Friendship and forgetfulness in Derrida and the Zhuangzi

ABSTRACT

Part one of this article introduces the conception of friendship and its connection with forgetfulness in Derrida and the Zhuangzi. Part two deals with the ethical focus of the discourse of friendship in Derrida and the Zhuangzi, which addresses the underlying relationship of oneself-other. Part three reveals how temporality and fleetingness are recognized as elements of friendship by Derrida and the Zhuangzi. While the Zhuangzi lacks the Derridean melancholic tone, this recognition helps both take the disruption, otherness and mourning of friendship into account. Part four relates the Zhuangzian mutual forgetfulness of friends through effortless action (wuwei) to the Derridean criticism of classical friendship as ‘the second self’ and his assumption of difference, distance and disruption for friendship. Embracing these three ‘D’s’ leads Derrida to the structural ineluctability of forgetting to friendship. However, the Zhuangzi characterizes its ideal friendship in a style of simplicity, calmness, openness, desiring less and avoiding extremity, to emphasize naturalist suitability.

KEYWORDS:

• Derrida
• the Zhuangzi
• ethics
• friendship
• forgetfulness

1. Introduction

In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle characterizes five elements of friendship: 1) one wishes and does what is good for the sake of his friend; 2) one wishes for his friend to exist and live for the friend’s own sake; 3) one enjoys spending time with his friend; 4) one has the same tastes or chooses to do the same things as his friend; 5) one shares the sorrows and joys of his friend (Aristotle, 1984a, 1166a2–10).¹ It seems implausible to regard these characterizations as completely outdated, as they remain common markers of human friendship even during modern times. In our cross-cultural investigation of the Zhuangzi, we see, too, these universal phenomena of friendship: one cares for a sick friend, brings them food, spends time visiting, talking and laughing, and shares similar values and perspectives with them. However, this is not the whole story about human friendship as far as recent scholarship is concerned. Some scholars have begun to pay attention to the structure and functions of the modern self, how it is shaped by cultural factors and advanced societies, and ‘how these actualities inform the theory and practice of friendship’ (Hutter, 2000, p. 131). These factors include: the increasing isolation of individuals and the atomization of society; increasing competitiveness for access to the scarce means of life and labor; increasing economic insecurity and pauperization; rising enslavement caused by many too long hours of work, and so on. They threaten leisure time and the ability to form friendships, erode trust and relatability, and increase psychic instability, mental illness and a lack of warmth, loving acceptance and recognition. The desire to maintain continuous, even lifelong, close contact with friends, so natural to societies of low social mobility and fairly static orders of class, status and residence, is strongly challenged by the fleetingness and high geographic mobility of modern life (Hutter, 2000, pp. 143–144).

Perhaps Nietzsche is right when he describes the plight and fragility of friendship between individuals in this modern social context:

We are two ships each of which has its goal and course; our paths may cross and we may celebrate a feast together, as we did—and then the good ships rested so quietly in one harbor and one sunshine … But then the almighty force of our tasks drove us apart again into different seas … , and perhaps we shall never see each other again; perhaps we shall meet again but fail to recognize each other: our exposure to different seas and suns has changed us. (Nietzsche, 1974, book 4, no. 279)

Acknowledging the transitory nature of personal friendship and the difference and distance ineluctably involved, Nietzsche designates this friendship as ‘star friendship’ while realizing that the memory of former friendships in such situations is indeed ‘more sacred’ (Nietzsche, 1974, book 4, no. 279). Nietzsche seems to echo Aristotle’s classical point that complete or perfect friendship is rare (Aristotle, 1984a, 1156b25–26), but he nevertheless conveys the sense that finding and keeping a genuine friendship is more difficult and more challenging in his era. What we should note is not just the representative modern experience and practice of friendship, but also the effort to make ‘new ways of conceptualizing friendship that take into account the factors of fleetingness and mobility’ (Hutter, 2000, p. 144). It is to this new way of theorizing friendship, including a critique of Western classical notions of friendship, that Derrida and his fellows have committed. It will also be on the horizon of this contemporary discourse of friendship that I will proceed to revive and deepen our understanding of the Zhuangzian view on friendship and forgetfulness. In what follows I will survey several central themes of Derrida’s discourse on friendship. Each will then be connected to a discussion on the Zhuangzian view of friendship. As these studies will unfold, the Zhuangzian view of friendship is more comparable to Derrida’s non-classical approach than to Aristotle’s in its distinctive ethical inquiries. Both the Derridean and Zhuangzian conceptions include a temporal dimension and value the loss and mourning of friendship despite the contrast of Derrida’s melancholic tone to the Zhuangzian celebration of natural destiny. Both criticize self-sameness or self-centricity and see difference, distance and disruption as inevitable to friendship. Both relate forgetfulness to friendship although the Zhuangzi is more able to thematize forgetfulness in regard to friendship and develop a moderate style of friendship based on the practice of forgetfulness and avoidance of extremes.

2. The ethical focus on friendship in Derrida and the Zhuangzi

There is no doubt that friendship has sociological and psychological dimensions. However, Aristotle is unique in involving the theme of friendship in his ethics. In other words, the ethical dimension of friendship is the focus of Aristotle’s discourse on friendship. As Ricoeur observes, friendship, for Aristotle, ‘belongs not primarily to a psychology of feelings of affection and attachment to others’ (which does not mean Aristotle is blind to psychological factors), ‘but rather to an ethics: friendship is a virtue—an excellence—at work in deliberative choices and capable of being elevated to the rank of habitus, without ceasing to require actual exercise’ (Ricoeur, 1992, p. 182). Friendship, as such, falls into the practical sphere and the sphere of interpersonal relationship, which involves personal values, dispositions, decisions, acts or actual events, including interactions and responses. Underlying the involvement of these elements is the fundamental self-other relation, an ever-renewing theme in all ethics. Aristotle’s discourse of friendship is not short of addressing this underlying theme of the self-other relationship. For example, the perfect friendship, or virtuous friendship, for Aristotle, belongs to those ‘who wish well to their friends for their sake’ (Aristotle, 1984a, 1156b10); namely, those who wish and do good to the other in an unselfish and altruistic manner. At the same time, Aristotle does propose the concept of friends as ‘another self’—the good man ‘is related to his friend as to himself’ (Aristotle, 1984a, 1166a31)—which not only creates some tension within his own ethics but also ‘could well be taken to be a refined form of egotism’, as Ricoeur admits (Ricoeur, 1992, p. 182). No wonder it has been a target of contemporary critique on the various forms of self-sameness in Western philosophy.

Derrida’s ostensibly radical deconstruction of the classical conception of friendship has, to a certain extent, continued this trend, which first began with Aristotle, of focusing on the ethical dimension of friendship and its underlying conception about the self-other relation, although Derrida’s approach is decidedly non-Aristotelian and non-classical. The theoretical base for Derrida’s discourse of friendship can be traced back to his quasi-transcendental notion of the spacing/temporizing and differing/deferring ‘différance’ or archi-writing that inherently subverts all conceptual hierarchies and makes their full presence impossible (Derrida, 1982, pp. 6–9). ‘Différance’ or deconstruction facilitates Derrida’s fascination with ‘the irreducible other’ (a theme shared with Levinas), or prepares the so-called ‘ethical turn’ in deconstruction. But unlike Levinas, and against ‘oppositional logic’ (Derrida, 1997, p. 232), Derrida introduces various cases of aporia, ‘the pathless path’, in ethico-existential situations. Aporia is inscribed in the marks of irresolvable contradictions, tensions, or ruptures, which are necessary conditions for conceptual determinations, but also eventually make the latter come undone. Derrida’s non-oppositional way of thinking demands openness, respect to and embrace of the suppressed difference, heterogeneity and asymmetry. As such, deconstruction for Derrida is both ‘pre-ethical-political’ and simultaneously just ‘ethical-political’ because it ‘does indeed have a pre- as a request or as a preliminary prescription’ (Derrida, 2002, p. 300; italics original). This helps us recognize that Derrida’s ‘ethical pathos’ is enshrined within his transcendental or quasi-transcendental philosophy (cf. Reynolds, 2010, p. 672).²

This style of using a quasi-transcendental argument for the ethical is applied by Derrida to his discourse of friendship where he explicates the condition for the possibilities of friendship. This condition of friendship is like a friendship prior to all friendships, ‘an ineffaceable, fundamental, and bottomless friendship, the one that draws its breath in the sharing of a language (past or to come) and in the being-together that any allocution supposes’ (Derrida, 1988, p. 636). In Derrida’s view, an Aristotelian move would see an ordinary friendship as having ‘merely an accidental and analogical relation’ with the ideal one, ‘friendship in the strict or proper sense’, thus raising the question of what the proper sense or essence of friendship is (Derrida, 1988, p. 636; italics original). This question of ‘what is … ’ for Derrida is equivalent to seeking the presence, substance or essence of friendship, but not the condition of its possibilities. The latter lies in ‘the very movement and time’ of friendship, in the performance of waiting, promising or making a commitment, which undeniably connects to the past and opens to the future, and is not just ‘a given in the present’. It is an ‘anterior affirmation of being-together’ in a sort of minimal community (Derrida, 1988, pp. 636–637). I can see clearly that Derrida’s condition of friendship involves the web of ‘being with’ the other, ‘being-together’, being in a shared language (or culture), being in a community, so on and so forth. It is noteworthy how Derrida further defines the existentio-ethical meaning of this ‘being-together’: ‘[W]e are caught up, one and another, in a sort of heteronomic and dissymmetrical curving of social space—more precisely, a curving of the relation to the other: prior to all organized socius, all políteia, all determined “government”, before all “law”’ (Derrida, 1997, p. 231; italics original). This anterior, heteronomic and asymmetrical relation with the other is one of Derrida’s most important quasi-transcendental arguments on the condition of the possibilities of friendship. On another occasion, Derrida clarifies that this heteronomic and asymmetrical relation to the other ‘in itself outside myself, outside myself in myself’, is distinguished from the ‘self-relation’ that supposes the other within its own being-itself as different from itself. The latter is the feeling of mine-ness (Jemeinigkeit), self-identity or self-sameness of the ego ‘constituted in its ipseity’ (Derrida, 1993, p. 61; cf. Reynolds, 2010, p. 669). This anterior, heteronomic and asymmetrical relation with the irreducible, singular other and its otherness is a central motive behind all of Derrida’s deconstruction of the classical and canonical notions of friendship. It sounds pre-ethical but in fact provides profound ethical impetus to Derrida’s discourse on friendship.

The portion of the Zhuangzi involving a notion of friendship is very small if compared with the size of the whole text. However, these small segments embody the unique Zhuangzian perspective on friendship and are prized resources not only for a critical and cross-cultural study of the ‘other’ form of friendship but also for Zhuangzian forgetfulness and its substantive involvement with the notion of friendship. Scholars have compared the Zhuangzian perspective of friendship with the Aristotelian classical philosophy of friendship (cf. Lee, 2014, p. 56ff, among others). To scholars of comparative studies, taking Aristotle’s theory as ‘a conceptual framework for understanding the nature and value of friendship’ is unsurprising because Aristotle’s discourse is seen by many as ‘the most influential account of friendship in the Western philosophical tradition’ (Lee, 2014, p. 56). The Zhuangzi and Aristotle both refer to many of the common features of friendship I mentioned earlier. However, with a little more scrutiny on the otherness of the Zhuangzian perspective of friendship, we can reasonably discern that it is Derrida’s non-classical, not Aristotelian, approach to the theorizing of friendship that indeed more resembles the Zhuangzi’s. I will reveal this throughout this essay. For the time being, it suffices to say that, like Derrida’s, the Zhuangzian view of friendship has an ethical focus, even if it is not as explicit as Derrida’s. The Zhuangzian view of friendship serves and is embedded in a broad ethical aim and motive of moving along with, and responding to, the infinite change and otherness of things, perspectives and ways of life, in order to attain a flourishing mode of living suitable to nature throughout the life-world. This is the ethical message of the dao or the so-called attunement with the dao. It defines the ethical content and focus of the Zhuangzian discourse on friendship. It similarly includes, but is broader than, the Derridean type of the anterior, heteronomic and asymmetrical relation with the other since this relationship in the Zhuangzi covers more than just other human beings. This message is both pre- or meta-ethical and directly ethical or prescriptive. Apart from this central ethical message, the meaning and purpose of the Zhuangzian notion of friendship cannot be fully understood.

3. The acceptance of the fleetingness of friendship in Derrida and the Zhuangzi

One of Derrida’s key perspectives of friendship centers on the ‘movement and time of friendship’ (Derrida, 1988, p. 637). This Derridean emphasis distinguishes itself from the Western classical notion of the stability and intemporality of friendship, such as Aristotle’s primary (or perfect) friendship from which other (incidental or incomplete) types of friendship are determined (Aristotle, 1984a, §3–4). For Derrida, even such primary friendship ‘never presents itself outside time: there is no friend without time’ (Derrida, 1997, p. 14). ‘Engagement in friendship takes time, it gives time, for it carries beyond the present moment and keeps memory as much as it anticipates’ (Derrida, 1997, pp. 14–15). Whereas Aristotle connects faith and confidence in friendship with the stability or even permanence of friendship, this stability, in Derrida, only ‘amounts to a stabilization’. It ‘supposes the passage through an ordeal’—‘the ordeal of what remains to be decided’ or ‘the undecidable qua the time of reflection’ (Derrida, 1997, p. 15; italics original). It ‘puts confidence to the test’ (Derrida, 1997, p. 14). Thus, there is a ‘double contretemps’ (being both against and in time): ‘firm and stable constancy on the one hand and, on the other, beginning again, renewal, the indefinite repetition of the inaugural instant, always anew …’ (Derrida, 1997, p. 14). In this line of thinking, the classical preference of stability/constancy over instability/inconstancy cannot be justified. Although Derrida draws much attention to the traditionally suppressed side and aims to subvert the classical hierarchy, he nonetheless admits the ‘indissociable’ aspect of these two modalities and the unavoidability of ‘the becoming-steadfast’ (Derrida, 1997, p. 14) or a must of reinvigoration despite being a trial and ‘liable to transformation’, including rupture (Reynolds, 2010, p. 671). In my reading, Derrida does not simply position himself on the opposite side of classical preference but disenchants the latter and exposes the aporetic structure of friendship between them (Derrida, 1997, p. 16).³

To Derrida, time seems to connect and blur polarities by disrupting and shifting into one another and destabilizing the conceptual hierarchy that our thoughts often tend to retain. It is both a quasi-transcendental and experiential dimension of ‘movement and time’, this logic of aporia or contretemps, that enables Derrida to expand the horizon for the theorizing of friendship, to include factors that are often excluded by traditional accounts as absolute opposites to friendship. Derrida’s conception of friendship hence accents the underlying linkage between friendship and what is thought of as the absence or lack of friendship. The items, to which this Derridean list of linkage extends, involve dying/death, wound, mourning, surviving, separation, distance, enmity, disaster, and so forth (some are borrowed from Nietzsche or Blanchot). For Derrida, these factors or features cannot be entirely seen as opposites to, denials of, or in isolation from, friendship. They are the components of the underlying structure for friendship, or the condition of the possibilities for friendship, on which the Derridean conception of friendship would never turn its back. In general, such conditions of lacking are necessary for the advent of friendship, if not entirely sufficient. Derrida questions those who are blind to this pre-condition: ‘How could I give you my friendship where friendship would not be lacking, that is, if it already existed … if the friendship were not lacking?’ (Derrida, 1988, p. 635) Specifically, Derrida sheds light on the link between death, wound, mourning and friendship. He writes:

The anguished apprehension of mourning (without which the act of friendship would not spring forth in its very energy) insinuates itself a priori and anticipates itself; it haunts and plunges the friend, before mourning, into mourning. This apprehension weeps before the lamentation, it weeps death before death, and this is the very respiration of friendship. (Derrida, 1997, p. 14)

As such, surviving and mourning the death of a friend is not merely an aftermath of friendship. It is structurally intrinsic to friendship due to the fleeting nature of time, human existence and friendship itself, and hence it is ‘the condition of possibility of friendship’ (Derrida, 1997, p. 14).

Derrida’s insight into this linkage also manifests in his commentary on a passage about the unsettling distinction of friendship-enmity from Plato’s Lysis:

The possibility, the meaning and the phenomenon of friendship would never appear unless the figure of the enemy had already called them up in advance, had indeed put to them the question or the objection of the friend, a wounding question, a question of wound. No friend without the possible wound. (Derrida, 1997, p. 153)

Time/temporality provides this structural anteriority to all these negative things ‘before’ any positives of friendship. While this kind of quasi-transcendental argument is used to reveal the prior condition of friendship, it also points to ‘the undeniable future anterior’, (Derrida, 1997, p. 249) since the open-ended process of friendship inextricably involves itself with these opposites as it connects to both the past and the future. Moreover, Derrida does not equate friendship with negativity. He takes inspiration from Plato’s pharmacological statement in Lysis: ‘[O]n account of the bad that we prized and loved the good—as if the good is a drug against the bad, and the bad is a disease, so that without the disease there is no need for the drug. … Take away the enemy and it seems it is no longer a friend’ (Plato, 1997, p. 705). So, with regard to structural possibility, what is included—hostility/enmity, death/wound/mourning, or the interruption of friendship—is neither good nor bad, ‘neither true nor false’, ‘neither living nor dead’ (Derrida, 1997, pp. 155, 219). On the other hand, positivity, friendship, love, and so on, must also go beyond themselves insofar as their condition of possibility is concerned. That is why Derrida sometimes refers to a friendship prior to or beyond friendships.

This does not mean that Derrida’s quasi-transcendental argument has no ethical-practical bearings. It has an ethical focus, as mentioned earlier. For one thing, by following Plato in acknowledging the therapeutic or pharmacological role of friendship in curing the disease of hostility/enmity, Derrida not only accepts the common sense of friendship as ‘remedy’ or ‘consolation’ (Derrida, 1997, p. 153), but also implies a detachment to or disenchantment with any ‘permanent’ friendship, which is likewise therapeutic though Derrida does not make this explicit. In my view, going from Plato’s sense of remedy to this second sense of therapy is a great advancement in the philosophy and ethics of friendship. Both demonstrate the ethical-practical meaningfulness to victims of hostility/enmity and the illusory ‘purity’ or ‘permanence’ of friendship, and therefore contribute to human flourishing, health and well-being. On the other hand, Derrida’s discourse prescribes an acceptance and embrace of death, wound, mourning and impermanence as a condition of friendship, and an openness to and respect for heterogeneity, uncertainty, difference and resultant possibilities for friendship and beyond. This is the central motive of Derrida’s deconstructive project, including his discourse of friendship, as he stresses quite clearly: ‘[W]e should never exclude the possibility’ (Derrida, 1997, p. 155). It is undeniably ethical.

Time, temporality or temporization, too, is a preeminent element of Zhuangzian philosophy in addition to the element of spacing or spatialization. There is a Zhuangzian view of inseparableness between temporality or temporization, on the one hand, and otherness or change, on the other. For the Zhuangzi, time or temporization is intrinsic/structural to the change and transformation of myriad things and beings, including life and death, as well as friendship and its ending. Chapter five of the Zhuangzi involves the following passage:

Life and death, preservation and loss, failure and success, poverty and wealth, excellence and mediocrity, slander and praise, hunger and thirst, cold and heat—these are the transformations of events, the operation of destiny. Day and night they come to us, one replacing another, and human knowledge cannot measure back to where they began. (14/5/43–44; translation synthesized and modified from Graham, 1981/2001, p. 80; Mair, 1994, p. 47; Ziporyn, 2020, p. 49)⁴

This list covers a variety of social and individual aspects of existential phenomena or situations. It is hard to say that they have nothing to do with the phenomenon of friendship. At the very least ‘life and death’, ‘preservation and loss’, and ‘excellence and mediocrity’, are factors highly relatable to either Derridean or classical friendship, even though the author does not make a direct reference to friendship. The key point of this passage is to place these opposite phenomena within the context of temporality, mutual shift and transformation. They are not fixed, and are lacking in stability, constancy or permanence. With an untraceable beginning and end, they are in an infinite chain of temporization, substitution and transformation. This chain is the process of the dao, the way-making of the universe. This single chain is named by some passages of the Zhuangzi as ‘a single string (yitiao 一條)’, ‘a single thread (yiguan 一貫)’ or ‘a single body (yiti 一體)’ (13/5/30–31, 17/6/46). For example, chapter five of the Zhuangzi includes a piece of advice given to Wuzhi by Laozi: ‘Why don’t you simply let him [Confucius] see life and death as a single string, acceptable and unacceptable as a single thread, thus releasing him from his fetter?’ (13/5/30-31; Ziporyn, 2020, p. 48) Here, the idea of linkage between polarities is glaringly similar to Derrida’s, despite subtle contextual differences. By affirming said link, the Zhuangzi recommends accommodation and openness to the negative side of human existence, considering it to be a condition for the possibility of a flourishing life, a life of going with the flow, without shackling oneself to illusory permanence and its damaging consequences.

The Zhuangzi does not offer any formal analysis for the concept of friendship, nor does it attempt to define the origin or essence of friendship when answering what a primary friendship is. However, the stories of the Zhuangzi do impressively relate friendship to the more common existential issues of death, loss and mourning in the wider context of dealing with the fundamental changes and transformations that all humans face. These issues are not only inextricable from common life in general but also from the phenomenon of friendship in particular. Isn’t friendship a micro version of the more macro form of human life? Few would deny this. Unlike Derrida and his peers, the Zhuangzi does not directly claim that accounting for friendship must also take death, loss or mourning into consideration or else the account will be incomplete. Nevertheless, the Zhuangzi seems quite radical in offering its version of ideal friendship through the story of four friends. One of them said to the others, ‘Who knows life and death, preservation and loss, are within a single body? I will be this person’s friend’. They all laughed and agreed (17/6/46). The acceptance of this insight into the linkage between life and death, preservation and loss, thus becomes a requirement for this friendship. In this way, the Zhuangzi does take death, loss and mourning into its account for friendship.

Another related story goes as follows (17/6/53–60). When Master Lai was dying, he was surrounded by his weeping wife and children. His friend Master Li came to visit him and tried to stop them: ‘Shoo! Get back! Don’t disturb the process of change!’ (Watson, 1968, p. 85) Master Li then spoke to Master Lai: ‘How great is the Process of Creation-Transformation! What will it make you become, where will it send you? … ’ Master Lai replies:

[T]he Great Clump burdens me with a physical form, labors me with life, eases me with old age, and rests me with death. What makes my life good is what makes my death good … Now if I, having happened to stumble into a human form, should insist, ‘Man! I must remain a man!’ Creation-Transformation would certainly consider me an inauspicious chuck of person. So now I look upon all heaven and earth as a great furnace, and the Process of Creation-Transformation as a great blacksmith—where could I go that would not be all right? (Ziporyn, 2020, p. 59; minor modification)

A similar pattern of thought can be found in the story about what Zhuangzi’s friend Huizi saw and heard when he visited Zhuangzi to mourn the death of Zhuangzi’s wife (46/18/15–19). To his surprise, Zhuangzi was beating a basin and singing. Huizi complained to Zhuangzi that she lived with you, raised your children, grew old and died. Lack-of-crying already seemed too much, how could you go even further? In response, Zhuangzi acknowledged that when she had just died, he could not help but grieve, like anyone else. However, he soon started to reflect upon her ‘genealogical’ past, trying to find traces of her from her life back to before she was born, before she even had any physical shape and her vital energy was not yet formed. Then he found:

[I]n the course of some heedless mingling mishmash a change occurred and there was energy, and then this energy changed and there was a physical form, and then this form changed and there was life. Now there has been another change and she is dead. It’s just like the progression of the four seasons, spring, summer, fall, winter. Now she’s going to lie down peacefully in a vast room. If I were to follow her bawling and sobbing, it would show that I don’t understand anything about human destiny. So I stopped. (Translation synthesized and modified from Watson, 1968, p. 192; Ziporyn, 2020, p. 145)

Several meanings can be extracted from these and other related stories from the Zhuangzi. First, life, spending time together, talking, laughing, dying/death, mourning, the ending of friendship and its becoming a memory (as illustrated by Zhuangzi’s recollection of Huizi in 67/24/51) are all part of the universal process of change and transformation. As they are intrinsically connected and inextricable from each other within this universal process, they are all acceptable, expectable and valuable in terms of this perspective of the dao or the universe. In other words, the negative side of existence has its own values, or its own varied goodness to the universe. We must understand these extended or de-parochialized forms of goodness. Thus, for the Zhuangzians, to understand a human life, one must understand what comes before it, such as vital energy (qi 氣) or other physical forms, and one must also understand what comes after this current human form or relationship and its various possibilities. In a sense, Zhuangzian rhetoric quite resembles those Derridean terms—‘the condition of possibilities’, ‘structural anteriority’ or ‘the future anterior’—despite being expressed in a different language and from a more practical angle. Some theoretical implications are noticeably similar.

Second, since the Zhuangzian conception of existence, life or friendship understands its opposites as integral, the Zhuangzian model for acts of friendship distinctly involves a capacity for easing the affective consequences of death, helping one to move along with the process of transformation (Elder, 2014, pp. 580–581), and even minimizing the inevitable mourning of the death of friends, as shown by the above stories. This model is ethically significant in assisting/comforting a dying friend and his/her family, promoting self-therapy and a necessary detachment to the negative side of life or friendship, and effectively avoiding excessive grief.

Third, while Derrida’s discourse of friendship has been praised for its embrace of otherness and heterogeneity, some scholars have criticized him for the melancholic intonation in his view of human friendship (Reynolds, 2010, p. 671) and for being under the Nietzschean influence of modern pessimism (Freibach-Heifetz, 2005, p. 252; McEvoy, 2003, p. 17). Zhuangzian discourse on friendship does not carry such a sentiment. Zhuangzian stories dare to celebrate, not just accept or embrace, the death of a friend or the loss of a friendship. In addition to the tale of Zhuangzi beating a basin and singing after his wife’s death, the Zhuangzi also provides another famous story about ‘singing at the corpse [of a friend]’ (linshi er ge 臨屍而歌; 18/6/62–71). When Master Sanghu died, one of his friends was composing a piece of music, the other plucking a zither, and the two were singing together: ‘Hey-ho Sanghu! Hey-ho Sanghu! You’ve gone back to being what you truly are. But we go on being human, O!’ (Graham, 1981/2001, p. 89; modified). Their singing is meant to celebrate Sanghu’s energy going back to nature or the universe, returning to where it comes from, since Sanghu is, like all others, ‘about to become companions of the creator of things, and to roam in the single vital energy of heaven and earth’ (Cf. Mair, 1994, p. 60; Ziporyn, 2020, p. 60). The energy of Sanghu is not totally lost; what is lost is just his human form. The story justifies that they have good reason to be happy about their friend’s return to nature, where he truly belongs, and happy about whatever possibilities their friend may have after the ending of his human form and their interactive friendship. They are happy for Sanghu’s own sake. This dealing with the end of friendship nonetheless demonstrates their broad concept of friendly care and friendship. The Zhuangzian notion of friendship thus seems to include how to let go of a treasured friendship. This happy celebration of a lost friend or friendship deeply reflects and influences the formation of a philosophical, psychological and cultural tradition other than Derrida’s. While Reynolds’ commentary on Derrida’s discourse of friendship takes a similar step in thinking that in a certain sense we must ‘celebrate this wound’ for ‘without it no friendship is possible’, he admits that this ‘remains an open question’ to Derridean thought (Reynolds, 2010, p. 671). Derrida does address the issue of ‘being natural’ in his critique of the Aristotelian emphasis on the stability of friendship: ‘In its sheer stability, this assured certainty is not natural’ (Derrida, 1997, p. 15). Derrida also unfolds the internal tension between Aristotle’s ethics of friendship based on the stability of virtue and his retention of ‘some naturality’ and ‘a spontaneous repetition’ of its own movement; but, as Derrida discerns, this virtuous constancy ‘is not in nature: it does not come down to nature’ (Derrida, 1997, p. 23). Derrida’s ethics of friendship has been called a ‘natural philosophy’ (Phillips, 2007), but Derridean ethics, in my view, may need a lot of reconfiguration before it can rest content with a naturalist philosophy like the Zhuangzi’s. Within Chinese tradition, the Zhuangzi’s view is also different from the Confucian one. Confucius, in the story cited above, regards Master Sanghu’s friends as those who wander beyond, rather than within, the Confucian guidelines of rites, which require complying with certain practices of crying and weeping. The Zhuangzian naturalistic perspective on the act of friendship challenges Confucian moral norms of propriety in a way analogous to how Derrida, Nietzsche or Blanchot challenge the Western classical notion of friendship.

4. Critique of the self-same and the involvement of forgetfulness in friendship

4.1. From a critique of the self-same to the forgetfulness of friendship in Derrida

Corresponding to the assured certainty and permanence of primary friendship is the classical definition of friend as ‘another self’ (Aristotle, 1984a, 1166a31; Cicero, 2018, p. 139) or as ‘an image’ of oneself (Cicero, 2018, p. 47). In terms of this notion, not only is there total sameness within oneself, but the other as friend is also the same as oneself. As a result, the goodness of friends becomes derivative from one’s own goodness. For Derrida, Aristotle ‘inscribes friendship … in a single, selfsame configuration’ (Derrida, 1997, p. 7; italic original); Cicero ‘envisage[s] the friend’ as ‘the duplicate, the reproduction, the copy … the same, and that is the whole story’ (Cicero, 2018, p. 4), ‘[a] narcissistic projection of the ideal image, of its own ideal image’ (Cicero, 2018, p. 3). To fight against such narcissism and self-sameness, Derrida insists that one ‘find[s] the other in oneself, already: the same dissymmetry and tension of surviving [other] in self, in the “oneself” thus out of joint with its own existence’ (Derrida, 1997, p. 24; italic original) since ‘[l]eaving oneself as of oneself’ ‘can be done only by letting the other come’ (Derrida, 1997, p. 42; italic original). Derrida sharply criticizes those ‘who cannot think or who thinks nothing other than self’: ‘Now if man has friends, if he desires friends, it is because man thinks and thinks the other’ (Derrida, 1997, pp. 223–224), not because he thinks only about himself and then extends the self-same to the other or appropriates the other into himself. ‘Friendship par excellence can only be human but above all, and by the same token, there is thought for man only to the extent that it is thought of the other—and thought of the other qua thought of the mortal’ (Derrida, 1997, p. 224; italic original). The emphasis on the other as ‘the mortal’ shows that human existential finitude is a central element in Derrida’s recognition of the instability or fleetingness of friendship along with other constitutive factors such as death and mourning. The argument that friendship is not something at one’s ‘disposal’ (Derrida, 1997, p. 235) similarly attests to the problematic of the self-same. Being an open-ended process, friendship must constantly put faith, confidence and commitment to the test, as we discussed earlier. It is a loving response to the other that interrupts the self-same or self-centricity and makes friendship possible. Even Aristotle himself contradicts this ‘second self’ theory by admitting that it is the act of loving rather than being loved, or wishing and doing good for the sake of the friend himself, that more appropriately characterizes the essence of friendship (Aristotle, 1984b, 1237a38; 1239a33; Derrida, 1997, p. 10).

This postmodern critique of the self-same and its absolute unity in the classical notion of friendship presumes difference, distance and disruption as inextricable elements of friendship. Derrida particularly cites Kant’s requirement for friends ‘to stay at a proper distance from each other’. Friendship for Kant ‘is never for a moment safe from interruptions’ (Kant, 2017, p. 233). Derrida admits that ‘at least Kant grants the necessity of this distance’ and therefore in this regard is closer than classical writers to the true essence of friendship (Derrida, 1997, p. 255). Perhaps Nietzsche more perceptively depicts than Kant does the difference between friends:

[R]eflect to yourself how various are the feelings, how divided the opinions, even among your closest acquaintances, how even the same opinions are of a quite different rank or intensity in the heads of your friends than they are in yours; how manifold are the occasions for misunderstanding, … how uncertain is the ground upon which all our alliances and friendships rest … originating in the inextricable interweaving of character, occupation, talent, environment. (Nietzsche, 1996, p. 148)

Following this line of thinking, Blanchot further attacks any essentialism regarding friendship, and draws a sharper distinction from the classical notion:

We must give up trying to know those to whom we are linked by something essential; … we must greet them in the relation with the unknown … the common strangeness that does not allow us to speak of our friends but only to speak to them, … an infinite distance, the fundamental separation on the basis of which what separates becomes relation. Here discretion lies not in the simple refusal to put forward confidence … but it is the interval … from me to this other who is a friend, measures all that is between us, the interruption of being that never authorizes me to use him, or my knowledge of him … and that … brings us together in the difference. (Blanchot, 1997, p. 291)

Blanchot attempts to give difference, distance, interruption, reservation, and lack of full personal knowledge their proper place in the structure and development of friendship. Furthermore, friendship, for Blanchot, involves a relation to the cessation of friendship or its erasure.

[A]t a certain moment this discretion becomes the fissure of death. … speech responding to someone who speaks from the other shore and where, even in our life, the measureless-ness of the movement of dying would like to complete itself. … not the deepening of the separation but its erasure … its leveling out and the dissipation of the void between us. (Blanchot, 1997, pp. 291–292)

It is from here that Blanchot proceeds to address the relation between forgetfulness and friendship in an unprecedented way in the whole history of Western discourse on friendship, as he reveals the limits of the classical view that friendship can safely ‘survive’ through memory after the death of a friend.

Undoubtedly we will still be able to follow the same paths, we can let images come, we can appeal to an absence that we will imagine, by deceptive consolation, to be our own. We can, in a word, remember. But thought knows that one does not remember: without memory, without thought, it already struggles in the invisible where everything sinks back to indifference. This is thought’s profound grief. It must accompany friendship into oblivion (Blanchot, 1997, p. 292; italic mine).

Blanchot is perhaps the first Western thinker to explicitly and positively relate forgetfulness to friendship. Aristotle once mentioned that when wicked men stay in company with others, they can forget many grievous deeds of the past as well as their anxiety for the future (Aristotle, 1984a, 1166b13–17). That seems to be a positive case for the relation of forgetting and friendship, and especially for the positive role of friendship, but it is still very limited in explaining why friendship is more desirable for some people than for others. Nietzsche also suggests: ‘In regard to an existence of suffering the ancients sought forgetfulness … in this matter they sought palliatives, while we attack the cause of suffering’ (Nietzsche, 1996, p. 259). Insofar as the loss of friendship is normally considered part of human suffering, the forgetfulness that Nietzsche recommends above can be applied, but this is not directly indicated. In contrast, Blanchot’s account is far more direct and outlined by Derrida’s reiteration—‘Oblivion is necessary’, ‘Oblivion must [Faut l’oubli]’—in his commentary on Blanchot (Derrida, 1997, p. 295). The way Blanchot and Derrida have raised the point of forgetfulness in regard to friendship is not only surprising, but extremely impressive. However, their reasons for such an inevitable and even imperative forgetfulness of friendship must first be figured out.

To my understanding, there are two levels to the meaning of forgetting or forgetfulness as addressed by Blanchot and Derrida. The first deals with the intrinsic structure of friendship, where there are not only elements of affinity, closeness, continuity, survival and memory, but also components of difference, distance, interruption, dying/death and forgetting. Forgetting and memory are now included in the group of polarity. However, forgetting, along with dying/death, absence and so on, cannot be excluded or controlled by memory and survival, which are not guaranteed by the process of change with immanent finitude. In the sense of this structural intertwining (or ubiquitous finitude), forgetting is not negative, but neutral or indifferent; it is a condition for memory, just as the end or erasure of friendship is a condition for the advent of friendship. Without this aspect of unbinding, ‘no friendship has ever seen the light of day’ (Derrida, 1997, p. 295). So, due to its innateness to friendship, forgetfulness is inevitable and necessary. As Critchley explains, Derrida requires the recognition of ‘a more fundamental forgetfulness’ (Critchley, 2006, p. 14), a forgetfulness more fundamental than, and not exhausted by, any single incident of forgetting or its facticity.

Based on this first level of the structural ineluctability of forgetting to friendship, the second level is prescriptive or ethical. Derrida has suggested that all classical hierarchies with regard to friendship are at least suspended in this non-negative neutrality. It ‘calls into questions not only our memory of the friend … but our memory of what “friendship” has always meant’. ‘On the death of the friend, the “measurelessness of the movement of dying”, the “event” of death, reveals and effaces at the same time this “truth” of friendship’. And hence comes the imperative: ‘Oblivion must’ (Derrida, 1997, p. 295). Derrida demands we forget the classical theory or ‘truth’ about friendship, the hierarchical categories of memory over forgetting, endurance over rupture, survival over dying/death, and so on, as a result of recognizing the profound immanent finitude. As Critchley rightly observes, this forgetfulness is paradoxical. It is a form of forgetting, but it is also for remembering what Blanchot stresses as only ‘speaking to’ rather than ‘speaking of’ the distant or dead friend, a response to that which one can never adequately respond, ‘a speaking to that speaks out of the impossible experience of le mourir [dying]’ (Critchley, 2006, p. 21; italic original); or in Derrida’s own terms, ‘a certain non-response in a response that will never come to an end’ when he says ‘Adieu’ to Levinas (Derrida, 1999, p. 5). In other words, we must perform forgetting first in order to do a right thing, for instance, a proper conceptualization of friendship. This imperative of forgetting is both pre-ethical (in relation to the theorizing or deconstruction of concepts) and ethical since it serves Derrida’s overarching project of calling for the respect and embrace of irreducible otherness, heterogeneity and asymmetry even though the ethical meaning of forgetfulness itself is addressed indirectly. Blanchot signals an underlying connection between ‘profound grief’ and inevitable forgetfulness, but both Blanchot and Derrida have not explored the possibility of letting go of grief through forgetting as Nietzsche suggests in his discussion of palliative forgetfulness. Despite this, I think that, theoretically, Blanchot and Derrida could accept such a possibility. Besides, having criticized the self-sameness of the classical definition for friend, Derrida fully realizes the otherness of friend without basing friendship on any form of narcissism. Derrida’s account of otherness in friendship is ethically illuminating, although he does not relate this suspension of self-sameness to forgetfulness. Levinas does attest to this kind of connection in his description of the substitution of oneself for the other. ‘Forgetfulness’ is part of how Levinasian rhetoric describes ‘substitution’. ‘Substitution’ is thematized in Levinasian philosophy, but not ‘Forgetfulness’ (cf. Levinas, 1981, p. 115). But Derrida does refer to forgetfulness on a different occasion, in his discourse of gift, where he states that responsibility requires ‘being good and through goodness, one forget or efface the origin of what one gives’, in the sense of renouncing any return to oneself, of infinite love, giving and sacrifice (Derrida, 2008, p. 52). In this context, forgetfulness implies relinquishing any affirmation of the self-same, but this meaning is not singled out for thematization. A completely thematized role of forgetfulness in disregarding self-sameness or self-centricity can only be found in Zhuangzian philosophy.

4.2. From the forgetting of oneself to the mutual forgetfulness of friends in the Zhuangzi

I can sum up the Zhuangzian notion of forgetting oneself in a nutshell: it aims at forgetting or letting go of illusory unity, identity, separability from the other, unchangeability and centricity of oneself. In addition to reasoning on the impossibility of such self-sameness, the Zhuangzi provides many anecdotes to illustrate the author’s main point. One story admires Mengsun Cai for not complying with his established identity as a renowned funeral manager but only being concerned with doing things suitable to the circumstances of different people and environments (18/6/80). Several other stories are in fact told in a setting of friendship or being with friends. In response to Master Li’s concern for his imminent death, Master Lai likens the universe or nature to a great blacksmith, the maker of a myriad different things, and thus thinks it would be inauspicious (to the creator) for him to attach to his human identity or refuse whatever change his natural death will bring (17/6/53–60). Another story relates how Master Yu is happy with whatever identity he will become after death, whether a chicken, crossbow or cart (17/6/50–52). It is because of such positive and receptive attitudes towards inevitable changes and transformation, and the encouraged forgetfulness of one’s fixed identity, that the Zhuangzi stays away from any position that regards a friend as only the second self, or claims absolute unity between friends. Both oneself and friends in the stories of the Zhuangzi go with the flow and move along with otherness within and without.

Chapter six of the Zhuangzi contains the following narrative:

Master Sanghu, Meng Zifan, and Master Qinzhang came to be friends and talk to each other: ‘Who can be together in their very not being together, doing something for one another by doing nothing for one another? Who can climb up upon the heavens, roaming on the mists, twisting and turning round and round without limit, living their lives in mutual forgetfulness, never coming to an end?’ The three of them looked at each other and burst out laughing. None was reluctant in his heart. So they became friends. (17/6/60–18/6/62; Ziporyn, 2020, modified; also cf. Graham, 1981/2001, p. 89)

Forgetfulness in friendship, like many other elements of Zhuangzian thought, works for the wider ethical aim of unimpededly wandering throughout the fluid world or moving along with infinite changes and transformation. The metaphorical phrases—‘Climbing up upon the heavens’, ‘roaming on the mists’, and ‘twisting and turning round and round without limit’—all signify this primary goal.⁵ The Zhuangzian relation of forgetfulness and friendship cannot be properly understood outside of this broader context.

‘Mutual forgetfulness (xiangwang 相忘)’ seems to challenge our commonsensical idea of friendship. One may need to forget oneself or abandon a self-centered state of mind in order to be open or responsive to others, but if a friendship is based on other-directed dispositions and actions, in what sense can the Zhuangzi reasonably assume that friends can be forgetful of each other while maintaining their friendship? This can be a difficult phrase for readers to parse. For example, Mair’s translation of ‘xiangwang’ is simply ‘forgetting themselves’ (Mair, 1994, p. 59), which seems in accord with the more preeminent Zhuangzian notion of forgetting oneself and presumes that everyone forgets oneself while engaging in friendship with others but does not ‘forget each other’. Such a translation omits the word ‘mutual (xiang 相)’ and therefore does not fully convey the original point. The meaning of mutual forgetfulness can be captured in a more careful reading of the related passages with a better understanding of their context. ‘Forgetting each other’, of course, involves forgetting oneself in the first place, and forgetting oneself is foundational to this mutual forgetting. Nevertheless, the word ‘mutual (xiang)’ and its meaning cannot be neglected.

One of the phrases crucial to our understanding of how it is possible to be friends while forgetting each other is ‘being together in their very not being together, doing something for one another by doing nothing for one another (xiangyu yu wuxiangyu 相與於無相與, xiangwei yu wuxiangwei 相為於無相為)’. Its paradoxicality is typical of Zhuangzian philosophical language (Derridean non-oppositional logic may find some affinity with it despite contextual differences), and the polarities are juxtaposed and linked together in a way similar to what I have examined earlier in this article. Because of its paradoxicality, this phrase often puzzles many readers, and the reason for such linkage and reconciliation of opposites has not been clearly explained in English literature. In contrast, the exegetic tradition of the Zhuangzi itself has offered alternative interpretations. One such interpretation is represented by Guo Xiang’s commentary. He explains this connecting of opposite statements—‘being together’ and ‘not being together’, or ‘doing something for one another’ and ‘doing nothing for one another’—from the perspective of regarding myriad things in the world as one body (yi tianxia wei yitizhe 以天下為一體者; Cui, 1988, p. 255; Guo, 1961, p. 265). This ‘one body’ perspective provides a reason for linking the contrary together instead of seeing them as merely opposed to each other or simply irrelevant. I consider this kind of interpretation to be methodic, rectifying our conventional way of looking at opposites. In doing so, Guo Xiang puts forward the point that, while being not together, friends can still harmonize their different characters; while doing nothing for one another, their exterior (actions) and interior (dispositions) all come to benefit each other (Guo, 1961, p. 265).⁶ Such an exegesis is reminiscent of some classical Western imaginations on the power of a friendship that can transcend limited space and time; for instance, those inscribed by Cicero’s writing: ‘Even when friends are absent, they are still present’ (Cicero, 2018, p. 47), and so forth. The Zhuangzians would not deny this partial truth about friendship but they are far from seeing it as the whole truth, as the previous discussion has shown. Guo’s interpretation makes a certain sense but it does not exhaust all meanings of the phrase, especially those in a closer relation with several core ideas or values of the Zhuangzi, like ‘wuwei 無為’, which is implicated in the word ‘wuxiangwei 無相為’ of this phrase.

It seems that many scholars of the Zhuangzi prefer another interpretation of this phrase, although Guo Xiang’s is not completely rejected. This second interpretation was first taken up by Lin Xiyi 林希逸, reaffirmed by Lu Xixing 陸西星, and later followed by others up to modern times. According to Lin and Lu, ‘being together in their very not being together’ means ‘having-no-mind (wuxin 無心)’ while being together, and ‘doing something for one another by doing nothing for one another’ means acting as ‘not-acting (wuwei)’ or ‘having effortless action’ (Lin, 1997, p. 115; Lu, 2010, p. 105).⁷ Xuan Ying 宣潁’s interpretation, on one hand, follows that of ‘wuxin’ for the first half of the phrase (wuxiangyu zhi xin 無相與之心), and, on the other hand, explains the second half as ‘without the trace of doing something for one another (wuxiangwei zhi ji 無相為之跡; Xuan, 1977, p. 69)’. Chen Shouchang 陳壽昌 simply calls it ‘doing things [for one another] without the trace [of artificiality]’ (weizhi wuji 為之無跡; S. Chen, 1977, p. 54). Thus we see how three related concepts are used to interpret this phrase: wuxin, wuwei, and wuji (無跡).

The concept of ‘wuji’ is invented by Guo Xiang. Guo takes the words ‘ji 跡’ (contextually denoting forms/xing 形 or designations/ming 名 of Confucian classics) and ‘suoyi ji 所以跡’ (what makes forms or designations possible) from the Zhuangzi (39/14/77). He then defines ‘suoyi ji’ as ‘wuji (being without trace)’, which is equivalent to one’s ‘true nature (zhenxing 真性)’ or following what is natural (yi ziran weilü 以自然為履) (Guo, 1961, pp. 288, 532; cf. B. Wang, 1996, pp. 544–546). The text of the Zhuangzi does not provide any conceptualization of ‘wuji’ as Guo does. Guo’s coinage is later adopted by Chinese Madhyamaka Buddhist philosophers, becoming an influential concept in the paired categories of root (ben 本) and trace, and is afterwards applied back to the interpretation of the Zhuangzi as we see here. It is commonly acknowledged that the Chinese Buddhist usage of root/trace involves, more or less, a metaphysical dimension. In contrast, the use of ‘no trace’ in interpreting the paradoxicality of xiangwei 相為/wu xiangwei 無相為 is constrained by the context of wuwei in the sense that they both emphasize naturalness, spontaneity, deference and being against artificial maneuvers. In this respect, wuji is a sub-concept of wuwei.

The appearance of the word ‘wuxin (no-mind)’ is very rare in the Zhuangzi (one example can be found in 58/22/24) but is frequently used in Guo Xiang’s interpretation. ‘Wuxin’ is further conceptualized by Chinese Madhyamaka thinker Sengzao and especially by Chan Buddhists. They add a trans-metaphysical dimension to the concept based on the Buddha-nature theory of Mahayana Buddhism. However, Lin, Lu and others applying ‘wuxin’ to interpretations of the current passage about xiangyu 相與/wuxiangyu 無相與 are similarly constrained by its Zhuangzian context. Lin’s expression ‘being together without using [intentional or purposive] mind (相與以無心也)’ and Xuan’s phrase of ‘without the mind [or intention] for being together (無相與之心)’ both point to the Zhuangzian style of aimlessness, flexibility and going with the fluidity of friendship. This style embodies the virtuosity of ‘wuwei’, effortless action or doing. In fact, Guo’s interpretation involves an element of being together and doing things for one another without a self-preferred endeavor (無愛為於期間也), even though he subjects this point to his focus on the ‘one body’ (Guo, 1961, p. 265). We can thus assume that the paradoxical statements about being together through not being together and doing things for one another by doing nothing for one another direct readers toward the virtuosity of naturalness and effortless action (wuwei), which is central to the Zhuangzian model of wandering freely in the shifting world. This interpretation also provides the key to understanding the meaning of ‘forgetting each other’. Because the sages would be friendly and do good (or suitable things) to each other in a natural and spontaneous way without contrivance, manifesting their intrinsic mode of being and living without remembering the need to be good to each other, they are capable of ‘forgetting each other’. Their intrinsic good (or fittingness) and spontaneity are constitutive to their acts of forgetting, just as a properly fitted pair of shoes makes one forget one’s own feet. Forgetfulness, again, both signifies the level of spontaneity or naturalness and operates as a guide for how to attain such a level in regard to friendship. ‘Forgetting each other’ does not mean discarding friends or friendship. It is simply a unique way of shaping, handling or even maintaining friendship.

4.3. The naturalistic constraint on suitability and “dan 淡”-styled friendship

Another passage about ‘mutual forgetfulness’ offers further aid to understanding the relation between forgetting and friendship in the Zhuangzi.

Fish mutually thrive in water, humans mutually thrive in the dao. Those who thrive in water can find adequate nourishment just by passing through their ponds. Those who thrive in the dao can make their intrinsic nature satisfied by [practicing] no-contrivance. Therefore, it is said: ‘Fish forget each other in the rivers and lakes, humans forget each other in the arts of the dao’. (18/6/72–73; G. Chen, 1990, pp. 198, 196; cf. Guo, 1961, p. 272; S. Wang, 1988, vol. 1, pp. 256–257)⁸

By using metaphor to compare a fish’s relation to water with a human’s relation to the dao, this passage reveals the importance of suitability or fittingness (shi 適) to the neuro-physiological or psychological state of spontaneity and forgetting, of which the former seems to be a condition of the latter. This suitability or fittingness is, however, constrained by one’s heavenly nature (tianxing 天性 or xingfen 性分). Cheng Xuanying uses the word ‘shixing 適性 (the suitableness to the nature of things)’ in his commentary (Guo, 1961, 272). Guo Xiang, on the other hand, may be the first scholar to interpret the word ‘ding 定’ in this passage as ‘zu 足’. Guo writes: ‘Everyone can feel [that one’s nature is] satisfied and then forget each other (gezizu er xiangwang 各自足而相忘) … The perfect person is always satisfied and therefore is always forgetful (zhiren changzu gu changwangye 至人常足故常忘也)’ (Guo, 1961, p. 272). These words might remind us of Aristotle’s claim that self-sufficient men should have no need of friends, although he nevertheless concludes that friends are still necessary, due to man’s nature as a social/political animal and his own assessment of friends as the greatest of external goods (Aristotle, 1984a, 1169b4–21). Guo Xiang’s discussion of this seemingly similar topic is actually on a very different plane. Guo’s ‘zu (satisfaction)’ is not self-sufficiency. He does not focus on whether a self-sufficient person has no need for friends and therefore can forget about them, but instead on whether an individual’s heavenly nature is satisfied (shi tianxing gezu 使天性各足) (Guo, 1961, p. 273). If this nature is followed or satisfied, the conditions for suitability or fittingness will be met and human thriving, including friendly relationships, can naturally occur without relying on deliberate loving-kindness. This thriving is marked by spontaneity and forgetfulness.⁹ Guo’s use of the fish/water metaphor, with a naturalistic constraint on the so-called fittingness, elaborates at the same time the source of spontaneity and forgetfulness. The central point is to let everyone’s heavenly nature be satisfied, advising against hindering one’s intrinsically different nature by imposing things of artificiality and uniformity, which can cause damage through excessiveness or deficiency induced by overdoing, attachment and aversion. To oppose artificiality and uniformity, the Zhuangzi calls for ‘wuwei’, spontaneity and forgetting.

This naturalistic constraint on suitability, which is pivotal to Zhuangzian forgetfulness, has a direct bearing on the Zhuangzian view of friendship. Following this Zhuangzian norm, any excessive or coercive behavior that neglects differences or (necessary) distance between friends is not encouraged. Instead, Zhuangzians promote being respectful of differences and maintaining space or distance between friends, similar to modern or contemporary Western thinkers. For instance, Zhu Boxiu 褚柏秀 interprets the phrase ‘being together in their very not being together’ as ‘to become friends by being simple, calm, or desiring less (dan yi chengjiao ye 淡以成交也; Zhu, 2014, vol. 1, p. 220)’. Chapter 20 of the Zhuangzi involves an even clearer statement on this natural style of friendship: ‘Friendships between noble persons are flavorless like water, while friendships between petty persons are sweet like fruit liqueur (junzhi zhijiao danruoshui, xiaoren zhijiao ganruoli 君子之交淡若水, 小人之交甘若醴)’ (53/20/41–42; Ziporyn, 2020, p. 161, modified).¹⁰ Here the word ‘dan 淡’ when applied to ‘water’ (in contrast to ‘sweet’ ‘fruit liqueur’) symbolizes a friendship that is not directed by profit. The immediate context of this sentence is a criticism on utilitarian friendship, very similar to what Aristotle distinguishes as secondary friendship (Aristotle, 1984a, 1156a17-1156b6). In this context, translating the polysemic word ‘dan’ as ‘flavorless’ in contrast to ‘sweet’ is perfectly fine. However, the broader context of the anecdote and this Zhuangzian criticism associates the ‘dan 淡’ quality of a relationship or friendship with one’s intrinsic nature or naturalness, like ‘tianshu 天屬 (natural connection)’ (53/20/40–41). Lü Huiqing 吕惠卿 interprets ‘tianshu’ as ‘following along with one’s natural endowment and then satisfying the intrinsic nature (renqizhi zhi ziran er xingfen yizu 任其質之自然而性分已足)’ (Lü, 2009, p. 371). Xuan Ying construes it as ‘being affectively connected to one another by one’s authentic nature (zhenxing xianggan真性相感)’ (Fang, 2012, vol. 2, p. 993; Xuan, 1977, p. 153).¹¹ Lin Yidu 林疑獨 points out: ‘Friendship in following the dao is equivalent to the natural connection (daojiao zhiyu tianshu, qi zhiyi ye 道交之與天屬, 其至一也)’ (Zhu, 2014, vol. 2, p. 628). These explanations unequivocally call attention to one’s intrinsic nature or naturalness in which the ‘dan 淡’ style of friendship is imbedded. ‘Dan 淡’-styled friendship, following one’s intrinsic nature and following the dao inherently overlap and coincide in Zhuangzian perspective.

While the authorship of Chapter 20 ‘Shanmu 山木’ is commonly attributed to members of the school of Zhuangzi, a close connection between the contents of this chapter and the inner chapters is widely acknowledged (cf. Cui, 1992, pp. 75, 92; Liu, 1994, pp. 102–103, 168–169). Such a connection is found in the use of the term ‘dan 淡’ as well. ‘Dan’ first appears in chapter seven ‘Yingdiwang應帝王’ in Wuminren’s advice to Tiangen: ‘Let your mind wander in flavorlessness [simplicity or placidity] (youxin yu dan 遊心於淡), blend your vital energy with immensity [or featurelessness] (heqi yu mo 合氣於漠). Follow along with the nature of things and retain no self-preference’ (20/7/10–11; cf. Graham, 1981/2001, p. 95; Mair, 1994, p. 68; Watson, 1968, p. 94). Because of the metaphorical use of the words ‘dan 淡’ and ‘mo 漠’ and their polysemy, exegetic tradition has offered several notable interpretations to their Zhuangzian context. For instance, Guo Xiang construes ‘dan 淡’ as ‘following along with one’s intrinsic nature without adding anything artificial (renxing er wushuoshi 任性而無所飾)’ and ‘mo 漠’ as ‘calmness out of one’s innate nature and attaining stillness (jing yu xing er zhi 靜於性而止)’ (Guo, 1961, p. 294). Cheng Xuanying affirms both words as ‘being empty and calm (xujing 虛靜)’ (Guo, 1961, p. 294). I have noted that, in Chapter 16 of the Zhuangzi, ‘dan 淡’ and ‘mo 漠’ are used together as a compound ‘danmo 淡漠’, which, according to Chen Jingyuan 陳景元, means ‘no-desire’ or ‘desiring less’ (wuyu 無欲; Zhu, 2014, vol. 1, p. 521). Hu Yuanjun 胡遠濬points out that if one does not use oneself (as a standard) to rectify others, one can get along with the whole world and acquire placidity and peace (de danmo 得淡漠; Hu, 1988, p. 129). Although Guo and Cheng’s interpretations have been well received and become authoritative, many later interpretations can also enrich our understanding of these words. Zhu Boxiu 褚柏秀 explains ‘dan 淡’ as ‘no-craving (wu shiyu 無嗜欲)’ too (Zhu, 2014, vol. 1, p. 246); following Lin Yidu, Zhu construes ‘mo 漠’ as ‘no-damage’ or ‘no-violence’ to connective vital energy (wubao 無暴; Zhu, 2014, vol. 1, pp. 245, 247). Xuan Ying sees ‘dan 淡’ and ‘mo漠’ as ‘the dao of tolerance (or accommodation), peacefulness and the cultivation of oneself’ (youmi xiuji zhi dao宥密修己之道; Xuan, 1977, p. 77). Chapter 15 of the Zhuangzi, ‘Keyi 刻義’, uses ‘dan 淡’ in the following phrase: ‘Being lofty without any carved-in-stone intentions, cultivated without [conventional] benevolence and dutiful conduct … Nothing is not forgotten, yet everything is getting along; being placid without going to any polarity, yet all good things come to attend’ (40/15/6–7; cf. Watson, 1968, p. 168; Ziporyn, 2020, p. 128).¹² ‘Dan 淡 (placidity)’ here is related to the meaning of ‘wuji 無極’—to not be one-sided, fixed or prefer one extreme (Cf. Guo and Cheng’s commentary in Guo, 1961, p. 537). Zhu Boxiu explains ‘danran wuji 澹然無極’ as being placid without measuring or judging by one’s fixation and bias (danran moliang 澹然莫量; Zhu, 2014, vol. 1, p. 505). Chapter 13 of the Zhuangzi adopts yet another compound ‘tiandan 恬淡’ and lists it as one of the four forms of wuwei (33/13/7; cf. Cheng’s exegesis in Guo, 1961, p. 459): ‘Emptiness and stillness, placidity and mildness, quietude and indifference, effortless-action—these are root of all things’ (Cf. Mair, 1994, p. 120).¹³

I submit the following list summarizing all the meanings underlying the use of the word ‘dan 淡’, ‘danmo 淡漠’, ‘tiandan 恬淡’, and their inner logic.

1. ‘Dan 淡’ and related words describe a kind of agential capacity and its state of mind. This capacity or state of mind can be applied to, or guide, one’s relationship with other things and persons in general, and one’s friendship in particular, including its formation and development. The word ‘dan 淡’ can then characterize the corresponding style of friendship.

2. This ‘dan 淡’-styled friendship is characterized by emptiness/openness and calmness/stillness. This kind of openness to others, including friends, without being fixed on any pre-conceptions is crucial to any ongoing friendship since friends are constantly challenged by otherness and changes in daily situations and relationships. One may wonder why a friendship needs to involve calmness or stillness. It must be so because, on one hand, calmness is the capacity for dealing with any unexpected challenges, maintaining a workable state of the mind and avoiding overreacting. As Chapter 13, ‘Tiandao 天道’, indicates, calmness or stillness empowers the practitioners so that myriad things cannot disturb their mind (wanwu wuzuyi raoxin 萬物無足以鐃心; 33/13/3). On the other hand, calmness is a pre-condition for any fluid action, like water. If the mind is first like the stillness of water, it can reflect or receive myriad things without obstruction, which facilitates suitable decision-making and appropriate actions (33/13/4).

3. This ‘dan 淡’ style of openness and calmness leads to ‘no-craving’ or ‘desiring less’. Flavorlessness (dan 淡) contrasts the intensity (nong 濃) of flavor; decreased flavor symbolizes decreased desire or a detachment from desire. Zhuangzian philosophy suggests that detachment or ‘dan 淡’ is a remedy for desiring too much from others and the world, particularly since, in many circumstances, those desires only serve inflated self-interest. Tao Chongdao 陶崇道 criticizes those who see the plentifulness of the world, feel petty about themselves, and thus fill their minds with self-interest, only desiring for themselves the utmost. Therefore, they need to desire less; they need this flavorlessness (Fang, 2012, p. 993).¹⁴ The ‘dan’ style recommended for friends and friendship aims at overcoming these problems.

4. A friendship of ‘desiring less’ signals a strong opposition to utilitarian friendship, since it encourages decreasing desire. However, ‘desiring less’ does not only target the negatives of a desire for personal profit; it also includes benign or positive desires, such as the desire for enhancing friendship, which cannot be desired too much either, because it is nonetheless a form of overdoing. Accelerating too much will slow one down; this is against naturalness in the Daoist-Zhuangzian view.

5. In this way ‘dan 淡’-styled friendship cautions against going to any extremes. Similar to ‘desiring too much’, pushing anything to the extreme will hurt a friendship, or any relationship. Complete unity, overfamiliarity, a lack of independence or the necessary space/distance between friends; these are all examples of extremities in friendship. Avoiding one-sidedness, bias, or fixation facilitates one to be flexible about differences between friends, or with changes brought about by the journey of life itself. These difficulties, which have attracted so much attention from Nietzsche, Blanchot and Derrida, do not seem to be problems if one adopts ‘dan 淡’-styled friendship.

6. Through openness or the absence of one-sidedness, the ‘dan 淡’ style allows for placidity, mildness, even-temperedness, and tolerance or accommodation. This is the Zhuangzian middle-way between various opposite extremes. It is paradoxical in the sense that the ‘dan 淡’ style may seem less exciting or passionate in a relationship, but it indeed makes a close connection more possible, or more sustainable, than many of the extreme states, even with their tempting or sweet profits (dan yi qing 淡以親, gan yi jue 甘以絕; 53/20/42).

7. Underlying all these qualities of the ‘dan 淡’-styled friendship—emptiness, calmness, no-craving, non-extremity and so on—is the wuwei, an application of effortless or spontaneous action in a human relationship. These qualities are regarded as the manifestation of the dao or nature itself. It is interesting to note that, according to the exegetic tradition, both ‘mutual forgetting’ in friendship and the ‘dan 淡’ style are the practice of wuwei. Wuwei is the Zhuangzian norm of virtuosity based on a meta-ethical dimension that sees wuwei as the root and source of the universe.¹⁵

8. As the wuwei demands, the ‘dan 淡’-styled friendship follows one’s natural endowment and connection, and satisfies the intrinsic nature of each other. ‘Being flavorless like water’ means being natural or ‘self-so’; being self-so means fitting or being suitable to the intrinsic nature of each other, and against artificiality and arbitrariness. In this respect, difference, distance, disruption, the death of friends and the fading away of a friendship are all acceptable and accommodatable as part of the natural process and as occurrences within a greater natural order.

9. Finally, we have witnessed that the ‘dan 淡’-styled friendship is inextricable from forgetfulness. Maintaining a ‘dan 淡’-styled friendship requires forgetting, and the practice of forgetfulness boosts the ‘dan 淡’-styled friendship. The intimate relation between ‘dan 淡’ and ‘wang 忘’ can be discerned within the sophisticated conceptual scheme of Zhuangzian philosophy. From the popular use of the modern Chinese compound ‘danwang 淡忘’ we can also see the survived connection of these two words and the ubiquitous cultural influence of these original Zhuangzian concepts.

Returning to the general theme of this section, the contents of Zhuangzian forgetfulness in regard to friendship seem much richer, broader, and more substantial than the Derridean one. Zhuangzian forgetfulness involves therapeutic functions for the loss of friendship, the idea and practice of shattering narcissist confinement and self-sameness, the idea and practice of balancing relationships between friends to avoid going to the extreme, dealing with differences, disruption and proper distance in friendship, and so on. The contents regarding ‘mutual forgetfulness’ in friendship can be seen as an application and expansion of the more famous notion of ‘forgetting oneself (wangji)’, since forgetting oneself, letting go of desires, following what is natural or spontaneous and opposing extremes (wuwei) are all interrelated. They become both a means and an end. As means and agential capacities, they require cultivation to transform oneself from self-centricity to being open to the other. Forgetting oneself is not meant to deny the relative everyday existence of oneself and escape from its problems. However, forgetfulness also often denotes an end for Zhuangzian practice, the achieved freedom to go with the flow, to reconcile with the dao.¹⁶ Once a person achieves this end, forgetting as a means or as an end itself should be forgotten too. As such, forgetfulness is deeply rooted in the whole structure of Zhuangzian philosophy, in its ethical naturalism, and in its unique modal of language use, very different from those of Derrida and his peers. Compared to the long history of the Zhuangzian tradition of forgetfulness in regard to friendship, Derrida, Blanchot and Nietzsche are just among the first Western thinkers to start linking forgetfulness with friendship. The Zhuangzi would be a useful resource for their further development, while the insights of Western thinkers may simultaneously provide angles from which to understand and interpret Zhuangzian forgetfulness anew.

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Notes

1. My reference to the works of Aristotle uses the standard Bekker numbering, not the page number of Barnes’ The Complete Works of Aristotle.

2. Reynolds basically defines Derrida’s approach as a ‘transcendental philosophy’, which employs ‘transcendental arguments’. I tend to use the term ‘quasi-transcendental’ to distinguish Derrida from traditional transcendental philosophy since Derrida only borrows transcendental arguments to perform the deconstruction of philosophy, including deconstructing the classical concept of friendship. As Critchley rightly points out when he remarks on Derrida’s argument for ‘the quasi-transcendental condition’ for friendship: ‘ … “quasi” because it announces the condition of both their possibility and impossibility’ (Critchley, 2006, p. 19). I have also addressed this Derridean ‘quasi-transcendental’ position elsewhere: ‘What constitutes Derrida’s “transcendental” motif is precisely this marginality, this non-positionality of being inside/outside’ (Y. Wang, 2003, p. 26).

3. Despite my position that Derrida’s critique of the classical preference of the stability of friendship over fleetingness is overall defensible, and my disagreement with the accusation of Derrida’s ‘persistent critique of steadfastness’ as ‘disorienting’ (Dallmayr, 2000, p. 126) through a contextual examination above, there are still other criticisms on the Derridean discourse of friendship. For example, McEvoy traces back to the historical-philological process that shapes the misunderstanding of Aristotle and neglects the original meaning of ‘having too many friends means no friend’ for the expression ‘O my friends, there is no friend’, which Derrida uses for his view on the disruption of friendship (McEvoy, 2003, p. 5). But even though the quote has no historical-philological basis, and Derrida has been censured for a ‘repeated invocation’ of this ‘apocryphal motto’ (Dallmayr, 2000, p. 118), in my view, Derrida can still use it as a metaphor for his philosophical questioning of certain classical presumptions of friendship. McEvoy implicates his criticism on the preference of a ‘complete discontinuity’ over continuity in Derrida’s treatment of human friendship (McEvoy, 2003, p. 18). I don’t think that Derrida attempts to cancel all continuities in human friendship. Derrida does not align himself only with the discontinuity or even rejection of friendship. ‘Derrida never considers such a gesture as walking away; walking away is not Derrida’s strategy’ (Goh, 2011, p. 108). Derrida crosses two modalities, as we have cited. I am therefore more on the side of those who take insight and inspiration from Derrida, while attempting to develop something that Derrida may have not started to do or may have needed to do. In this respect, Reynolds points out that the lived time or a confused and ambiguous present ‘is not unimportant to friendship’, but it is ‘occluded and downplayed in Derrida’s temporal and ethical decisions’ (Reynolds, 2010, p. 673). Webb accepts the Derridean insight into a fluid flow of friendship, but he also proposes saving the (relativized) constancy of friendship by blending constancy with ‘novelty’ and ‘more significant changes’ (Webb, 2003, p. 138). I think these critiques of Derrida’s discourse on friendship are far more useful than a simple rejection of his seeming radicality and warrant further exploration.

4. Otherwise indicated, all citations of the Zhuangzi are from Zhuangzi Yinde 莊子引得 (1966). Following the Yenching convention, they include the page, chapter and line numbers from the left to right.

5. See Guo Xiang and Cheng Xuanying’s interpretations of the relevant sentences: ‘能隨變任化, 俱無所窮竟’; ‘不滯其中’, ‘能隨變化而無窮’ (Guo, 1961, p. 265).

6. ‘未嘗相與而百節同和’, ‘未嘗相為而表裡俱濟’.

7. Lin writes: ‘相與於無相與,相與以無心也; 相為於無相為, 無為而為也’. Lu comments: ‘相與於無相與,言無心也; 相為於無相為, 言無為也’.

8. I avoid translating the phrase ‘無事而生定’ literally. Following Guo Xiang, the term ‘wushi 無事’ is interpreted as ‘wuwei’ (also see Fang Yong 2012, vol. 1, p. 898); following Cheng Xuanying, the word ‘sheng 生’ as equivalent to ‘xing 性’; and following Yu Yue俞樾, ‘ding 定’ as ‘zu 足’.

9. Another passage in chapter six of the Zhuangzi likewise uses a metaphor of fish forgetting each other in the water: ‘When the springs dry up, the fish have to cluster together on the shore, blowing on each other to keep damp and spitting on each other to stay wet. But that is no match for forgetting all about one another in the rivers and lakes’ (16/6/22–23; Ziporyn, 2020, p. 56). While this scenario is used in a context where the fish spitting on each other is directly compared with human reliance on a generalized moral ‘rightness’, it would be much better understood in terms of the fittingness to the different nature of things/beings illustrated by the water or dao. While this early passage may be more clearly related to a critique of morality, its stress on the transformability of moral rightness resonates with the current passage’s emphasis on the fittingness to the nature of things/beings and their shifting circumstances. Both cases demonstrate that they do not oppose caring for each other per se, but rather the limitations of conventional moral codes. They promote spontaneity and fittingness of moral feelings and actions, and prioritize them over general norms.

10. A similar phrase is found in the Chapter ‘Biaoji 表記’ of the Confucian classic Xiaodai Liji 小戴禮記: ‘君子之接如水, 小人之接如醴; 君子淡以成, 小人甘以壞’ (Dai, 2006). It appears that ‘dan 淡’-styled friendship is accepted by both Daoist and Confucian ideologies. However, the ‘dan 淡’-styled friendship is interpreted in a Confucian context in the Liji, as opposed to the Zhuangzian context.

11. ‘真性相感’ in this edition of Xuan’s Nanhua Jingjie is printed as ‘真忤相感’. It is an obvious error, so I use Zhu’s citation.

12. ‘不刻意而高, 無仁義而修, … 無不忘也, 無不有也. 澹然無極而眾美從之’.

13. ‘虛靜, 恬淡, 寂寞, 無為者, 萬物之本也’. These four forms of ‘wuwei’ also appear in Chapter 15, ‘Keyi’, with some minor differences (40/15/8).

14. ‘將天下看得十分濃釅. 卑之, 生心自利, 則欲必求其極 … 故要淡’.

15. In a recent study of wuwei, Slingerland shows how the network of metaphoric conceptualizations of the wuwei state weaves together meanings of non-exertion: following (or yielding), flowing with, responsiveness, wandering/playing, forgetting the self, making tenuous inside of the Self, and life as lodging, fitting or properly dwelling. It helps us understand that wuwei is entangled with all these meanings and notions in the Zhuangzi. Forgetfulness can be part of, or demonstrate, wuwei. However, I disagree with his interpretation of the Zhuangzi as believing in an ‘essential Self’, and his comparison of this essential Self with the role of the sprouts or the righteous qi in the Mencius (Slingerland, 2003, p. 198). This comparison discounts too many differences between the Zhuangzi and the Mencius.

16. I appreciate one of the reviewers reminding me of this point as well as other feedbacks that helped to improve the quality of this essay.