Chuang Tzu: Mystic, Moralist, and Social Reformer

...and the contempt for common views is indeed equally marked in Eleaticism a school of pre-Socratic philosophy that argued reality is a single, unchanging substance, and there is much in Chuang Tzu original: "Chuang Tzŭ" which recalls Parmenides¹ regarding the contrast between the way of truth and the way of error—the true belief in the One versus the popular belief in the Many. But it seems to me that the “One” of Chuang Tzu is not the dead Unit of Eleaticism, which resulted from thinking away all differences, but the living Unity of Heraclitus original: "Heracleitus", in which contraries co-exist. Heraclitus, indeed, seems to have been a man after Chuang Tzu’s own heart, not only in his obscurity, which won for him the title of “the Obscure” original: "ὁ σκοτεινὸς", but in his indifference to worldly position. This was shown in the fact that, like the Emperor Yao, he abdicated in his brother’s favor (Diogenes Laertius ix. 1), and in his supercilious disregard for the learned like Hesiod, Pythagoras, Xenophanes, and Hecataeus,² no less than for the common people³ of his day.

“Listen,” says Heraclitus, “not to me, but to reason the Logos, or the fundamental order of the universe, and confess the true wisdom that ‘All things are One.’”⁴ “All is One: the divided and the undivided, the begotten and the unbegotten, the mortal and the immortal, reason and eternity, father and son, God and justice.”⁵ “Cold is hot, heat is cold, that which is moist is parched, that which is dried up is wet.”⁶ “Good and evil are the same.”⁷ “Gods are mortal, men immortal: our life is their death, our death their life.”⁸ “Upward and downward are the same.”⁹ “The beginning and the end are one.”¹⁰ “Life and death, sleeping and waking, youth and age are identical.”¹¹

This is what reason tells the philosopher. “All is One.” The world is a unity of opposing forces (the back-turning harmony of the world, like that of the bow and the lyre).¹² original Greek: "παλίντροπος ἁρμονίη κόσμου ὅκωσπερ λύρας καὶ τόξου" “Join together whole and not whole, agreeing and different, harmonious and discordant. Out of all comes one: out of one all.”¹³ “God is day-night, winter-summer, war-peace, fullness-want.”¹⁴ The very rhythm of nature is strife. War, which men hate and the poets would banish, “is the father and lord of all.”¹⁵ But “men are without understanding; they hear and hear not,”¹⁶ or “they hear and understand not.”¹⁷

¹ See the fragments in Ritter and Preller’s History of Greek Philosophy § 93 and § 94 A. B. Seventh edition.
² Fragments of Heraclitus of Ephesus, Bywater, xvi.
³ Heraclitus, the abuser of the mob original Greek: "ὀχλολοίδορος Ἡράκλειτος". Timon in Diogenes Laertius ix. i.
⁴ "Listening not to me, but to the Word (Logos), it is wise to agree that all things are one." original Greek: "Οὐκ ἐμεῦ ἀλλὰ τοῦ λογου ἀκούσαντας ὁμολογέειν σοφόν ἐστι ἓν πάντα εἶναι" Fragments of Heraclitus of Ephesus, i.
⁵ Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies ix. 9.
⁶ Fragments of Heraclitus of Ephesus, xxxix.
⁷ Ibid., lvii.
⁸ Ibid., lxvii.
⁹ Ibid., lxix.
¹⁰ Ibid., lxx.
¹¹ Ibid., lxxviii.
¹² Ibid., xlv.
¹³ Ibid., lix.
¹⁴ Ibid., xxxvi.
¹⁵ Ibid., xliv.
¹⁶ Ibid., iii.
¹⁷ Ibid., v.