SOURCE: Hall, David. “Nietzsche and Chuang Tzu: Resources for the Transcendence of Culture.” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 11, no. 2 (June 1984): 139-52.

In the following essay, Hall explores the similarities in the thought between Nietzsche and Chuang Tzu, arguing that both developed a philosophy that exists outside of their own cultures.

Establishing a suitable context within which valuable comparisons of thinkers as diverse as Nietzsche and Chuang Tzu might be made presents problems associated with differing histories, languages, and institutional relationships as obvious as they would be tedious to rehearse. One way of escaping many of these difficulties is to avoid direct doctrinal comparisons and to approach the relation of these two thinkers indirectly, from a functional perspective. This I shall do. I propose to highlight the function of certain aspects of the vision of each thinker within his cultural milieu. This approach has its own peculiar difficulties, of course...