Traditionally fourth century BCE; the dates are uncertain
Zhuangzi
The Zhuangzi is a composite text. The Inner Chapters are often treated as earlier; the Outer and Miscellaneous Chapters are later and varied. Biographical details are not secure.
Zhuangzi is the name attached to a composite Daoist text and, more loosely, to a person of the Warring States period. The book unsettles confident distinctions between useful and useless, self and other, life and death, often by stories rather than by treatise. It is a mistake to score this as libertarian free will, and a mistake to score it as quietism. Its relevance to NOEMA is the pressure it puts on any axis that pretends a distinction is simply given.
Also in the atlas
- Perspective
- Spontaneity
- The limits of fixed distinctions
Reading, not a syllabus ranking
- Zhuangzi — A composite work; the Inner Chapters are the usual starting point, with later chapters that do not all speak in one voice.
Questions for reflection
- Which of your distinctions would survive if you took the other pole’s description as seriously as your own?
Zhuangzi is included so the agency and knowledge pages are not an exclusively European argument. He is not assigned a six-letter code.