Chuang-tzu's Anti-intellectualism Based On Skepticism

Chuang-tzu is the most important representative of Taoism in the warring state period after Lao-tzu, whose work famous for his speculative and deep thought. In order to elucidate reason, Chuang-tzu considered something as allegories, and demonstrated his aloofness. This attitude contains a strong awareness of the secular idea's opposition. In this paper, lend from Yu yingshi's nomenclature, the idea of Chuang-tzu is summed up as "Anti-intellectualism", and then reveals the ideological motivation of Skepticism and the home of Anti-intellectualism.Chuang-tzu to be opposed to the "intellectual" is the cognitive aspects of knowledge, his Anti-intellectualism is not a general suspicion or abandoning of knowledge, but in the pursuit of the highest wisdom and knowledge on the basis of the negation of secular knowledge. In Chuang-tzu's theory, the anti-intellectual is a relative of the anti-intellectual, rather than absolute. This anti-intellectual is to break other school's theory at that time, which is the ideological motive of Skepticism.Based on the analysis of Chuang-tzu's Epistemology, this paper further pointed out that Chuang-tzu's Anti-intellectualism get rid of the secular view, and also put forward a positive recognized way"yi ming"(lighting true colors of the things by Dao). Around concept of "yi ming", this paper did a comparative study among Chuang-tzu's thought and Plato's thought on the body and the phenomenon and Kant's idea of "intellectual legislative for nature", which pointed out that the ideas of Chuang-tzu different from Plato and Kant is that Chuang-tzu was affected from the concept of "harmony between man and nature", in pursuit of "only exchange with spirit between heaven and earth", and to grasp the "spirit of Heaven and Earth" by"yi ming", which is the home of Chuang-tzu's Anti-intellectualism.