Some ancient Chinese argument

A few years ago, I noted here that the philosophy of Zhuangzi seemed worth a look (and I hadn't hear of him before.)

I have tried reading some of him since then, but to me, he came across as a smartass teenager arguing more to get attention than to paint a well considered position, so I didn't stick with it for long.

This essay, however, talking about his position of being against the Confucian view of meritocracy, is pretty interesting.   I'm not sure that it convinces me that Zhuangzi is worth following - but it is worth reading.  Take this part, for example:

Through such theatrics Zhuangzi developed a systematic critique of Confucianism’s moral justification of inequality, and the most essential part of that critique is his insistence that moral striving alienates us from life. For Zhuangzi, the drive to become xian invites a person to live for an abstraction, whether it be for reputation, moral purity or a sagely ideal of pursuing ‘the good’. This leads one to treat their own life as raw material for that abstract identity. One’s material body becomes an instrument for something immaterial.

In the Robber’s monologue, he lists celebrated Confucian exemplars: Bo Yi and Shu Qi, who starved themselves rather than serve an unjust ruler; Bi Gan, who remonstrated with King Zhou so forcefully that his heart was cut out; Wu Zixu, whose loyalty to his state, warning his King of a threat, ended with his corpse thrown into a river. These people are praised in Confucianism as exemplars of virtue, yet Zhuangzi treats them as tragic figures ‘trapped in the net of reputation and names’, who met their grisly ends precisely because of their inflexible pursuit of virtue.

What makes these figures disturbing is that they were consumed by their convictions. A system that ranks people by virtue necessarily creates incentives for self-exploitation. Once virtue becomes something that can be measured, ranked and exchanged for authority, it turns human life into a resource to be spent. In other words, Confucian xian turns cultivation into moral capital, and moral capital demands extraction from the self. Indeed, one can see this kind of self-extraction in our modern neoliberal ‘hustle culture’ even more clearly, where it is trendy to ‘rise and grind’ and forego basic necessities.