Research
I work on Chinese philosophy and ethics, broadly construed, with a particular emphasis on their intersection and extending to related issues in aesthetics.
Overall, my research is guided by the hunch that the ideal figure which emerges from the literature on “how to live” is often too serious to be a genuine ideal—or at least to be the only sort of ideal.
In search of a lighter vision of how to live, I turn to Zhuangzi, an ancient Daoist whose philosophy is often described as playful, especially in contrast to the tradition of Confucianism.
Let me explain how this overall research goal breaks into, and leading to, different projects in different fields.
Playful Interpretation of Zhuangzi
With full awareness of the complexity of the Zhuangzi, and with full awareness of the danger of anachronism, my research focuses on the Zhuangzian elements that may “loosen up” mainstream perspectives about how to live. One element from the Zhuangzi which I have therefore chosen to explore is “play”. In “To Love Surprise Like a Butterfly: A Zhuangzian Life of Playing” (forthcoming in Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy), I develop the widely shared intuition that Zhuangzi is playful and address the apparent tension between Zhuangzi’s joy and skepticism. I argue that Zhuangzi can be an anxiety-free—even joyful—skeptic because he is playful: He is not frustrated by his epistemic limit but loves to confront that limit in the experience of being surprised, like a child having fun being surprised by a bouncy ball.
In future work, I aim to expand this playful interpretation to another important Zhuangzian element: transformation. The Zhuangzi is full of stories about radical transformations beyond our control, but it seems that Zhuangzi is never stressed about these transformations. It seems that Zhuangzi never bothers to guard the boundary between different things, or different sorts of things, because the question of identity does not bother him. A common explanation is that Zhuangzi erases the differences that look salient to us by adopting a cosmic perspective or being one with the Dao. While this “oneness” interpretation has some textual support, it may make Zhuangzi aloof, as opposed to lively. Aiming to see how far the idea of playfulness can go, I propose to provide an alternative, “extremely playful” explanation. That is, most of us are playful enough to enjoy losing control over a ball. But Zhuangzi is so playful that he even enjoys losing control over his identity, thus joyfully letting himself go into the transformation.
Finally, the Zhuangzi is known for its varying rhetorical devices. In “To Love Surprise Like a Butterfly”, I have explained how the image of a fluttering butterfly functions as an invitation to play. Next, I will explore the significance of other images (fish, birds, water, rotation, etc.) in Zhuangzi and the boarder Daoist tradition. )
The above project on the playful interpretation of Zhuangzi naturally leads me to an investigation into the nature of play. In “The Nature of Play: Having Fun with the Unexpected and the Uncontrollable” (in progress), I argue that the playful attitude, which carries us through the activity of play, is a loving attitude toward the experience of confronting the unexpected and the uncontrollable. A ball, for example, is a great playmate because it moves freely in all directions, responding to our move with a countermove that is not completely within our control—thereby surprising us. We may enjoy a sense of achievement when we succeed in responding to this “challenging” ball. But we enjoy a sense of fun when we are being challenged.
I aim to continue my analysis of play and playfulness in three lines. First, I will incorporate studies from other fields, including psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, and animal studies. For example, I plan to examine the psychological literature concerned with the personality trait “Openness to Experience” and to see the relation between openness and play.
Secondly, I have contrasted this playful attitude of loving the experience of being surprised and losing control with a serious, everyday attitude of disliking that experience. But this contrast could be more nuanced. So, I aim to draw on aesthetics and moral psychology to study mental states that may offer interesting contrasts to playfulness. These mental states include interest, curiosity, boredom, anxiety, alienation, irony, and awe. Awe, for instance, involves the enjoyment of being challenged by something “bigger” than oneself (like the Grand Canyon). So, while awe and playfulness both involve a humble attitude of not taking oneself too seriously, only playfulness involves the radical irreverence of not taking anything, including oneself, too seriously. It seems that the world of play is a world without strict hierarchy, where nothing is overpowering so that everything can play together. I aim to explore this irreverence and breakdown of hierarchy in relation to Bakhtin’s idea of “carnival”, comedy (as opposed to tragedy), and entertainment (as opposed to fine art). For example, classic tragedy tends to center around a few elites (e.g., the king) whereas comedy tends to feature more diverse characters, including those from lower classes.
Thirdly, I will research on humor and games, with a focus on “nonsense humor” (the sort of humor where an incongruity is presented without a resolution) and Nguyen’s so-called “stupid games” (e.g., Twister. Games in which the fun part comes from failure). My proposal is that we can pinpoint the levity of playfulness by understanding how stupid games are “stupid”, thus different from other sorts of games, and how nonsense humor is “nonsense”, thus different from other sorts of humor. Then from the levity of playfulness, a broader concept of playfulness can emerge—one that extends beyond typical examples of play, like playing with a ball.
Playfulness & its Relatives
Serious Western Ethics
The first two projects on Zhuangzi and playfulness enable me to carry out the third project: to see whether my original hunch is right that the ideal figure which emerges from the literature on “how to live” is often too serious, i.e., has no room for play. To the extent that most ethical traditions cherish our abilities to predict and to control, my hunch is justified—because the frustration of these two cherished abilities is exactly what the playful spirit loves. In my dissertation, I develop this idea using Hurka’s Aristotelian principle (that to love what is good is itself good and to love what is bad is itself bad) and the perfectionist view (that the exercise and development of our rational abilities to know and to act is good). I argue that the combination of the two doctrines leads to the condemnation of playfulness as a bad love for something bad. In future work, I will explore this rejection of playfulness in other forms. For example, according to Kant and Santayana, nonsense humor is irrational because our rational part, whose desire to know is frustrated, cannot enjoy nonsense. I will examine whether this irrationality objection to humor will lead to an irrationality objection against play, which will then lead to a too serious vision of how to live.
Besides this straightforward depreciation of the limit of our abilities to predict and to control, I will investigate Nussbaum’s more complex position. She argues that we, as creatures depending on the world beyond our control, are drawn by two opposing ideals: aspiring to become self-sufficient and embracing our fragility. While the latter ideal suggests some appreciation of our limit, I argue that Nussbaum’s model is still too serious and omits the third option: play. In particular, I will emphasize the seriousness of embracing fragility—the ideal figure that emerges here is more like a tragic hero as opposed to a comedic fool.
Another line of research corresponds to my proposal that Zhuangzi’s extreme playfulness makes him not care about his identity, which in turn makes him joyfully let himself be radically transformed. In contrast, most ethicists seem to care a lot about our identity—either as a human being or as an individual. For example, Aristotelian (and Mencius’) tradition emphasizes the development of human nature and Kantian tradition emphasizes human dignity. Bernard Williams’ criticism against utilitarianism depends upon the claim that people’s actions should flow from projects which those people most closely identify with. If my proposal is right that Zhuangzi, in not worrying about his identity, is playful, then these ethicists’ “obsession” about identity makes them serious: they anxiously guard the boundary between human beings and beasts, or even oneself and others.
Lastly, I will discuss how philosophers have “domesticated” the concept of play by watering down its levity. Play has been linked by philosophers to “respectable” values such as autonomy and achievement. On the contrary, I link play to the “disappointing” side of us—i.e., our imperfection in predicting and controlling things. This is not just a matter of how to use the word “play”. Rather, my point is that the levity of play lies in the celebration of our imperfection. So, a domesticated concept of play that misses this levity cannot point to a lighter way of living.
Finally, I reflect upon the proper place of playfulness in a good life. A difficulty which emerges concerns our love-hate relationship with play. On the one hand, play seems to be only for our immature part that we aspire to “grow out of”, which explains the lack of play in mainstream ethics. On the other hand, a life without play seems to be inhumanly heavy and too harsh to be good, which motivates my search for a play revision to ethics.
Rather than resolutely siding with either intuition, I propose to acknowledge both. For all of us, who are already oscillating between the two, the good news is that whichever side we are currently on, we are free from the guilt of indulging in something bad. On the other hand, the bad news is that whichever side we are currently on, we cannot escape the remorse of sacrificing another also important but incompatible good. I argue that this inevitable remorse is not a problem for my proposal, but simply a result of our complicated situation.
I will explore how different ethical theories may be able to accommodate this ambiguity of the value of play. Take perfectionism for example. I will revisit the Aristotelian principle (that to love what is bad is itself bad) and explore the following possibility: the exercise and growth of our ability to predict and control is good and the impediment of that exercise and growth is bad. But, oddly enough, holding a positive attitude toward that bad thing—like we do when we are having fun playing with a bouncy ball—can be not bad but even good.
At the heart of our love-hate relationship with play, the key for a lighter vision of how to live, lies the question of how to live in a world “going against our way”. So, in future work, I will connect this question about play with the issue of luck in ethics.
Our Love-Hate Relaitonship to Play
