Among the pre-Qin Chinese texts, the Zhuangzi has proved to be one of the hardest to pin down and has lead to a variety of discussions concerning whether the authors of the text are relativists, or skeptics (and, if so, what kind), or whether they simply subscribe to a form of intuitionism that does not do away with the possibility of attaining knowledge about the world, but doubts our ability to communicate it via speech. A common interpretational route is to focus on skill stories and suggest a dichotomy between “the physical world” and “discursive thought,” which is expected to make skills ineffable and unteachable. This presentation will examine various skill stories, along with what might be considered alternative teaching scenes in the text. I too will thus examine skill stories in relation to the broader discussions on the issue of the limits of the linguistic sphere in the Zhuangzi, however following the lead of scholars such as Moeller and Geaney, among others, I will resist reading a language/reality or representation/presence dichotomy into the text. I will instead inquire into the possibility that part of the difficulty in teaching a skill to others is the fact that it requires mastery and negotiation of multiple skill sets of which linguistic skills are a part.

Sonya Özbey is the Tang Junyi Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan’s Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies. Her primary research field is pre-Qin Chinese philosophy. She is also interested in comparative approaches to philosophy that trace a topic across different philosophical streams and inquire into different articulations of it. She is currently revising a book manuscript on the trope of animality and the human/animal distinction in the Zhuangzi and Spinoza.