Thread by @Helenreflects

Today I am teaching Zhuangzi, Wolf and Russell on the good of uselessness. Since the idea of usefulness and efficiency is so deeply ingrained in our society, so integrally a part of our "philosophical plumbing" (as Midgley calls it), I think a brief thread on this is in order 1/

Many passages in Zhuangzi push back against usefulness, efficiency, and welfarism, for example this one in book 1 where Huizi complains to Zhuangzi about a gnarly, useless tree. Just chill! Says Zhuangzi 2/

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Or this one about the gourds and the salve. Huizi complains about giant gourds that are too large as containers but would be great to float with. Zhuangzi says to his friend he simply is not thinking broadly enough about purposes 3/

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Zhuangzi was likely reacting against the mohists (followers of Mozi) who prized welfare of the people above all. They recommended moderation in burial (just dig a pit deep enough so it doesn't stink, just cry when you're walking towards the burial mound, but go to work after!) 4/

No music obviously, no elaborate rituals, say the Mohists. It's wasteful. You could've helped the people with that expense! Zhuangzi questions their focus on efficiency and on usefulness in general. In our society today we have no mohists but plenty of efficiency thinking 5/

Maybe most disturbingly this was brought to my attention when I was teaching ethics to British students. Many of my students thought that lives of people who could not "contribute" to society (e.g., very elderly, babies born with severe disabilities) were not worth living 6/

And they also expressed the sincere belief that, if they were very old and not to use to anyone, it would be perfectly fine to be euthanized (!!) So that brought to my mind how much my students had internalized the be-a-brave-little worker ethic 7/

So deep is the idea we need to be useful contributors part of our philosophical plumbing, it's ubiquitous. It influences everything: our ethics, our voting, our policies. Even when we discuss stuff like universal basic income our primary concern is: how much good will it do? 8/

Let's briefly look at Bertrand Russell's in praise of idleness. Russell pushes back against the work ethics of his society, arguing it is very harmful theanarchistlibrary.org/library/bertra… 9/

He writes, and you could write the following about Amazon and Uber workers today, about peasants that at first they were forced to work harder so they could support loitering warriors and priests, but later, work ethic could compel them to do just the same without coercion 10/

So, work ethic is harmful because it subjugates people who truly work hard (for meagre innings). But it is interesting how Russell does eventually make a welfarist argument for less work. We should work less because it would be beneficial 11/

And this brings us to something of a paradoxical situation: the use of uselessness. How can we think about uselessness without ultimately some appeal to usefulness? It is important to do so because otherwise we just collapse in some form of utilitarianism or welfarism 12/

We then seek to think how our hobbies can be useful or monetized, how mindfulness and meditation is so great because it makes us more efficient, even--amazingly--how self-care ultimately makes us better brave, docile little workers who produce more 13/

So how can we escape this pull of utility? It is very hard. Perhaps the best essay I found on this is Susan Wolf's good-for-nothings, a paper that explicitly addresses and pushes back against welfarism 14/

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Welfarism is the view that "nothing can be good unless it is good for someone - unless, that is, it can enhance someone's welfare or support the existence of beings who have a welfare themselves." Wolf pushes back against this claim 15/

Wolf argues that if e.g., an excellent Dutch 17th-century painter had not existed, we'd not on the whole be worse off. If someone didn’t choose to become a dermatologist, there would have been another dermatologist doing the same (good) things. 16/

What makes great art great is not that it is good for us, though it is. Its greatness is prior to the fact that it improves us. “what is good about good art is its beauty, broadly conceived, or, to use an even vaguer term, its aesthetic excellence." 17/

Now, intriguingly Wolf is not a platonist about the Good - she is not like Iris Murdoch arguing for the greatness of things independent of human experience (as in Sovereignty of Good). The goods of art, literature, philosophy, are still human-dependent 18/

Rather, she argues that it is good for us to enjoy excellent and beautiful artworks, because they are excellent and beautiful. That determination must be made prior to any consideration about how good they are for us. 19/

Their excellence comes from facts about them that make them good independently of our contribution to their welfare.
This is a disavowal of trying to reduce value to usefulness, and thus as close to Zhuangzi a position I could find in contemporary analytic philosophy 20/

We see this in book 20, where Zhuangzi is posed a dilemma: a goose survives because it is useful (it cackles), a tree on the other hand survived because it was useless (it was gnarly). What's better, his interlocutor asks, usefulness or uselessness? 21/
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His response (Watson translation) Zhuangzi laughed and said, "I'd probably take a position halfway between worth and worthlessness. But halfway between worth and worthlessness, though it might seem to be a good place, really isn't - you'll never get away from trouble there. 22/

"It would be very different, though, if you were to climb up on the Way and its Virtue and go drifting and wandering, neither praised nor damned, now a dragon, now a snake, shifting with the times, never willing to hold to one course only." 23/

I read this passage as Zhuangzi rejecting to cast things in terms of usefulness and uselessness, and most importantly, to reject casting *ourselves* and our *doings* in terms of how much we contribute. Drifting, easy wandering, not caring about praise, is true freedom 24/

How often have we not wondered about, or tried to justify ourselves in terms of usefulness and in terms of how much we contribute to society. We philosophers do it too: look how great a philosophy major is for your mid-career salary, and things like that 25/

Such defenses ultimately become incoherent, because as Zhuangzi argues (in the gourd and salve passags, it's impossible for us to foresee what would be useful. Who would know that mathematicians idly playing with knot theory would vitally contribute to understanding viruses? 26/

Zhuangzi also argues that the welfarist approach fails (in the passage on the tree) because usefulness is not beneficial for the person being useful. The straight tree is just going to be cut down. Russell makes a similar point about exploited workers 27/

So we don't really need to strive to strike a balance between usefulness and uselessness (as per book 20). We need to reject the idea of usefulness altogether. The idea is incoherent, and societies based on it do not make us happier or more in line with the Dao /end