The Equality of Things & the Relativity of Perspectives

This page sets out the argument in steps, states what it does and does not claim, deals with the problem of self-application, and explains why it is neither relativism nor indifference. It is the densest page in this section, and the payoff for working through it is that the rest of the book becomes considerably clearer.

What the chapter title means

The title is three characters and can be parsed two ways, both of which are ancient and neither of which is clearly correct.

Read one way it means the equalising of things, or a discussion of making things equal. Read the other way it means the equalising of discourses about things — that is, the levelling of the competing doctrines that the philosophers of the age were arguing over.

The ambiguity is productive rather than annoying, because the chapter does both. It argues about how things are and it argues about how positions are held, and its point is that the second question is prior to the first.

The argument in steps

Reconstructed, the chapter's core reasoning runs roughly as follows.

Judgements come in pairs. To say something is this is to distinguish it from that; to affirm is to deny. The terms are correlative and neither has content without the other.

Each of these judgements is made from somewhere. What is this from here is that from there. The chapter says explicitly that from one position you do not see, and from the other you do — meaning that the assignment depends on where the speaker stands, and both assignments are correct from their respective positions.

Disputes therefore arise from what the text calls a formed mind: a settled standpoint that generates its judgements automatically. The Confucians and the Mohists each affirm what the other denies, and each is right by their own standard. That is not a stalemate to be broken by better arguments; it is what having a standard consists of.

To settle such a dispute you would need an arbiter. The chapter then closes this off with a small piece of formal reasoning: an arbiter who agrees with you cannot settle it, since he shares your position; nor can one who agrees with your opponent; nor can one who agrees with neither, since he has a third position; nor can one who agrees with both, since he has no position from which to decide. There is no neutral ground.

What remains is not a conclusion about the world but a change of attitude towards one's own judgements. They still function. They stop being final.

What "equal" does not claim

Three misreadings can be ruled out from the text itself.

It does not claim that all things are identical. The chapter is full of distinctions, and the man who wrote it clearly noticed the difference between an ox and a duke.

It does not claim that no view is better than another. The chapter mocks specific positions, calls specific arguments foolish, and holds up a specific way of holding judgements as preferable. A text arguing that all views are equally good would not be arguing.

And it does not claim that nothing matters. The book as a whole makes recommendations about how to live, admires certain people, and treats certain ways of acting as competent and others as clumsy. Indifference is not on offer.

What the chapter claims is narrower: that the distinctions in our judgements are grounded in the standpoint from which they are made, not in the things independently of any standpoint, and that there is no position from which competing standpoints could be adjudicated.

The monkeys and the chestnuts

A short passage illustrates the point better than any paraphrase.

A keeper offers his monkeys three measures in the morning and four in the evening, and they are angry; he offers four in the morning and three in the evening, and they are delighted. The total is unchanged. The keeper accommodates them.

Several things are going on. The monkeys' preference is genuine — it is not a mistake about arithmetic but a difference in how the arrangement appears from where they sit. The keeper does not correct them, argue with them, or conclude that their preference is meaningless. He rearranges what costs him nothing to rearrange. And the reader, who can see the total, is being invited to notice that they too are a monkey with respect to some larger arrangement they cannot see.

That last move is characteristic and it is why this is philosophy rather than a fable about foolishness.

The problem of self-application

Any argument of this kind faces an obvious objection: if all judgements are standpoint-dependent, what about this one?

The chapter raises the objection itself, repeatedly and without flinching. It asks how it could know that what it calls knowing is not in fact not knowing. It says that in speaking it has said something, and then asks whether what it said was anything at all. It notes that if it is right and its opponent wrong, it has just made a distinction of exactly the kind it was questioning.

The book's response is not a solution but a style. It uses the mode of speech named elsewhere in the text as the kind that tips over and empties itself: assertions made in a form that withdraws their finality. It also uses stories and jokes rather than frontal argument, because a joke shifts the reader's standpoint without claiming a standpoint of its own.

Whether this is a satisfactory answer is a genuine question and philosophers disagree about it. What should be said is that the difficulty is not an oversight. It is the most self-aware moment in early Chinese thought.

Why this is not relativism

The comparison to relativism is natural and it is worth seeing exactly where it fails.

Modern relativism is usually a thesis about truth: that a claim is true relative to a framework and there is no framework-independent truth. That is a doctrine, held from a standpoint, and it makes a general claim of exactly the kind the chapter refuses to make.

The chapter is doing something else. It is not building a theory of truth; it is dismantling the confidence with which theories are held, including its own. And it does not conclude that one should adopt a relativist doctrine and act accordingly. It concludes that one should keep moving.

There is a technical distinction in the chapter that captures this, and scholars have made a great deal of it. The text contrasts two ways of affirming something: one that goes by what is at hand, adapting to the situation as it presents itself, and one that deems something to be so, fixing it as a standard. Both use the same word. The first is recommended and the second is the source of disputes. So judgements are not abandoned. They are made provisionally and revised as circumstances change.

Why this is not indifference

The practical upshot is more specific than serenity.

The chapter recommends what it calls walking both roads: not choosing between two positions in the sense of committing to one permanently, but retaining the ability to occupy either as the situation requires. This is the argumentative basis for the language of unconstrained wandering in the first chapter, and it is why the skill stories matter. A craftsman responding to this particular ox is going by what is at hand; a philosopher applying a general standard is deeming.

So what follows is not withdrawal but a kind of responsiveness. The person the chapter admires still acts, still judges, and still gets things done — but is not committed to the standard that generated yesterday's judgement, and is therefore able to see what is in front of them.

Comparisons, and their limits

Two comparisons are commonly drawn and each helps a little.

Greek scepticism of the Pyrrhonist kind is genuinely close: it also uses arguments about the equal weight of opposed positions and about the impossibility of an arbiter. But the Greek sceptics aimed at suspension of judgement as a route to tranquillity, whereas this chapter does not suspend judgement. It keeps judging, provisionally, and the goal is manoeuvrability rather than calm.

Modern perspectivism in the tradition of Nietzsche is also close in places, particularly the claim that valuations come from positions. But that tradition is usually interested in the genealogy of values and in power, which this chapter is not.

The honest summary is that the chapter arrived at a recognisable philosophical position independently, that no Western label fits it exactly, and that the labels do more harm than good if they replace reading the chapter.

How the chapter is misused

Three uses to watch for, including in oneself.

As a conversation-stopper. Responding to a disagreement by observing that all positions are standpoint-relative avoids the disagreement rather than addressing it, and the chapter's own practice — arguing vigorously against named opponents — rules this out.

As permission not to decide. The recommendation is to hold judgements provisionally, which requires making them.

And as a general licence for vagueness. The chapter is a tightly constructed argument with a formal step in the middle of it. Prose that gestures at the unity of all things without reproducing any of the reasoning is not following it.

Key points

• The chapter title can mean equalising things or equalising the doctrines about things, and the chapter does both.
• The core argument is that judgements are correlative, are made from a standpoint, and cannot be adjudicated because no arbiter can be neutral.
• It does not claim that things are identical, that all views are equally good, or that nothing matters.
• The chapter raises the self-application objection itself and answers it with a style rather than a solution.
• It distinguishes affirming what is at hand from deeming a standard; judgements are made provisionally, not abandoned.
• The practical recommendation is to walk both roads: to retain manoeuvrability, which is responsiveness rather than indifference.