Zhuangzi contra Confucius

This monograph takes the Inner, Outer, and Miscellaneous Chapters of the *Zhuangzi* as its textual foundation and systematically examines the Zhuangzian school's critique of Confucius and Confucian doctrine. It argues that this critique is not a scattering of unrelated parables but a complete argumentative system possessing internal logical progression and ultimately pointing toward positive reconstruction. Previous scholarship has generally treated chapters such as "Webbed Toes," "Horses' Hooves," "Rifling Trunks," and "Robber Zhi" as parallel expressions of a single position. This book proposes instead that, when rearranged according to the three-tier textual structure of Inner, Outer, and Miscellaneous Chapters, the mode of critique itself undergoes a threefold progression—from "self-refutation," to "consequentialist argument," to "historical indictment"—constituting a lineage of anti-Confucian texts with dual value for rhetoric and argumentation theory. The first tier (Inner Chapters, Chapters One through Three) centers on "In the World of Men," "The Sign of Virtue Complete," and "The Great and Venerable Teacher," revealing the Zhuangzian school's most subtle and most persuasive argumentative strategy: using Confucius's own words, Confucius's own teachings, and Confucius's own self-reflection to expose contradiction within Confucianism's own terms. The contrast between the teaching of "fasting of the mind" and entanglement in court politics, together with the admission of being "a prisoner of Heaven," constitutes a form of *performative self-refutation* whose persuasive force does not depend on any external standard but is drawn directly from internal textual evidence. The second tier (Outer Chapters, Chapters Four through Nine) turns to "consequentialist argument": the parables of webbed toes and horses' hooves, the paradox of rifling trunks, and the discourses of the Way of Heaven and the Turning of Heaven each test the actual effects produced by Confucian doctrine in practice—along the four dimensions of harm to human nature, institutional facilitation of theft, disturbance of the heart-mind, and the conflation of trace and source—rather than merely evaluating its stated intentions. This tier places particular weight on the distinction between "trace" (迹) and "that by which there is a trace" (所以迹), which this author holds to be the single most broadly applicable logical instrument in the entire book, transferable to the critique of any intellectual tradition that equates historical inheritance with living truth itself. The third tier (Miscellaneous Chapters, Chapters Ten through Twelve) closes with "External Things," "The Old Fisherman," and "Robber Zhi," shifting from satire to direct historical indictment. "Robber Zhi" is especially pivotal: its argument relies entirely on the genealogy of sage-kings—Yao, Shun, Yu, Tang, and Wu—that Confucius himself venerates, using this very genealogy as evidence to demonstrate that it is in essence a history of violence and usurpation. The argument therefore requires no Daoist metaphysical premise to succeed, making it the most persuasive and most "acceptable to the secular reader" of any argument in the book. Building on this foundation, the book's Part Four, "Why Nature Supersedes Benevolence and Righteousness," directly addresses the more fundamental question of why the Zhuangzian school *had* to critique Confucius: critique is not an end in itself but the clearing of theoretical ground for its naturalism, its theory of free and easy wandering, and its theory of non-action. Part Five situates this argument within the broader lineage of pre-Qin anti-Confucian thought (Mozi's cost-based critique, Han Fei's efficacy-based critique, Yang Zhu's critique from bodily integrity, Xunzi's ritual-reconstruction critique) and within contemporary intellectual history (ideology critique, philosophy of educatio