SOURCE: Chenyang Li. “What-Being: Chuang Tzu Versus Aristotle.” International Philosophical Quarterly 33, no. 131 (September 1993): 341-53.

In the following essay, Chenyang Li examines the differing methods by which Chuang Tzu and Aristotle determine what something is.

In a way, the philosophy of Chuang Tzu (b. 369 b.c., China) is radically non-commonsensical. For instance, he says “nothing in the world is bigger than the tip of an autumn hair, and Mount T'ai is small.”¹ Nevertheless, behind Chuang Tzu's willingness to depart from ordinary ways of talking, there is a metaphysics of everyday reality. The purpose of this paper is to compare Chuang Tzu's view of what an object is—its “what-being”—to a highly influential Western view that derives from Aristotle. I will show how Chuang Tzu's metaphysics is a plausible alternative to the Aristotelian philosophy.

I

A common view of being goes like this: an object² falls into a certain...