Snowdon - 4/16/22 - Zhuangzi's Words on Words

 4/16/22


“The purpose of the fish trap is to catch the fish. Once you have the fish, you can forget the trap. The purpose of the snare is to catch the rabbit. Once you have the rabbit, you can forget the snare. The purpose of words is to capture the meaning, once you have the meaning, you can forget the words. Where is the man who has forgotten words, that I might have a word with him?” This Zhuangzi line which Dr. Redick shared in class has settled cozily into my mind. It is one of those lines which presents an unfortunate conundrum, in that, as much as I love it, I would come off as infinitely pretentious if I went up to one of my boys and said, “Get a load of this,” followed by that quote. Even though Zhuangzi had the good sense to throw a little joke in there at the end, I simply cannot run that risk. And so I am left to confine it to my own mind, or to scrawl it on the wall like an asylum patient. Alas!


It was, however, shared with the perfect crowd, when Dr. Redick presented it in class. It speaks so much about the things we try to do in analyzing primal religion in this class, and how impossible adopting the appropriate philosophy has become in our modern, literate, and (even moreso) technologically bombarded society. Now more than ever, one word typed into the little device that goes everywhere with us in our pocket, or sent off in a drunken text, or typed out in a digital blog, say, is preserved eternally. Who cares is the next question, but one for another time. This, naturally, has fundamentally changed the way we think about… anything. It is nigh on impossible, with anything but the highest level of effort and commitment, to frame our minds in the way that our predecessors and contemporaries in some parts of the world, who live/d in oral societies, did. Of course, even in an oral tradition, one is not going entirely without words, as Zhuangzi implies is the height of mastery there, but it simply goes to show how they can be framed, processed, differently. I do think that it is not a stretch to say we have gone far in the wrong direction, if no words was the end goal.


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