Hundun’s Hospitality

Daoist, Derridean and Levinasian readings of Zhuangzi’s parable

Bibliographic Data

ID8859217
AuthorsMeiyao Wu (National Kaohsiung Normal University, corresponding author)
Year2014
Volume46
Issue13
Pages1435-1449
Publication date2014-10-24
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueEducational Philosophy and Theory (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0013-1857 • E-ISSN: 1469-5812
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/00131857.2014.965652
OpenAlexW1977662710
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited8

At the end Zhuangzi 7, Hundun (the Middle Sea) invites his two neighbours, the North Sea and South Sea, to visit him. They repay his kindness by drilling seven holes (for seeing, hearing, breathing and eating) in his face to make him more ‘human’ but Hundun dies. This essay pursues Daoist, Derridean and Levinasian readings of the parable which foreground issues of non-duality and the absolute priority yet impossibility of unconditional hospitality or infinite openness to others (or to the Other). Key concepts include selflessness, non-duality and/or the relativity of opposites in Laozi and Zhuangzi, conditional and unconditional hospitality and the aporia of gift-giving in Derrida and in Levinas the ontological priority of infinity to totality, that of the face of the other or neighbour to the self or subject, and that of ‘saying’ to ‘the said’.Keywords: Hundunnon-dualityhospitalitygift-givingface of the othersayinginfinityLaoziZhuangziDerridaLevinas Notes1. The hun 混 of hun-dun 渾沌 (muddy, mixed, chaotic) means bound together, muddled, featureless (like Hundun’s face). We get the hun without the dun in Laozi 14 as ‘bound together or blend’ (‘The elusive ... rarefied ... and infinitesimal blend into one ...’); as ‘muddled’ or ‘murky’ in Laozi 15 (‘Murky, as a troubled stream ...’); and as ‘featureless’ or ‘formless’ in Laozi 25 (‘There was something formless yet complete,/That existed before heaven and earth ...’) (Waley, Citation1958, p. 159, 160, 174).2. See Wu, Kuang-ming, ‘Emperor Hundun: A Cultural Hermeneutic’, and Frank W. Stevenson’s discussion in ‘The Question of the Wind in Zhuangzi,v Gould, ed., China-West Interculture (Stevenson, Citation2008, pp. 92–98). According to the interpretation of Taiwanese Daoist scholar Bangxiong Wang, Hundun’s death also means that his complete openness to the Others (Shu and Hu) went beyond the boundary that separates the limited perspectives of human beings from Nature, that is, went beyond this duality (Wang, Citation2013, pp. 391–393).3. This notion of the ‘self-ordering’ of an initially indeterminate, undefined and perhaps ‘chaotic’ state also fits the model of chaos theory in physics, as does the Hundun parable. In Michel Serres’ (Citation1995) account (e.g. in Genesis), the key point of chaos theory is that disorder tends to spontaneously self-order through repetition, yet when it reaches a state of hyper-repetition or hyper-order—as suggested by the openings for perception and rationality that were carved by ‘Sudden’ and ‘Speed’ in Hundun’s face—it may decay into another form of disorder (as in the case of entropy).4. The six family relationships mean ‘father and son; elder brother and younger brother; husband and wife’ (Chan’s note).5. Waley, in The Way and its Power (Citation1958, p. 165), translates the second line as ‘That human kindness and morality arose,’ and the fourth line as ‘[That] the Great Artifice began.’ He also translates ‘loyal ministers’ in the last line as ‘loyal slaves,’ noting that this is what ‘Ministers called themselves.’6. See Wang, The Modern Interpretation of Laozi’s Daodejing (Citation2010, pp. 10–11), and Mou, ‘The Origin of the Hundred Schools in the Pre-Qin Dynasty’ (Citation2002, pp. 45–68).7. A.C. Graham in his very poetic translation renders these first three lines: ‘By what is the way hidden, that there should be a genuine or a false? By what is saying darkened, that sometimes ‘That’s it’ and sometimes ‘That’s not’? Wherever we walk how can the Way be absent?’ (Graham, Chuang-tzu, Citation1981, p. 52). This ‘hidden’ may remind us of Heidegger’s ‘self-concealment of Being.’8. Chad Hansen in ‘A Tao of Tao,’ in Victor Mair, ed., Experimental Essays on Chuang-tzu), takes Dao as a ‘discourse’ that guides human actions; he sees Zhuangzi as having many discourse-daos rather than the Confucian single discourse-Dao that is authoritative and correct. ‘Zhuangzi does not claim that all shi-ing [asserting] because the absolute is without any distinctions. He claims instead that all shi-ing is right—from some perspective or other .... Ming-clarity is apparently to be understood here as the awareness that there is a possible dao which would generate any desired pattern of shih-ing and fei-ing’ (Hansen, Citation1983, p. 46). This is not the primitive Daoism of Shen Dao, which ‘sees all things as one.’ Rather, the mature Daoist view attributed by Hansen seems in effect to ‘mime’ or ‘play off of’ Confucianism. Thus Zhuangzi endorses ‘residing in the usual’ by ‘using names and shi-ing in the conventional ... ways’ (p. 48). Hansen also notes Zhuangzi’s claim that conformist shi-ing ‘comes to and end, and when it is at an end; and when it is at an end, that of which we do not know what it so of it we call [the] dao.’9. Thus Robert Bernasconi remarks in ‘Deconstruction and the Possibility of Ethics’ that for Derrida ‘the possibility of ethics is referred, not to its actuality, but to its impossibility’ (Citation1988, p. 135). Also, see in this context, among others, Mark Westmoreland’s (Citation2008) ‘Interruptions: Derrida and Hospitality’ (pp. 1–3) and Ruyu Hung’s (Citation2013) ‘Educational Hospitality and Trust in Teacher–Student Relations: A Derridarian Visiting.’ Hung foregrounds the concept of trust—the need for students and parents to trust teachers and for teachers (as hosts) to trust students (as guests)—within the Derridean context of conditional/unconditional hospitality. Here one wonders if we might see Hundun’s guests as his ‘teachers’?10. All life on earth has of course a close connection with water, with the sea, and a significant percentage of the human body is basically saltwater. Given the sense of Hundun as a perhaps originary, creative or self-ordering Chaos (like Hesiod’s Xaos out of which arise Mother Earth and Father Sky and then everything else), it may be helpful here to keep in mind Serresian chaos theory, mentioned in the above discussion of Laozi’s Dao as uncarved block, his Dao which gets lost or forgotten (if not destroyed) when its smooth surface is over-specified, over-moralized, over-rationalized (see Note 5). Chaos theory takes disorder—as in the chaotic flux which precedes the emergence of a singular origin—as tending to self-order through repetition; then, when a state of hyper-repetition or hyper-redundancy is reached, this super-ordered state tends to decay back into another form of disorder.11. Perhaps one might interpret Laozi’s opening line ‘Dao ke dao, fei ch’ang dao’, which has of course various readings, by correlating the ‘spoken’ of ‘The way that can be spoken’ with the rational abstraction of the ‘said’ and correlating the ch’ang dao with ‘saying’. Or correlate ‘the said’ with Zhuangzi’s positing of all the logical opposites, and ‘saying’ with ming-clarity.12. Here ‘eating’ and ‘breathing’—but not ‘speaking’—are mentioned; do the others then not need him to speak? In any case Hundun would not need to ‘speak’ in order to utter ‘useless sayings.’ In another parable in Zhuangzi 26 the master is talking with his friend: Said Hui Shih to Chuang-tzu: ‘These sayings of yours are useless.’ ‘It is only with people who know about the useless that there is any point in talking about uses,’ Chuang-tzu replied. ‘In all the immensity of heaven and earth, a man uses no more ground than he can walk on. If recognizing this we were to dig away the ground around his feet all the way down to the Underworld, would it still be useful to the man?’ ‘It would be useless.’ ‘Then it is plain that the useless does serve a use [無用之為用].’13. Perhaps one might interpret Laozi’s opening line ‘Dao ke dao, fei chang dao’, which has of course various readings, by correlating the ‘spoken’ of ‘The way that can be spoken’ with the rational abstraction of the ‘said’ and correlating the ch’ang dao with ‘saying.’ Or correlate ‘the said’ with Zhuangzi’s positing of all the logical opposites, and ‘saying’ with ming-clarity.14. In ‘Vitality as Responsivity: Levinas and Lao-Zhuang Daoism’, Bradley Douglas Park (2013) compares Levinas’s focus on our physical body, and on our active bodily responses to what is outside of (other than) us, to the Daoist focus on our body’s vitality and attunement to the world around it. For example: ‘Daoism focuses on the cultivation of poised vitality (jing) as the proper relation to alterity, for reasons not unlike those offered by Levinas ... It is this focus on bodily being-toward-the-other that resonates with Levinas’s approach. But whereas Levinas restricts his account in view of the kind of object (i.e. animate vs. inanimate objects), the Daoist perspective simply centers on cultivating non-objectifying modes of attunement and, as such, it does not discriminate in principle between animate and inanimate objects—only between coercive and noncoercive styles of comportment’ (p. 197)

Aesthetics · Ancient history · Art · Emperor · Epistemology · Face (sociological concept · Heaven · Hospitality · Literature · Metaphysics · Theology · Tourism · Chinese history and philosophy · History · Japanese History and Culture · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism