Study Guide to Chuang Tzu's "Independence"


Study Guide to

Chuang Tzu's "Independence"

(1) The editors' introduction to the story gives a summary representation of the philosopher Chuang Tzu's philosophy. Does the story communicate all of these features of the philosopher's outlook on life to us, or does only part of this outlook come through in the story? That is: if we had only the story, and knew nothing else of Chuang Tzu, would it be possible to interpret this narrative as indicating something quite different about the protagonist's philosophy?

(2) Suppose the facts of the story were different. What if the Prince of Ch'u were known to have mounted up above his ancestral altar the stuffed remains of a sacred falcon, dead some three thousand years. Chuang Tzu might then have responded to the emissaries' request by pointing to this fact, and asking "Do you think that falcon would rather be dead and have its remains thus honoured, or be alive and wheeling around in the heavens, and swooping to capture its prey?" The officials would answer that no doubt it would rather be alive and wheeling around in the heavens, and swooping to capture its prey. The philosopher would then cry out, "Begone! I too elect to remain wheeling around in the heavens, and swooping to capture my prey." Obviously, there would be some respects in which this story would be equivalent to the original. But in how many ways would the ultimate effect and/or meaning of such a story be subtly (and perhaps fundamentally) different from that of the story we have here? Which would you regard as more effective? Can you explain why?

(3) Suppose the facts of the story we have were changed in a different way. Suppose there were no sacred tortoise beneath the ancestral altar of the Prince of Ch'u, but that the prince was known to keep the remains of favorite childhood pet (a tortoise, as it happens) in a box under his bed. Would the philosopher Chuang Tzu, when approached by the emissaries with the same request, have been able to make as effective a point as he does on the basis of the facts of the story as we have it?

(4) Suppose the facts of the story were exactly the same as we have them at the outset, except that its conclusion was "...whereupon Chuang Tzu smiled and said, "You may return, my good sirs. I too elect to remain wagging my tail in the mud." How would the portrait of the philosopher be altered? Would that portrait be consistent, or inconsistent, with the outlook on life we attribute to him on the basis of the original? with the outlook on life described by the editors in their headnote to the piece?

(5) Suppose the translator or editors had outfitted the story with the title "Self-indulgence" instead of "Independence." Or how about "Seize the Day"? Would the overall effect of our experience with the story be changed in any way that is important?

(6) What do you notice in common about the sequence of moves made in each of the five questions you've just worked through? What seems to be the point of that sequence of moves?

(7) Let's consider some structural features of the narrative here. Note that this story actually consists of two stories, one embedded within the other.

The frame story is the one about the encounter between Chuang Tzu and the emissaries from the Prince of Ch'u.
The embedded story is the story about the sacred tortoise and the way its remains are treated by the prince. (The telling of this story is an event within the frame story.)
On the face of it, the frame story is realistic -- a straightforward telling of some facts in the life of a Chinese philosopher (or, from another perspective, some minor facts in the political history of the State of Ch'u).
So is the embedded story, at first glance: these are some facts about the larger situation in the state of Ch'u, with whose administration the prince has asked for the philosopher's help, though of course at first they initially strike us, as they must have struck the emissaries -- as tangential, even irrelevant, to the situation at hand. Their only connection with the frame story at first seems to be that they are told by one of its characters to some other characters within it.
But when the facts of the embedded story do become relevant within the frame story as a whole, that relevance is enabled by our understanding them as parabolic. They are still realistic details -- even (we may be willing to suppose) real historical facts -- within the State of Ch'u, but they are not merely realistic: they are also parabolic about the actual attitudes of the teller towards the choice the emissaries' call confronts him with.
These attitudes are also facts within the frame story. And it is these attitudes that motivate the teller's decision to turn down the offer -- resolving the conflict the frame story is built around.
- A striking feature of the frame story is therefore that the most emphatic element of its plot -- its climax -- is not directly stated. The reader has to constructively reach it by making an inference from the explicit facts of the narrative. The protagonist's most important acts -- his decision to reject the prince's offer, his reasoning in reaching this decision, and his explaining this decision and reasoning to his prince -- are crucial to the story (the frame story) the narrative puts before us, but are left out of the flow of explicit details that the narrative we are directly given consists of. If the reader doesn't make the move of bridging the apparent gap in coherence by capturing just what exactly unites the imagined tortoise's situation with the one the protagonist understands himself to be in, he never sees the rationale for the protagonist's act -- or, indeed, for that matter, the act itself. If we don't tune into the plot, we surely are not (and in a quite fundamental way!) "where the action is"! But to do this here, we have to be engaged in some quite specific actions of our own. This little story thus plays a particular kind of game with its reader that we will see over and over again: it confronts us with an apparent incoherence and challenges us to find, with the help it then also affords, some way of connecting things back together. This game in fact shows up in all sorts of communication games -- oral or written, in argument and exposition as well as in drama and narration, and regardless of what other games might be under way in (say) a given story. We might call this the game of feigned nonsense and its enabling convention is that things are said to communicate something that makes sense. (A corollary of this convention is that not every sense is the same as any other, so that when we undertake to communication, we mean one thing rather than just any other, and that when we seek to grasp what is communicated, we are concerned to discover what this happens to be. This obvious-sounding assumption has some consequences that students are sometimes skeptical about buying into.)
  - It is only because people suppose with each other that what we say makes sense that the emissaries can be jolted by Chuang Tzu's initial response to their offer: it doesn't seem to be a response to their offer, i.e., it seems to be an impertinence (something disrespectful) or idiotic (mind-wandering), either of which is out of character for a philosopher one's boss would deem worthy of assigning important political duties to.
  - And it is only because this supposition is in fact at work in the story, despite initial appearances, that the emissaries can eventually understand what the philosopher's reply to their offer is for them to take back to their master
  - Further: it is only because this supposition is at work that the philosopher can demonstrate to us (as to them and their prince) what his particular character as a philosopher is. (Take some time out to explore this! It's more complicated than it may appear even when we get what we initially take to be his point!) And this means this supposition is fundamental to our appreciation of the peculiar value of that revealed character. (What is this, for you? Something positive? Something negative? Something you have mixed feelings about? What do you learn of yourself, from reflecting on your reactions?)

(8) Let's close by returning to the frame story itself, and asking a question not about something within it but about its relation to things outside itself. We've already seen, with the embedded story, that it is possible for a narrative to be simultaneously realistic and parabolic.

Some narratives of course are exclusively the one or the other. Jesus' stories about the Sower and about the Good Seed are represented (in Matthew's frame narrative itself) as strictly parables. The fairy tale "Godfather Death" [or try here], while clearly fictional, and even fantastical, is "realistic" in one quite narrow sense: it pretends to be an account of a sequence of events that happened, that we can re-imagine with the help of the narrative: it doesn't stand to its meaning (the pretended history it recounts) in the way in which a parabolic story stands to the meaning it is designed to convey. To be sure, it doesn't play the game of "realism" as that term is usefully employed in quite a different special sense: it doesn't undertake to immerse us in a concrete texture of lived experience, by inviting us to pretend that we are undergoing, through our identification with some character in the story, some "real-life" experience, however alien to our familiar existence. A story like Chopin's "The Story of an Hour", though, is realistic in both of these distinct senses.

How about the story we have just been considering -- the frame story as a whole? Here we first need to remind ourselves of something that's a bit misleading about the format in which our editors have presented the text. We might be led to suppose that the author of the tale is Chuang Tzu himself. Certainly, in the frame story, Chuang Tzu is the author of the embedded story. But just as surely he is not to be taken as the author of the tale handed down to us. We can imagine him telling a story of the incident, in the first-person, to his disciples. But we imagine this as one of a series of stories handed down by tradition, by a chain of disciples who have decided to pass the memory of him along to posterity. Let's consider then the frame story as the product of his disciples. We ask then: what are we to understand their point to have been in framing and passing along this story?
- Of course they do take it to be a faithful representation of something that happened, revealing the character of the philosopher they define themselves as disciples of by revering, and seeking to emulate. (The fact that we may suspect that it is in fact legendary, the product of -- rather than part of the ground of -- their reverence is irrelevant to the present point.)
- But does it make sense to discover in this frame story a parabolic dimension in addition to this "realistic" one?
  - What might this be? What features would we attend to in order to explore the possibilities of constructing the kind of parallel that parables embody?
  - Or, if we persist in carrying this out, do we feel, on reflection, that we are stretching things too far? On balance, do we feel confident that this story is not also to be construed as a parable, but is content simply to instruct by example? Is Chuang Tzu in this tale being presented to us just as an instance of a kind of character (assumptions, values, attitudes) that might be instantiated in any one of us, if we were to find our way to settling upon the relevant priorities?

The text of the story can be found here, but is accessible only on the course website at K-State Online.

Suggestions are welcome. Please send your comments to lyman@ksu.edu .

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This page last updated 15 January 2003 .