The Affinities and Similarities Between Zhuangzi’s Philosophy and Late Greek Philosophy (Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Cynicism)

I. Affinities and Similarities

Many German and American philosophers and psychologists appreciate Daoist philosophy: Jung, Fromm, Maslow, Tolle, Hesse, and a whole host of others.

Zhuangzi’s philosophy also has much in common with late ancient Greek philosophy itself.

a. Epicureanism’s philosophy of happiness, pleasure, and tranquility, its philosophy of nature and death, materialism, dialectics, existentialism, and humanism (these share the same core as Zhuangzi’s thought and belong to the same period: Epicurus, 341–270 BCE; Zhuangzi, 369–c. 286 BCE).

b. Cynicism’s philosophy of critique and lying flat (Zhuangzi was a grandmaster of lying flat and a master of critique and deconstruction, which is why the Confucians hated him so deeply. In the Outer and Miscellaneous Chapters of the *Zhuangzi*, his disciples developed this critique further. In “Rifling Trunks,” they advanced such radical criticisms as the claim that sages, laws, morality, and so on “stand guard for great robbers,” that wealth and knowledge “are accumulated for great robbers,” and that “until the sages die, the great robbers will never cease.” This level of critique already approaches the Marxist critique of the superstructure and ideology.)

c. Stoicism’s ideas about cosmic laws, the limits of the individual, virtue, withdrawal from worldly affairs, and so on (these are relatively close to the *Dao De Jing* and Huang-Lao thought, and to some extent also constitute a kind of theory of rulership. For example, the *Meditations* of the famous Stoic Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor, is very popular in the West).

II. The Same Historical Period

The reason is that the late ancient Greek and Roman world, like China during the Warring States period, was undergoing a transition from the early feudal order of regional lords to bureaucratic imperial feudalism. Population, the economy, science, and technology were developing, but enslavement, warfare, intrigue, and calamity were also becoming more severe and more distorted, while the primitive “democracy of the people of the state” was diminishing. Thus, in both East and West, humanist philosophies, philosophies of humanity, philosophies of life, and philosophies of happiness developed greatly as a way to resist an alienated society beset by suffering and disaster.

Christianity also began to emerge during this period, taking root in the suffering of the middle and lower strata and gradually becoming part of Rome’s system of rule. Dong Zhongshu’s reform of Confucianism in the early Han dynasty, along with several other revealed, monotheistic religions, essentially arose during this kind of historical period. Bauer, Marx’s former comrade-in-arms (the principal target of criticism in the celebrated work *The Holy Family*)

The following two paragraphs come from my earlier article, “Complete Works of Marx and Engels 06: The Young Hegelians and Marx and Engels”:

In 1942, as Bauer continued his critique of the history of the Gospel of John, he wrote that the popularity of these philosophies in the late ancient Greek and Roman world was rooted in “unhappy consciousness”: the contradiction between the freedom of self-consciousness and the unfreedom of actual bodily existence under Roman domination. The purpose of these philosophies was to liberate individuals living in hardship and under hegemony, allowing them to transcend all external things, turn inward, and seek happiness in spiritual tranquility. Unhappy consciousness gave rise to Christianity; Christianity was the product of alienated self-consciousness.

More specifically, it took shape in the thought of Philo of the Jewish-Alexandrian school and in popular Greco-Roman philosophies such as Neoplatonism, particularly in the thought of the neo-Stoic philosopher Seneca. Bauer called Philo the true father of Christianity, while Seneca was regarded as its uncle. As Engels pointed out, Bauer’s principal achievement was that “he essentially proved that Christianity was not imported from outside, from Judea, and imposed upon the Greco-Roman world, but was that world’s most authentic product.” Like Strauss, Bauer regarded Christianity as a product of the historical process, but he emphasized the role of individual subjective invention and deliberate deception—in other words, its character as a product of “self-consciousness.” Engels concluded that the dispute between Strauss and Bauer was actually an internal contradiction of Hegel’s philosophy: whether the determining force in history was substance or self-consciousness, the objective or the subjective.

In the early nineteenth century, during the First Industrial Revolution and the early stages of capitalism, thinkers from Goethe, Kant, and Hegel through to the Young Hegelians and Marx were, in fact, confronting the same kind of historical turning point. Capitalism was replacing feudalism, but exploitation, warfare, and disaster were also becoming more severe and more distorted. Having only recently emerged from the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Reformation, European intellectual circles began seeking historical patterns and intellectual affinities in ancient Greek and Roman history, philosophy, and jurisprudence. They drew on these to criticize a Christianity that had become outdated, while affirming its earlier significance for liberation, the people, and humanism. Viewed dialectically, this was also aimed at a profound sublation. Criticism and interpretation of Christianity and late ancient Greek philosophy helped them analyze the philosophy of history. As everyone knows, the philosophy of history is one of the foundations of Hegel’s philosophy.

III. From Idealism and Objectivity Toward Materialism and Dialectics

The great Way converges in unity, and there is often nothing new in the history of philosophy. The Stoic idea that “God, nature, and humanity form a unity” is exactly the same thing as the *Dao De Jing*’s “unity of Heaven and humanity” and “the Way gives rise to all things”: what later came to be called objective idealism. One major thread in the history of Western philosophy leading up to modern German idealism is Schelling’s and Hegel’s inheritance and development of Spinoza’s theory of “God as nature.” Schelling’s “absolute identity” and Hegel’s “absolute spirit” belong to the same intellectual lineage, culminating in Hegel’s attainment of the pinnacle of objective idealism and an objectively idealist philosophy of history. Marx’s dialectical materialism and historical materialism, in turn, represent a further elevation of Hegel: an inevitable development of human philosophy and its highest point to date.

Marx’s choice of Epicurus as the subject of his doctoral dissertation, reaffirming his humanism, philosophy of pleasure, materialism, and dialectics, was a major event in the history of human philosophy. This is the historical significance of Marx’s doctoral dissertation that many people are unfamiliar with. Marx’s emphasis on Epicurus’s “atomic swerve” is a key point in the history of philosophy. This is also something lacking in Chinese Daoist thought and Zhuangzi’s thought (Chinese philosophy ventured too little into the philosophy of nature. Of course, this is “not much of a problem”: the Western Industrial Revolution did not depend on Greek philosophy either, but on industry, commerce, and capitalism themselves).

The theory of the atomic swerve addresses a crucial issue: how committed materialists can explain and analyze the human soul and freedom. In the language of contemporary systems theory and AI, this means how life “emerges” from complex systems of atoms. Atoms certainly cannot be mechanical and simple. In our era, quantum mechanics has developed enormously, and we know that the actual structural complexity of the “atom” far exceeds the imagination of even humanity’s foremost scientists. In Marx’s time, chemistry was only just beginning its transition to modern chemistry, with the concept of “elements” and Dalton’s atomic theory foremost among its developments. As a humanities scholar and philosopher, Marx was remarkably perceptive and intelligent. One contribution of Schelling’s philosophy was its emphasis on the philosophy of nature.

A few years later, Marx wrote in his *Theses on Feuerbach*: “The chief defect of all previous materialism—including that of Feuerbach—is that the object, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence, in contrast to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism—which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such.” This statement is the essence of dialectical materialism, and it also marks the gulf separating it from all previous materialism and idealism.

IV. The Great Way Converges in Unity: Great Thinkers Abroad Find Nothing Unfamiliar in Zhuangzi

Given all this, when great thinkers abroad read the *Dao De Jing* and the *Zhuangzi*, they do not find them unfamiliar in the way many people imagine. The great Way converges in unity; some basic philosophical ideas also exist in the West.

As Chinese people, we have no need to feel inferior, nor to indulge in narrow-minded conceit. Many people really do think the West is a cultural desert and underestimate the substance of the history of Western philosophy. East and West have no need to put each other down. The sea embraces a hundred rivers: throughout its history, China has absorbed Indian philosophy, mathematics, and culture, as well as Arab mathematics, philosophy, science, and technology. Healthy civilizations draw widely on the finest achievements of human civilization. The intermingling of civilizations is one of the keys to the West’s success.

Do not underestimate the breadth of these great thinkers’ reading. Look at Tolle’s *The Power of Now*, the work Fromm coauthored with the Japanese Zen master D. T. Suzuki, and so on. They have absorbed and integrated a great deal from the philosophies of Zen, the *Dao De Jing*, Persia, the Arab world, and other ancient civilizations around the globe.

Culture has always evolved and developed. Zen is a fusion of Buddhism and Chinese metaphysics, specifically the thought of Laozi and Zhuangzi. The transformation of Confucianism in the Song dynasty also absorbed elements of Daoism and Buddhism. Even the Confucianism of the imperial examination system was not so conservative, so let us all be a little more open-minded.

Later, mainstream Western liberalism, the Austrian School, and the value-investing school all took Stoicism as part of their core (ideas about the limits of knowledge, the complexity of systems, circles of competence, and so on appear in the writings of Hayek, Drucker, Munger, and others. Anyone familiar with Western writings should also be familiar with Stoicism). The French critical philosopher Foucault also held Cynicism in very high regard in his writings. The formulation he proposed was to “defend one’s own soul” in modern society.