Zhuangzi · Philosophy
Zhuangzi’s dream of being a butterfly - waking unsure whether he is a man who dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly now dreaming it is a man - opens his teaching on the fluidity of the self and the ‘transformation of things,’ in which fixed identity dissolves into ceaseless change.
You learned that the Butterfly Dream dramatizes the fluidity of identity and the ‘transformation of things’ ( wu hua ): the self has no fixed, privileged boundary, waking gives us no certain standpoint over dreaming, and we are always in the midst of change. Explain what the parable is really getting at in…
Leads to Pyrrho of Elis.
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