The Live Creature and The Crooked Tree: Thinking Nature in Dewey and Zhuangzi

• Autor(a) principal: Kirby, Christopher C.
• Data de Publicação: 2016
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10451/28016
• topic: Dewey, John, 1859-1952; Zhuangzi; Naturalism; Daoism; Humanism

This paper will compare the concept of nature as it appears in the philosophies of the American pragmatist John Dewey and the Chinese text known as the Zhuangzi, with an aim towards mapping out a heuristic program which might be used to correct various interpretive diffi culties in reading each fi gure.8 I shall argue that Dewey and Zhuangzi both held more complex and comprehensive philosophies of nature than for which either is typically credited. Such a view of nature turns on the notion of continuity, particularly that between an experiencing organism [Dewey’s “live creature”] and the conditioning environment [Zhuangzi’s “crooked tree”]. Where Dewey’s and Zhuangzi’s ideas about nature converge, one fi nds similarities in prescriptions made for human action, and in the few places where they diff er, one fi nds mutually complementary insights.