Literature & Theology, Vol. 34. No. 4, December 2020, pp.

467–476
doi:10.1093/litthe/fraa021

A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF

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ZHUANGZI AND NIETZSCHE’S
TRAGIC VISION AND
AESTHETICISM
Hong Zeng* and William Harmon**

Abstract
This article argues that both Zhuangzi and Nietzsche’s aestheticism is a
means of overcoming their tragic vision of life. Nietzsche’s aesthetic state of
Dionysian intoxication and Zhuangzi’s floating/wandering (游) involve
similar, rapturous self-loss in merging with a primal unity or ground being of
existence. Both seek an aestheticised, spiritual freedom that is built on an
alienation from their perceived reality. Both versions of aestheticism have
their price: the penalty of Zagreus in Dionysus, and the sacrifice of historical
time and historical self in Zhuangzi’s thought. Beneath their aestheticised vi-
sion of primal unity, both are torn by tragic conflicts and sacrifice. Of
Zhuangzi, we could say the same as Nietzsche said of the Greeks in his The
Birth of Tragedy: ‘this is the real meaning of the famous Greek serenity, so
often misrepresented as some kind of untroubled cheerfulness’.
Keywords: Zhuangzi; Nietzsche; Tragedy; Aestheticism.

I. INTRODUCTION

Zhuangzi, living in China in the 4th century BCE, was together with Laozi
the two major Taoist representatives in the time of Spring and Autumn and
Warring States. During his lifetime, Nietzsche expressed great admiration for
Taoism. Despite the fact that Nietzsche and Zhuangzi are prominent Western
and Eastern thinkers, separated from each other not only by the different hemi-
spheres but also a time span of thousands of years, they share an understanding
of aestheticism as a means of overcoming their tragic vision of life. Previous
scholarship has recognised them both as free and untrammelled thinkers who
challenged conventional morals: ‘Zhuangzi rejects the traditional sages and rid-
icules Confucius, and Nietzsche sings his requiem mass for God.’1 Nietzsche’s
aesthetics of Dionysian intoxication and Zhuangzi’s aesthetic state of ‘floating/
*Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, Sichuan, China. Email: 2942763458@qq.com
**University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
C The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press 2020;
Literature & Theology V
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468 HONG ZENG AND WILLIAM HARMON
wandering’ (游) both exult in a primal unity with Nature based on the collapse
of individuation.2 However, their affinity in the relationship between their tra-
gic vision of life and aesthetics of freedom has rarely been explored in detail. As
this article explains, attending to this relationship more closely revises the holis-
tic, serene vision of Chinese natural philosophy that has become such a deep-

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rooted myth. The prominent Chinese literary critics, Li Zehou and Liu
Xiaobo, in their nationally-famous debate, characterise Taoist philosophy as a
serene and holistic philosophy devoid of the tragic conflicts of western philoso-
phies. While Li Zehou lauds Taoist philosophy for its harmonious outlook,3
Liu Xiaobo laments its lack of conflicts that produced the profound, tragic
awareness of modern Western philosophy.4 Renowned sinologists such as
Wai-lim Yip (叶维廉) and Francois Cheng (程抱一), in their comparative
study of Chinese and Western poetics, also emphasised the oneness of human-
ity and Nature in Taoist-influenced poetry.5 Yet the tragic suicides of two
famous contemporary Chinese poets, Hai Zi and Gu Cheng, suggest some-
thing different, with Hai Zi declaring before his death that he ‘died of Taoist
violence’.6 Perhaps not coincidentally, Gu Cheng also wrote to his Beijing
friend Xiaonan shortly before his suicide: ‘I gave you this synopsis of Chinese
natural philosophy, after reading it, you will know where I be-
came demented.’7
This article examines the parallel between Zhuangzi and Nietzsche in their
aesthetic redemption of their tragic vision. It compares their sense of tragedy
and aesthetic states, and the way their aesthetics redeem their tragic vision of
reality. The article argues that Zhuangzi’s aesthetics of freedom, like that of
Nietzsche, is based on an alienation from their perceived constraints of reality.
Zhuangzi’s vision of primal unity is also similar to Nietzsche in the way that it
is predicated on tragic conflicts and sacrifice.

II. ZHUANGZI AND NIETZSCHE’S TRAGIC VISION OF LIFE AND THEIR

REDEEMING AESTHETICS

Laozi’s Tao Te Ching was written in the time of Spring and Autumn, when 16
countries struggled for supremacy, and Zhou, Laozi’s country, faced an immi-
nent decline and extinction. In the Period of Warring States that followed,
when Zhuangzi composed his work, the destruction and death caused by war
was exacerbated. Massive loss of life, fragmentation and the chaos of contend-
ing states was a prevalent daily reality. To a certain extent, the serene, compla-
cent surface of Laozi and Zhuangzi underscores the attempt to escape the war-
beset history by mythicising temporality: Tao Te Ching, by originating an ori-
gin whose generative, holistic force supplements the fragmentation of war;
Zhuangzi’s work by a shamanistic imagination which gives birth to a mytho-
poetic self, ‘heaven and earth were born at the same time as I was’ (天地与我
 A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF ZHUANGZI AND NIETZSCHE 469
8
并生). In other words, at a certain level, instead of compliance to the natural
flux of time and to a pre-human and pre-linguistic origin, both Tao Te Ching
and Zhuangzi’s work are predicated on a fugitive autochthonous strategy. The
non-human origin is originated by humankind. Thus nature in Taoism is a
human artifice, and the natural flux of time is a human-mythicised time, fabri-

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cations to ameliorate the violence of historical reality. The aestheticism in
Lao–Zhuang is a defence mechanism poised on a sense of disaster. The split in
temporality between mythic and historical time embedded in Chinese natural
philosophy leads to the split in subject (self): between the mythopoetic (cos-
mic, omniscient) self and historical (limited) self.
Zhuangzi is usually considered as exemplifying a unified body of thought
like that expounded by Laozi. However, Zhuangzi’s philosophy, reflected in
his extravagantly and even hyperbolically romantic, expansive writing style, es-
pecially in his chapter ‘Free and Easy Wandering’ (逍遥游), is much more aes-
theticised than Laozi’s philosophy. Laozi lacks Zhuangzi’s game-playing,
hyperbolic, caricaturing thinking style, let alone his self-derisive humour
which are close to the playfulness of Western aestheticism. While a great pro-
portion of Tao Te Ching focuses on rulership in a secular realm, the work of
Zhuangzi, for the most part, presents a resolute breaking away from historical
reality and verisimilitude into an aesthetic realm, where one: ‘Rides the clouds
and mist, straddles the sun and the moon, and wanders beyond the four seas’
(乘云气, 驾日月, 而游乎四海之外) (Zhuangzi, p. 46). In contrast to Laozi’s
statement, ‘Gravity is the root of lightness’ (重为轻根)9 the abundance of
mythic, soaring figures in the works of Zhuangzi indicates a shift from heavi-
ness to lightness. Zhuangzi breaks from historical time in his aesthetic flight.
The Confucius man is a man growing in time, ‘at fifteen, I had my mind bent
on learning, at thirty, I stood firm . . . . At seventy, I could follow what my
heart desired, without transgressing the norm’ (吾十五致于学, 三十而立. . .
七十随心所欲而不逾矩)。.10 By contrast, Zhuangzi’s ‘Free and Easy
Wandering’ begins with the great roc soaring up 90,000 miles into the sky,
breaking away from the earthly, human, historical time, and flying into mythic
time with ‘eight thousand years as one spring, eight thousand years as one au-
tumn’ (以八千年为春, 八千年为秋 (Zhuangzi, p. 30).
The symbol of flight, a miraculous acquisition of freedom from gravity, a
suddenly changed feeling of space and time, is a symbolic image that is also
found in Nietzsche and Western Aestheticism. Nietzsche’s conception of
Apollonian and Dionysian in his The Birth of Tragedy are powerful aesthetic
drives that transform his tragic perception of reality. Like Zhuangzi, Nietzsche
develops an aestheticism that deconstructs the conventional value of self and
turns to art to forge a new self. Aestheticism provides a channel for the threat-
ened, dwarfed and fractured self to escape the adverse historical reality and to
build a large mythic self in a fabricated spiritual reality and a new sense of time.
470 HONG ZENG AND WILLIAM HARMON
While Zhuangzi’s zhenren and shenren straddle the sun and the moon, riding
with the cloud and the mist and float beyond the four seas, Nietzsche’s
Zarathustra also exults, ‘at present I am light, now I fly, now I see myself below
me, now a god dances through me’.11 For both Zhuangzi and Nietzsche, flight
symbolises the shedding of historical burden, the release from the immobility

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of being rooted in a specific time and space. Being light is being mobile and
metamorphic, as variable as clouds and air. The flying or floating figures in the
works of Zhuangzi acquire a lightness of being through metamorphosis into
the manifold nature, enjoying the joy of birds and fish, the freedom of air
and wind.
However, the lightness of being signified by the ‘free and easy floating’ (逍
遥游) in Zhuangzi’s work disguises various tensions within its philosophy: the
tension between history and myth; the omniscient, mythopoetic cosmic Self
and limited, historical self; its pessimistic fatalism and optimistic belief in abso-
lute spiritual freedom; its outer metamorphosis and inner imperturbability; in
cognitive code, its scepticism of man’s ability for attaining truth and its intui-
tive approach and attainment to Tao; its distrust of language and pleasure in
language; its sympathetic enjoyment of nature and grandiose relentlessness to
feelings. The aestheticism of Zhuangzi serves to redeem these tensions, which
are seeds for tragedy. On the one hand, Zhuangzi knows the tragedy of life:
the intractability of historical reality; man’s helplessness and futility of struggle
before the force of fate. He talks about ‘ming’ (命), the intractable force of fate,
and advocates acceptance of fate without complaint. From ’In the World of
Men’: ‘To understand what you can do nothing about and to be content with
it as with fate’ (知其不可奈何, 而安之如命) (Zhuangzi, ‘, p. 60); ‘Life, death,
preservation, loss, failure, success, poverty, riches, worthiness, unworthiness,
slander, fame, hunger, thirst, cold, heat—these are the alteration of the world,
the working of fate’ (生死存亡, 穷达富贵, 贤与不肖, 毁誉, 饥渴, 寒暑, 事
之变, 命之行也) (Zhuangzi, ‘The Sign of Virtue Complete’, p. 73). Deeply
aware of man’s futile toil throughout life, he regards death as a welcomed rest.
On the other hand, in contrast to his complete passivity before fate, he exults
in an absolute spiritual freedom, one that ‘[r]ides the clouds and mist, straddles
the sun and the moon, wanders beyond the four seas.’
Zhuangzi’s pessimism in the world of reality and his belief in an absolute
spiritual freedom strike a singular chord of sympathy with Nietzsche. This
rarely-perceived affinity between Zhuangzi and Nietzsche is echoed and
strengthened by Liu Xiaogan’s comparison of Zhuangzi with Existentialism, of
which Nietzsche is a forerunner. As Liu Xiaogan remarks, the idea of absolute
freedom in both philosophies is built on a pessimistic recognition of man’s
constriction or alienation in reality.12 While the freedom in Zhuangzi is real-
ised through floating in an aestheticised realm cut off from the historical vio-
lence of his time, the freedom in Existentialism is realised through endless
 A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF ZHUANGZI AND NIETZSCHE 471
choice of action and artistic self-fashioning, despite the recognition of a mean-
ingless, absurd and tragically futile world.
Since this article’s discussion of Nietzsche’s aesthetics and vision of tragedy
mostly focuses on his work The Birth of Tragedy, we will briefly examine that
work, highlighting Nietzsche’s aesthetic overcoming of his perceived tragic

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reality in his interpretation of the origin of Greek tragedy. This will enable
comparison with Zhuangzi’s aesthetic redemption of his own tragic vision.
According to Nietzsche, art (including Greek tragedy) owes its continuous
evolution to the struggling and reconciliation of Apollonian and Dionysian
duality. The two artistic impulses may exist in split form, such as the plastic
Apollonian art of painting or sculpture, or the non-visual art of music inspired
by Dionysus.13 Apollo is a god of higher civilisation, for instance he is the god
of medicine. Dionysus, on the other hand, is a god of Nature and natural fertil-
ity, associated with wine and uncivilised, orgiastic worship. They find expres-
sion, on an elemental level, in dreams (Apollonian) and
intoxication (Dionysus).
Although the Apollonian tendency was dominant in early Greece,
Nietzsche argues, beneath the exuberant Olympian surface, Greek culture
evinces an unmistakable and unique sensitivity to the painful truth about life:
the Dionysian wisdom that the underlying reality of existence is unchanging
contradiction, pain and excess, represented to our immediate experience as the
‘curse of individuation’. In Hellenic creativity, Titanic horror precedes
Olympian joy. Titanic terror necessitates Olympian joy—the Olympian world
that overtakes the Titans was created by the Apollonian instinct for beautiful il-
lusion, in order to make life bearable. They vindicate life and make it desirable
by living it themselves more gloriously.
Greek tragedy originated in the satyr chorus of the Dionysus-worshippers.
Dionysian ecstasies tore through Apollonian veil of bright appearance, and
made people look into the painful essence of life. Such knowledge by itself
induces nausea and thereby inaction, since nothing can be done to affect the
essential condition, and leads to a Buddhist negation of the will, which is
Schopenhauer’s existential solution. But in Nietzsche, the salvation and solace
for this state of mind comes with art, which converts thoughts of loathing into
ideas it is possible to live with: horror is tamed and made sublime, while that
which had been disgusting absurdity becomes comic: ‘This is the real meaning
of the famous Greek serenity, so often misinterpreted as some kind of un-
troubled cheerfulness.’14 Yet the tragic vision of Nietzsche and Zhuangzi
involves a much broader sense of the tragic art than Greek tragedy. In the case
of Nietzsche, his historical research into Greek tragedy is much less valuable
than the imaginative clairvoyance he shed on the driving forces of a more gen-
eral sense of tragic art, as M.S. Silk and J.P. Stern have argued.15
472 HONG ZENG AND WILLIAM HARMON
III. THE SIMILARITY AND DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ZHUANGZI AND
NIETZSCHE’S ESTHETICISM

Nietzsche’s tragic vision as expounded in The Birth of Tragedy is embodied in

Dionysian wisdom, which believes that the ground being of existence is inevit-
ably excessive, painful and contradictory. His conception of the Apollonian

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and Dionysian, the dialectic forces whose conflict and periodic reconciliation,
according to him, propelled the birth of Greek tragedy, embodies the impulses
of dream and intoxication at the elemental level, and plastic art and music at
the artistic level, and represents the effort of aestheticism to overcome the tra-
gedy of life. In a similar way, Zhuangzi’s deeply hidden tragic vision is due to
the war-beset age he was in, symptomised in his talk of ‘fate’ and resignation
and his full awareness of the constraints of historical reality. Zhuangzi’s aes-
theticism is a means of overcoming historical tragedy and constraints by fabri-
cating a mythic time and expansive mythopoetic persona exulting in ‘floating’
beyond benefits and harm, life and death, good and evil. While Nietzsche’s
aesthetic states are expressed in dream and intoxication, Zhuangzi’s aesthetic
states are crouched in terms of ‘becoming one with heaven and earth’, ‘abstin-
ence of heart and sit forgetting’ (心斋坐忘), and ‘free and easy floating/wan-
dering’ (逍遥游). Both Nietzsche and Zhuangzi’s vision of life is highly
aestheticised. Dream and intoxication characterise Nietzsche and Zhuangzi’s
aesthetic states, and music is the symbol of both philosophers’ vision of the
ground being of existence that transcends language, conceptualisation and in-
dividual form. Zhuangzi talks about the pipe of man, the pipe of earth and the
pipe of Nature. The pipe of Nature symbolises the creative power of Tao itself:
each of our lives is a musical instrument, and when the selfsame wind of Tao
traverses the musical instrument of each of us, it produces the unique sound of
each life. Nietzsche’s Dionysian is embodied in the artistic form of music that
transcends individual form and reflects the unification of all lives in the world-
as-will. However, while ‘Zhuangzi’s dream of butterfly’ (庄周梦蝶)
(Zhuangzi, p. 49) implies self-loss in merging with One, non-distinction and
equality of all beings, and awakening to no-self, Nietzsche’s Apollonian dream
suggests the delightful illusion and boundary of individual principle.
Nietzsche’s Dionysian intoxication and Zhuangzi’s floating boundless and
free (which likewise can be induced by wine and intoxication) have much
greater affinity in that both indicate a state of rapturous self-loss and unity with
the ground being of existence. However, Nietzsche and Zhuangzi’s percep-
tion of the ground being of existence are different: Nietzsche’s ground being
comes from Buddhism via Schopenhauer, that is, the world-as-will, which is
affirmed in Nietzsche despite its painful knowledge, instead of being negated
as in Buddhism and Schopenhauer. The ground being of existence in
Zhuangzi is his conception of Nature absolved of will-to-live or desire, and
artificial human ethics.
 A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF ZHUANGZI AND NIETZSCHE 473
Moreover, Nietzsche’s Dionysian intoxication and Zhuangzi’s floating are
both aesthetics poised on a sense of tragedy or disaster. Therefore, just as the
Dionysian primal unity is predicated on Zagreus—the penalty that Dionysus
suffers of being torn into pieces—beneath the holistic, serene vision of
Zhuangzi lies dormant the conflict between mythic time and historical time,

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mythopoetic self and historical self. Zhuangzi’s tragic propensity is heavily
implied in his talk of fate and complete passivity before fate, and in the multi-
farious conflicts within his philosophy between limited, existential man radic-
ally constrained by historical reality and highly aestheticised, mythopoetic,
cosmic Self floating boundless and free. The consequence of such tragic rup-
ture is that it can potentially break out into violent chasm in the lives of its
influenced poets, such as Gu Cheng and Hai Zi.

IV. COMPARISON OF THE TRAGIC CONFLICTS AND SACRIFICE IN

NIETZSCHE AND ZHUANGZI

Western tragedy is often based on a philosophy of dualism about man’s exist-

ence, in which one side of the antithesis has to be sacrificed. Schopenhauer’s
philosophical dualism involves the world-as-will and the world-as-idea. He
rests his concept of the sublime and the beautiful on a homogeneous basis: the
momentary destruction or suspension of will-to-live. Influenced by
Buddhism, Schopenhauer posits that humanity’s blind will-to-live—Buddhist
equivalent of desire—is the cause of all suffering, and only when man is purged
of the din of will-to-live, is he able to contemplate the aesthetic object with
the ascendance of pure reason. Schopenhauer’s theory of tragedy is in keeping
with his conception of sublimity: ‘what gives to anything tragic . . . the charac-
teristic tendency to the sublime, is the dawning of the knowledge that the
world and life afford us no true satisfaction, and are therefore not worth our at-
tachment to them. In this the tragic spirit consists; accordingly, it leads to
resignation’.16
Nietzsche’s antithesis of the Apollonian and the Dionysian is derived from
Schopenhauer’s polarity of the world of idea and the world of will.17 Based on
the same philosophical premises, Nietzsche’s perception of tragedy is opposite
to that offered by Schopenhauer: instead of sacrificing will-to-live
(Dionysian), it is the world of idea/appearances/individual principle
(Apollonian) that is sacrificed. In the moment of tragic recognition, according
to Nietzsche, the Apollonian veil of beautiful illusion is torn, and the tragic
heroes are left with the abysmal ground being of existence (Dionysian wis-
dom), which is eternally contradictory and suffering. However, instead of
renouncing will-to-live, tragic heroes wilfully affirm the pain of that will,
which leads to a mixed passion of agony and intoxication. In the very collapse
of the individual hero (Apollonian illusion of individuation), tragedy gives us
474 HONG ZENG AND WILLIAM HARMON
the wisdom of the undying Dionysian will-to-live which permeates all cre-
ation and always pushes into new forms of life.
Laozi and Zhuangzi’s abrogation of the disastrous historical origin and
the replacement of it with a human-mythicised cosmic origin implanted
germs of rupture into their philosophy, between mythic and historical

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time, mythopoetic and historical self, beneath its apparently holistic and
serene vision. In Zhuangzi, the sacrificed is the historical time and histor-
ical self in order to invent a mythopoetic persona that can attain to an
absolute spiritual freedom. Wang Guowei, Gu Cheng, Hai Zi, are all
poets of anachronism, who ran into conflicts with historical changes in
their aesthetic fixation. Gu Cheng looked for a Taoist paradise in the
primitive forest of Auckland, New Zealand, detached from modern civil-
isation and commercialisation. Hai Zi sang the nostalgic song of tradition-
al Chinese countryside and Nature which were quickly disappearing with
the peasants’ urban migration after economic reform. Wang Guowei com-
mitted suicide in the Qun Ming lake, convinced of the dying out of a
culture that generates his beloved classical Chinese poetry. Gu Cheng
wrote movingly when he talked about Chinese natural philosophy as a
‘tradition [that] grows in us, struggling, distorted, blooming layers and
layers of flowers’.18 In their lifetime, these writers did not fully see the
tragic tension embedded in and intrinsic with the philosophy itself, and
they lived their lives according to their idealistic understanding of it and
died for it. Along the way, they created their most beautiful poetry out
of their unconscious struggle, leaving subsequent generations to discover
how the tragic roots in our culture might prove both enthralling and
frightening.

V. CONCLUSION

For both Zhuangzi and Nietzsche, aestheticism is a means of overcoming

their tragic vision of life. Their aesthetic states of intoxication or floating
involve similar, rapturous self-loss in merging with a primal unity or
ground being of existence, even though their perception of such ground
being are different: will-to-live in Nietzsche; Nature or Tao in Zhuangzi
that is absolved of such will-to-live or desires. Both seek an aestheticised,
spiritual freedom that is built on an alienation from their perceived reality.
Both aestheticisms have their price: the penalty of Zagreus in Dionysus, and
the sacrifice of historical time and historical self in Zhuangzi’s work.
Beneath their aestheticised vision of primal unity, both are torn by tragic
conflicts and sacrifice. By thinking about them together, we might decon-
struct the East/West antithesis in cultural criticism, which believes that
 A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF ZHUANGZI AND NIETZSCHE 475
Chinese philosophy is devoid of the profound tragic conflicts of Western
philosophy. Zhuangzi’s ‘natural’ philosophy and serene, holistic surface is a
consummated ‘artifice’/aesthetics as much as Nietzsche’s conception of
Greek tragedy and the aesthetic redemption of the Apollonian and the
Dionysian. Of Zhuangzi, we could say the same as Nietzsche said of the

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Greeks: ‘This is the real meaning of the famous Greek serenity, so often
misrepresented as some kind of untroubled cheerfulness.’ For both
Zhuangzi and Nietzsche, the height of their vision is not natural,
but achieved.

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5
See Wai-lim Yip, Diffusion of Distance: 演变》 (Zhuangzi’s Philosophy and Its
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Chinese Poetic Writing (New York 13
Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, p. 19.
Review Books, 2017). 14
Ibid., preface.
6
西川, ‘好友西川谈海子自杀的七个原 15
M.S. Silk and J.P. Stern, Nietzsche on
因’, Xi Chuan, ‘The Seven Causes for Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge
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Xichuan’, https://cul.qq.com/a/201403 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will
27/007087.htm. and Idea, trans. R.B. Haldane and J.
476 HONG ZENG AND WILLIAM HARMON
Kemp (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Schopenhauer’s central opposition be-
Trubner, 1989), section 37, p. 437. tween will and idea.’
17
Silk and Stern, Nietzsche on Tragedy, p. 18
顾城, (Gu Cheng) 《顾城的诗》, (Gu
330. In the book, the authors write: Cheng’s Poetry) 北京: 人民文学出版
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presuppose (among much else) banshe), 1986), appendix, p. 401.

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