The denial that the Way is communicable in words is a familiar paradox of Taoism. Lao-tzŭ begins with the line ‘The Way that can be told is not the constant Way’, which has always tempted humorists Chinese or Western to ask why the author went on to write the book.92 The irony is especially acute in the case of Chuang-tzŭ, a master of rhapsodic prose, sophisticated argument, aphorism, anecdote, and gnomic verse, who professes a boundless scepticism as to the possibility of ever saying anything.
On closer inspection the joke loses most of its point. Taoists are trying to communicate a knack, an aptitude, a way of living, and when the carpenter tells Duke Huan that he cannot put into words how much pressure to exert in chiselling wood we both understand and agree. With philosophers who profess to know unformulable truths, an ineffable reality, no doubt we have the right to become impatient, but Taoists, as we have noticed already,93 do not think in terms of discovering Truth or Reality. They merely have the good sense to remind us of the limitations of the language which they use to guide us towards that altered perspective on the world and that knack of living. To point the direction they use stories, verses, aphorisms, any verbal means which come to hand. Far from having no need for words they require all available resources of literary art, which is why all the classics of philosophical Taoism (Lao-tzŭ, Chuang-tzŭ, Lieh-tzŭ) have won important places in the literary history of China.
A classification of three modes of language is developed in a ‘Mixed chapters’ episode closely related to ‘The sorting which evens things out’, and in the account of Chuang-tzŭ in the historical chapter ‘Below in the empire’ his own writing is said to exhibit all of them.94 The three terms belong to a special vocabulary developed by Chuang-tzŭ in criticising disputation, did not outlast him, and were soon misunderstood. But their meaning can be clarified in the light of the relativism of ‘The sorting which evens things out’, according to which the sage moves freely between temporary ‘lodging-places’ instead of being trapped in a permanent standpoint.
(1) ‘Saying from a lodging-place’ appears to be persuasion by argumentum ad hominem, the only kind of victory in debate which could have any point for Chuang-tzŭ. You temporarily ‘lodge’ at the other man’s standpoint, because the meanings he gives to words are for him the only meanings, and he will not debate on any other basis.
(2) ‘Weighted saying’ is ‘what is said on one’s own authority’, backed by depth of experience, not merely the respect given to age. The aphorism would be the most concentrated example.
(3) ‘Spillover saying’ is traditionally and plausibly supposed to be named after a kind of vessel which tips over when filled to the brim and then rights itself. This is discussed at greater length than the other two taken together. We are told that it is for daily use, says most when it says least and least when it says most, that it shifts freely from one standpoint to another, and that we cannot prolong discourse or live out our lives without it. Presumably this is the ordinary language in which meanings fluctuate but right themselves in the spontaneous flow of discourse, providing that the speaker has the knack of using words, can ‘smooth it out on the whetstone of Heaven’.
Chuang-tzŭ’s regular mode is the language which spontaneously rights itself like the spilling vessel; he uses words not like a philosopher but like a poet, sensitive to their richness, exploiting their ambiguities, letting conflicting meanings explode against each other in apparent contradiction. Thus Chuang-tzŭ and his school delight in using ‘know’ in different senses in a single sentence. When, for example, we are advised to ‘know by depending on what the wits do not know’,95 we can see that knowing how, which is good, is being contrasted with knowing that, which is bad. But Taoists do not analyse such meanings, unlike the later Mohists, who in their Canons distinguish four kinds of knowing: knowing names, objects, how to relate them and how to act.96
The crucial point for Chuang-tzŭ is that words have no fixed meanings except in the artificial conditions of intellectual debate, in which one may as well accept the opponent’s definitions, since they are no more or less arbitrary than any others. ‘Saying is not blowing breath, saying says something; the only trouble is that what it says is never fixed. Do we really say something? Or have we never said anything? If you think it different from the twitter of fledgelings, is there proof of the distinction? Or isn’t there any proof?’ 97 Yet words do order themselves in speech, not according to any rules of disputation, but by that unanalysable knack which he discerns at the bottom of all successful behaviour, and which is the sign that Heaven is working through us. The meanings of discourse spontaneously right themselves as long as we ‘smooth it out on the whetstone of Heaven’; even the competing voices of philosophers are the ‘pipes of Heaven’, which blows through them as the wind blows different noises from hollows of different shapes.98