Against Identity: The Wisdom of Escaping the Self

Rather, it means trying not to be led by goals, ambitions or a notion of self at all.

Yet authenticity imposed as an obligation seems like a contradiction in terms. The whole point of authenticity is that the wu 吾 chooses what to embrace rather than deferring to the authority of others, including even the authority of existentialist philosophers.

As we have seen, wu 吾 stands for a sort of self that is more like an unselfing.15 This would explain why acting with self-conscious knowledge, youwei 有為, really means losing your fundamental nature. Youwei 有為 could mean deeming yourself under a specific identity – a wo 我 – and thus losing sight of the undetermined, identityless nature of your wu 吾.

All these were endowed with so much versatility that they made everyone in the world dance after them in emulation, but in emulating them, people lost what they themselves were. It was this loss of self due to them that made them masters of chaos, and the great disaster that has so afflicted the world is caused by just this loss of self. (Z 10.5.12

They have decided to be that: a borrowed self to fill the blank inside. But this – our profound ontological unoriginality – is an embarrassing fact, which we go to some lengths to hide from ourselves. Proving the theory that drives this philosophy therefore requires more than just rational argument. It is also necessary to overcome some of our psyc

The gardener’s boastfulness demonstrates that he has not forgotten himself at all. ‘One who boasts about himself has no merit’, as a later chapter, quoting the Daodejing, puts it (Z 20.16.8).18 The gardener in fact shows an attitude of ambition towards Zigong – an attempt to influence him through criticism, to make Zigong more like himself, or at l

We may no longer celebrate it in Whitman’s purple prose, but individualism is still so pervasive in modern society that we tend to underestimate

The main answer is that the pursuit of identity runs against the very grain of existence. To fight it is to doom yourself to endless frustration, and, in fact, to turn your life into a sort of living death.

At one point Guo writes: ‘Freedom from the “other” and “this one” is how one achieves arcane unity’ (Z 2.10.1).