Overview

This book investigates the various meanings of forgetting and their ethical dimension in the Daoist classic Zhuangzi. It responds to recent scholarship in the study of the ethics of forgetting, which has only emerged within the past two decades in the wake of the widespread memory-studies of the late 20th century. This book accomplishes two goals: First, it assimilates insights from contemporary scholarship, and specifically applies Ricoeur’s three areas of ethical examinations of forgetting, to the study of the Zhuangzi. It addresses a wide range of ethical themes related to acts of forgetting, such as the meaning of well-being and healing, the issue of personal identity and relational autonomy, the norm of spontaneity, naturalness and suitability, the capacities for being empathic, altruistic and responsive to others, and the values of accommodation, receptivity and all-inclusive friendliness. Second, it places forgetfulness in the wider context of the Zhuangzi’s ethical inquiry, and offers a novel understanding of this age-old notion and its exegetic tradition, bringing them into dialogue with Western philosophy and contributing to contemporary discourse on the ethics of forgetting. As the first book to present a comprehensive examination on the ethical dimension and meanings of forgetting or forgetfulness in the Daoist philosophy of the Zhuangzi, this monograph will be of interest to researchers in Asian philosophy, religion and culture, moral philosophy or ethics, the study of memory and forgetting, and comparative or cross-cultural philosophy and ethics.

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9781032300733

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Reviews

“The philosophical perspectives embedded in the text of the Zhuangzi are only just beginning to come to the attention of Anglophone scholarship, presenting an enormous task as well as huge potentials and challenges for the future of philosophy: for explosive synergies, radical rethinkings, redrawn parsings—a rich mine for discoveries of hitherto unsuspected questionings and unnoticed options toward solutions that open up vast new territories for metaphysical, ethical and social reflection. Professor Youru Wang's book contributes significantly to this dawning endeavor with a new approach, an extended thematic meditation on a particular topic in the Zhuangzi corpus—the theme of forgetting—creating the first sustained monograph devoted to this topic. His work combines sensitive engagements with both primary and secondary sources—Chinese and Western, modern and classical—with deft interpretive interventions, an adventurous speculative spirit and a rigorous comprehensiveness that bring this theme into focus in a particularly fruitful way, fostering a level of detailed and probing dialogue between Zhuangzian and Western themes that brings the discussion to a new level of sophistication. This book, one hopes, is a harbinger of a new wave of Zhuangzi studies, which ideally will galvanize further dimensions of reverberations of this inexhaustible work in the realm of contemporary philosophical conversation.” —Brook Ziporyn, Mircea Eliade Professor of Chinese Religion, Philosophy and Comparative Thought, the University of Chicago, USA “Wang has carried out a particularly fruitful way of doing comparative philosophy. He has identified a cluster of ideas in the Zhuangzi that have to do with forgetting, and throughout his fascinating book explores the resonance of this cluster with an impressive array of Western philosophy, gracefully crossing the divide between continental work such as that of Ricoeur, Nietzsche, Levinas and Derrida and analytic moral philosophy such as that of Jonathan Dancy, Julia Annas, Linda Zagzebski, and Rosalind Hursthouse. Wang makes a strong and lucid case for a positive ethical philosophy of forgetting that incorporates many of the insights about forgetting that can be gleaned from this work and furthermore goes beyond them to constitute a distinctive Zhuangzian philosophy on how we might live well by connecting with the ideas of (relational) autonomy, letting go of fixed self-identity, attuning to others through empathy, and practicing friendship that embraces impermanence.” —David B. Wong, Susan Fox Beischer and George D. Beischer Professor of Philosophy, Duke University, USA “Youru Wang's monograph is a groundbreaking work on forgetfulness in at least three senses. It is the first comprehensive study of the theme of forgetfulness in the Daoist classic Zhuangzi; it brings this ancient Chinese text into a fruitful dialogue with contemporary Western philosophers, most prominently, Paul Ricoeur, on the issue of forgetfulness; and it presents a most cogent philosophical conception of forgetfulness, especially from an ethical perspective. Wang's impressive skills in textual analysis and admirable ingenuity in philosophical reconstruction are fully displayed throughout the book.” —Yong Huang, Professor of Philosophy, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and Editor of ‘Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy’.

"“The philosophical perspectives embedded in the text of the Zhuangzi are only just beginning to come to the attention of Anglophone scholarship, presenting an enormous task as well as huge potentials and challenges for the future of philosophy: for explosive synergies, radical rethinkings, redrawn parsings—a rich mine for discoveries of hitherto unsuspected questionings and unnoticed options toward solutions that open up vast new territories for metaphysical, ethical and social reflection. Professor Youru Wang's book contributes significantly to this dawning endeavor with a new approach, an extended thematic meditation on a particular topic in the Zhuangzi corpus—the theme of forgetting—creating the first sustained monograph devoted to this topic. His work combines sensitive engagements with both primary and secondary sources—Chinese and Western, modern and classical—with deft interpretive interventions, an adventurous speculative spirit and a rigorous comprehensiveness that bring this theme into focus in a particularly fruitful way, fostering a level of detailed and probing dialogue between Zhuangzian and Western themes that brings the discussion to a new level of sophistication. This book, one hopes, is a harbinger of a new wave of Zhuangzi studies, which ideally will galvanize further dimensions of reverberations of this inexhaustible work in the realm of contemporary philosophical conversation.” —Brook Ziporyn, Mircea Eliade Professor of Chinese Religion, Philosophy and Comparative Thought, the University of Chicago, USA “Wang has carried out a particularly fruitful way of doing comparative philosophy. He has identified a cluster of ideas in the Zhuangzi that have to do with forgetting, and throughout his fascinating book explores the resonance of this cluster with an impressive array of Western philosophy, gracefully crossing the divide between continental work such as that of Ricoeur, Nietzsche, Levinas and Derrida and analytic moral philosophy such as that of Jonathan Dancy, Julia Annas, Linda Zagzebski, and Rosalind Hursthouse. Wang makes a strong and lucid case for a positive ethical philosophy of forgetting that incorporates many of the insights about forgetting that can be gleaned from this work and furthermore goes beyond them to constitute a distinctive Zhuangzian philosophy on how we might live well by connecting with the ideas of (relational) autonomy, letting go of fixed self-identity, attuning to others through empathy, and practicing friendship that embraces impermanence.” —David B. Wong, Susan Fox Beischer and George D. Beischer Professor of Philosophy, Duke University, USA “Youru Wang's monograph is a groundbreaking work on forgetfulness in at least three senses. It is the first comprehensive study of the theme of forgetfulness in the Daoist classic Zhuangzi; it brings this ancient Chinese text into a fruitful dialogue with contemporary Western philosophers, most prominently, Paul Ricoeur, on the issue of forgetfulness; and it presents a most cogent philosophical conception of forgetfulness, especially from an ethical perspective. Wang's impressive skills in textual analysis and admirable ingenuity in philosophical reconstruction are fully displayed throughout the book.” —Yong Huang, Professor of Philosophy, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and Editor of ‘Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy’. ""The Ethical Dimension of Forgetfulness offers a highly informed, wide-ranging, and revealing exploration of the Zhuangzi as a global resource for philosophical reflection on forgetfulness. It is particularly insightful in regard to the therapeutic uses of forgetting as a method that enables us to shed not only the trauma of debilitating memories but also disabling conceptions of ourselves as unconnected and alienated from other people, creatures, and things. Forgetting can, at times, not only relieve us of unproductive and painful burdens but also open us up to new, more comprehensive conceptions of ourselves offering profound sources of satisfaction and joy."" —Philip Ivanhoe, Professor, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, The Georgetown University, USA."

Author Information

Youru Wang is Professor in the Department of Philosophy and World Religions, Rowan University, USA. He is the author of Linguistic Strategies in Daoist Zhuangzi and Chan Buddhism: The Other Way of Speaking (Routledge/Curzon, 2003), Historical Dictionary of Chan Buddhism (Rowman & Litlefield 2017), the editor of Deconstruction and the Ethical in Asian Thought (Routledge 2007) and the co-editor of Dao Companion to Chinese Buddhist Philosophy (Springer 2019).

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