.

Hansen’s theory states that names (words) are created in pairs as opposites. “It is said that ‘that’ comes out of ‘this,’ and that ‘this’ relies on ‘that.’ This is the explanation of ‘that’ and ‘this’ being engendered out of each other (Ames/Callahan 181). So if language is composed of names (in pairs), and knowing is having the ability to manipulate and use these names towards a desired end, it follows that Zhuangzi’s ideal language is one of “know-how” rather than “know-that.” In other words, his language is prescriptive rather than descriptive. Ames says that according to this Contrast Theory in which names come in pairs, “knowing” is thus the knowing of the distinction between them. And in making a distinction, Ames says, we create “desires and values, which in turn lead to actions to fulfill them.” This thought of Ames resonates with Zhuangzi’s suggestion in the chapter “Commenting on the Equality of Things” on how humans can relate to language and use it to act.

Zhuangzi’s insistence on language as prescriptive, and therefore leading to action, rather than descriptive and liable to abstraction has the potential to answer the aforementioned self- defeating paradox. The function of “names” in the thinking of Confucius is predominantly prescriptive as well. Confucius stresses that the “correctness” of a social structure is obtained when “the name of each social role and its actuality correspond.” This correspondence, or what he calls “the rectification of names,” is important because if names are not correct, “speech will not be in accordance with actuality, [and] when speech is not in accordance with actuality, things will not beO’Brien 5 successfully accomplished,” and eventually “the people will be at a loss as to what to do with themselves.” In Benjamin Schwartz’s interpretation of Confucius, the term “Father,” for example, is not simply a biological fact, but “carries the implication that the father will ‘act like a father’ as well as the assumption that the language will provide information on how to do so” (Liu 51). In other words, it is the purpose of words to establish rules of conduct appropriate to each name. Rather than solving the paradox by abolishing language, Confucius simply called for language to “remain in the background.” Action, he says, is what is important; the value of speech comes not from what is said, but from what it produces (Jullien 196).