The Preliminary Exploration Of Zhuangzi's Thoughts Of Communication

As a famous representative of Taoist school, Zhuangzi not only created a miracle in the Chinese history of philosophy, but also left a great work entitled Zhuangzi of ten thousand words in the Chinese history of literature, which is also a precious treasure for us today. When we review this book from the perspective of communication, we can still find wisdoms and valuable thoughts between the lines. This thesis studies Zhuangzi's thoughts about communication in terms of philosophy methodology, with the idea that Relativism, which was deeply rooted in Zhuangzi's thoughts, was also the only way in which he made judgments of the world.In his mind, Zhuangzi considered that the world was under consistent change, and it was impossible for human beings to know the essence of the world. So he advocated canceling the duality contradiction of everything, and pointed out that"non-speaking", which was considered to be the general rule of Zhuangzi's idea about communication, was the best way of speaking. But since the fact was that it was also impossible for people to keep silent absolutely, Zhuangzi tried to carry out this"non-speaking"idea into all of his communication thoughts.We can see Zhuangzi's thoughts of communication especially from these two aspects ;one is his thoughts about language ,which is best manifested through the debate of language and meaning ;the other is his exploration of the tactics in interpersonal communication .First, in his thoughts about language ,zhuangzi realized the expressive function of language ,but being influenced by agnosticism ,he exaggerated the contradiction of language and meaning, thinking that"language cannot fully express the meaning", and thus, on the base of this contradiction, he drew the conclusion that"Language is forgotten when fully expressing the meaning", which we consider is the essence of communication. Then, he used"Xiangwang"as an approach to settle the dilemma between language and meaning. What's more, zhuangzi tried to overcome the limitation of language by using zhongyan,zhiyan and fables creatively. Second, zhuangzi had a profound understanding of interpersonal communication. He attached a lot of importance to the feelings of the receivers in communicating activities and found many drawbacks in interpersonal communication. So he suggested people to communicate with each other implicitly and indirectly so that they could lead a harmonious life rather fight with each other, that is also what isconsidered to be the most important characteristic of Zhuangzi's thoughts about interpersonal communication. And Zhuangzi's disfavoring attitude towards verbal communication had a lot to do with his firm belief in the power of non-verbal communication. He preferred"teaching without words and less words",and"to speak carefully, fluently, sincerely and honestly".With all of these tactics, Zhuangzi thought people could not only protect themselves while not offending others , but also achieve good persuasive effects.Zhuangzi was brilliant since he noticed the varieties of interpersonal communication and formed a set of helpful tactics for interpersonal communication which we still use in our communicating activities, but at the same time, he is also pessimistic, that is because everything loses its meaning when we refer to Zhuangzi's philosophical essence"Dao"(Way or Nature of the world).There is no contradiction between the ten thousand words in his book and the"non-speaking"idea he had, and the only thing he chose to do at last was to give up.