Genuine Pretending

On the Philosophy of the Zhuangzi

Hans-Georg Moeller, Paul J. D'Ambrosio

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780231545266
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Philosophies orientales

Genuine Pretending is an innovative and comprehensive new reading of the Zhuangzi that highlights the critical and therapeutic functions of satire and humor. Hans-Georg Moeller and Paul J. D'Ambrosio show how this Daoist classic, contrary to contemporary philosophical readings, distances itself from the pursuit of authenticity and subverts the dominant Confucianism of its time through satirical allegories and ironical reflections.

With humor and parody, the Zhuangzi exposes the Confucian demand to commit to socially constructed norms as pretense and hypocrisy. The Confucian pursuit of sincerity establishes exemplary models that one is supposed to emulate. In contrast, the Zhuangzi parodies such venerated representations of wisdom and deconstructs the very notion of sagehood. Instead, it urges a playful, skillful, and unattached engagement with socially mandated duties and obligations. The Zhuangzi expounds the Daoist art of what Moeller and D'Ambrosio call "genuine pretending": the paradoxical skill of not only surviving but thriving by enacting social roles without being tricked into submitting to them or letting them define one's identity. A provocative rereading of a Chinese philosophical classic, Genuine Pretending also suggests the value of a Daoist outlook today as a way of seeking existential sanity in an age of mass media's paradoxical quest for originality.

1. SINCERITY, AUTHENTICITY, AND ANCIENT CHINESE PHILOSOPHY

Les hommes sont toujours sincères. Ils changent de sincérité, voilà tout (Men are always sincere. They change sincerities, that’s all).

—Tristan Bernard, Ce que l’on dit aux femmes

THE DIALECTIC OF SINCERITY AND CONFUCIAN ETHICS

Despite the considerable impact the modern Western discourse on sincerity and authenticity has had on contemporary scholarship on ancient Confucian and Daoist philosophy, Lionel Trilling’s (1972) seminal and immensely influential book on this subject, Sincerity and Authenticity, seems to have been largely ignored by scholars in the field of Chinese philosophy (exceptions include, for instance, Blum 2007 and Chen Xunwu 2004.) Arguably, the most important work among the many inspired by or written in reaction to Trilling was Charles Taylor’s (2007) A Secular Age, which, it is probably quite safe to say, also did not have much of an effect on the study of Chinese philosophy. Taylor’s book includes a famous section on what he calls the age of authenticity, which connects with Trilling’s earlier work. Along with a more recently published trade book by R. Jay Magill (2012), simply titled Sincerity, Trilling’s and Taylor’s works provide us with some of the central vocabulary for our present investigation—namely, with the notions of sincerity and authenticity. In what follows, we outline why the semantics and the ideas of sincerity and authenticity as discussed by Trilling, Taylor, and Magill are highly relevant, if not for obtaining an understanding of ancient Confucianism and Daoism “in themselves,” then at least for acquiring an understanding of the history of their reception in the past one hundred years, and in the past three or four decades in particular.

We do not wish to engage here in a metadiscourse regarding the current conversation on Chinese philosophy and its often unreflected upon semantic and intellectual resources and socially conditioning contexts. Instead, our aim is to present a book on the philosophy of the Zhuangzi and its historical environment. However, we want to provide at least a brief overview of one of the major conceptual frameworks that has been applied explicitly and implicitly to the literature. We argue, broadly speaking, that Trilling’s distinction between sincerity and authenticity reflects distinctive intellectual and cultural trends in Western modernity. These trends have also permeated modern representations of Confucian and Daoist philosophies. Confucianism has typically been understood as representing an ethics of sincerity; and we think that this understanding fits the traditional reception of Confucian ethics quite well and, in particular, the depiction of Confucianism found in the Zhuangzi. Correspondingly—or alternatively, however one may like to see it—Daoism and the philosophy of the Zhuangzi have typically been identified as representing a philosophy of authenticity; we disagree with this identification and suggest a different one: genuine pretending.

Trilling begins his reflections on the history of sincerity and authenticity with a remarkable and beautifully phrased reflection on the hermeneutics of a history of ideas. It has lost nothing of its validity and simple profundity and indeed has become only more relevant in the context of the ongoing methodological debates in comparative philosophy. For this reason, it is worth quoting in full:

We read the Iliad or the plays of Sophocles or Shakespeare and they come so close to our hearts and minds that they put to rout, or into abeyance, our instructed consciousness of the moral life as it is conditioned by a particular culture—they persuade us that human nature never varies, that the moral life is unitary and its terms perennial, and that only a busy intruding pedantry could ever have suggested otherwise.

And then yet again, on still another view of the case, this judgment reverses itself and we find ourselves noting with eager attention all the details of assumption, thought, and behavior that distinguish the morality of one age from that of another, and it seems to us that quick and informed awareness of the differences among moral idioms is of the very essence of a proper response to literature.

This ambivalence I describe is my own as I propose the idea that at a certain point in history the moral life of Europe added to itself a new element, the state or quality of the self which we call sincerity.

(Trilling 1972, 2)

Although Trilling speaks here neither of non-Western cultures nor of philosophy but rather of Western literature, he addresses with disarming honesty the central antagonism of universalism versus relativism that still haunts what continues to be called comparative philosophy. Trilling exposes the core of the debates about contrastive or comparative approaches in East-West philosophy by indicating that the ambiguity between these poles never truly vanishes, at least not on a personal level, if one is honest with oneself—or, to put it less morally and thus probably more correctly, if one is a good reader. In the end, one has to take a leap of faith and go one way or another, either in the direction the winds are currently blowing or not. Clearly, for Trilling, sincerity is an exclusively modern (and European) phenomenon—in texts and culturally, though not psychologically or cognitively—and accordingly authenticity is too, since it develops out of sincerity. With respect to China, we make a different observation in this book, but not without feeling the very same ambiguity that he describes so aptly. We do think that it makes sense to detect, as so many authors have, more or less the same problems of sincerity that contemporary society wrangles with, if not in the Iliad or the plays of Sophocles, certainly in the Analects and the Mencius. But then again, our leap of faith is a split one, and we jump right back in the other direction by assuming that, unlike in modern Europe, the “dialectic of sincerity” (Kelly 2014) in ancient China did not—or at least not in the case of the Zhuangzi—result in the transformation of sincerity into authenticity. Instead, we argue that it took a different course toward what we call genuine pretending.

The following quotation leads us to the heart of Trilling’s conception of modern Western sincerity, albeit in an indirect way, by approaching it from the perspective of a postsincerity era that has already lost its former trust in sincerity and moved beyond it. True to Hegel, whose spirit is present from the first to the last pages of Sincerity and Authenticity, Trilling seems to suggest that the dialectical negation of sincerity begets a more complete grasp (or Begriff) of its essence. After all, the “essence” (or das Wesen) is, as Hegel explained famously at the beginning of the “Doctrine of Essence” in his Science of Logic, that which is gewesen (or vergangen)—that is, that which “has been” or “is gone.” Once we have critically distanced ourselves from sincerity, we understand better, in hindsight, what it has always essentially been: “If sincerity has lost its former status, if the word itself has for us a hollow sound and seems almost to negate its meaning, that is because it does not purpose being true to one’s own self as an end but only as a means. If one is true to one’s own self for the purpose of avoiding falsehood to others, is one being truly true to one’s own self? The moral end in view implies a public end in view, with all that this suggests of the esteem and fair repute that follow upon the correct fulfillment of a public role” (Trilling 1972, 9).

Sincerity basically means “being true to one’s own self ” by doing what one does and saying what one says honestly. It means that one’s actions and words are backed up by one’s own internal feelings and convictions. At the same time, the vector of sincerity points from the inside to the outside, from one’s true self with its convictions and emotions toward the public sphere, where these are represented and where they manifest themselves. This is the sense in which Trilling speaks of sincerity—in hindsight—as a means. The purpose of the correspondence between one’s inner self and one’s public persona is to support or to guarantee the latter by means of the former. The inner self legitimates the outer self. This is to say that the morality of sincerity is ultimately a public morality: its purpose is to provide a moral foundation for social agency and interchange. It allows for social trust and other components of social order such as—to use a word that is currently quite popular in China—harmony (hexie 和諧). This is also confirmed by the “reward” one can expect for being sincere—namely, “esteem and fair repute,” which can be bestowed unto the sincere person only by others and is thus once more clearly of a social nature.

Trilling is keenly aware of the crucial importance of a word that, as he says, he initially used only coincidentally or for matters of sheer expedience but that actually turned out to be most significant for his understanding of sincerity—the word “role”:

I did not deliberately choose that last word. It came readily—“naturally”—to hand. We nowadays say “role” without taking thought of its original histrionic meaning: “in my professional role,” “in my paternal, or maternal, role,” even “in my masculine, or feminine, role.” But the old histrionic meaning is present whether or not we let ourselves be aware of it, and it brings with it the idea that somewhere under all the roles there is Me, that poor old ultimate actuality, who, when all the roles have been played, would like to murmur “Off, off, you lendings!” and settle down with his own original actual self.

(Trilling 1972, 9–10)

Trilling here exposes the essential interrelatedness and interdependency of the concept of sincerity and the wider genre of an ethics focusing on social roles. Given the outward direction of its vector, inner sincerity is always not only tied to but also geared toward and directed by public roles. Not without paradox, its very point is therefore to reduce the difference it produces between the inner self and its public role, if not to nothing, then to a minimum. Paradoxically, the “invention” of sincerity, which demands a full correspondence between the self and its role, creates the very split between inner self and outer self that is supposed to be resolved by reinstating conformity between the two. The demand for conformity produces an awareness of a distinction that could not have been communicated, and so become socially relevant, without that very demand in the first place.

The notion of sincerity implies that our concrete social personae, the persona of a father, mother, teacher, and so forth, are not merely a theatrical impersonation, not merely histrionic, as Trilling says, or played. The “original paradox” of the notion of sincerity—that it produces the split between an inner self and an outer self that it then purports to close—is mirrored in the wider conceptions of a relational ethics, no matter if it demands a full identity between personhood and roles1 or if it allows for the two to remain distinct as long as they are in sincere congruence (as for many Confucian thinkers, including, for instance, Tu Weiming2). An ethics focused on roles or relations presupposes a division between persons and their roles and relations and then demands that the role or relation does not merely remain a role (or relation) but becomes a true expression of the person as well. Once “father” or “teacher” is understood to refer to a role that one plays, one is asked to play it sincerely and therefore no longer only to play it. The “old histrionic meaning” of a role is supposed to be transformed into a new ethical meaning of a sincerely adopted or expressed or—in more radical versions of Confucianism—lived role (see Ames 2011, 96). In short, and reiterating what we said in our introduction, what interests us in a reading of Confucian ethics as relational or role oriented is not the now much-debated question of whether this conception does or does not allow for autonomous agency (though we do not think that this question had much influence on the Zhuangzi) but rather that in any case it has been typically understood as prescribing sincerity.

Regarding the task of establishing personal identity, the notion of sincerity presents as much a solution as a problem. And the same is the case for an ethics that is tied to it. But, of course, from a Hegelian perspective, this could not be otherwise and is by no means a unique property of sincerity but of all formations of the spirit; however, since we are not writing a book on Hegel, we will not pursue this issue any further. Instead, we return to Trilling and his discovery of the “Me” that the idea of sincerity inserts into ethics and that also imbues it with a fundamental and irresolvable suspicion: if I fulfill my roles properly, am I playing them insincerely or am I sincerely enacting them? The distinction between the self and its role is the semantic condition and social framework of the moral distinction between sincerity and insincerity. The categorical demand for sincerity breeds an equally categorical suspicion of insincerity. Or, in the logic of the Daodejing, sincerity and insincerity generate each other. You cannot have one without the other.

When the Me is burdened with a constant effort to “make sincere” (cheng zhi 誠之) a role it finds itself facing—or, in other words, when it is asked to constantly make sincere a social face that is imposed on it—it may eventually become fatigued. At some point, it can no longer play the teacher or the father convincingly for others and may feel that it has failed as a true teacher or father. In the end, it may cease to believe in its identification with its social role. The latent and unavoidable inbuilt suspicion of insincerity cannot be voiced only by society but also by the Me against itself. It can become the subject and object of this suspicion. And at this very point it can finally cry out in desperation, to quote Trilling, “Off, off, you lendings!” When the “dialectic of sincerity” has come full circle, the Me tires of the constant suspicion it is exposed to and has a fortiori been led to inwardly adopt and practice. It wants to sh...