The Use of the Useless

Zhuangzi on the tyranny of utility

Welcome to Ever Not Quite—essays about technology and humanism.

It’s been a while since I’ve written, and I have much more in the works which I’ll be publishing soon. This essay takes a short passage from the ancient Daoist classic Zhuangzi and uses it to draw a lesson in the philosophy of technology which touches on themes which are broadly woven through the writing I do here. It’s a little different from the standard fare, but I hope it brings some illumination to your own thinking about technology and what it means to be useful.

I haven’t included an audio recording this time, but maybe I’ll get around to that if I hear that people miss it.

Thank you all for reading!

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Somewhere in her 1958 book The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt quotes the eighteenth century writer and critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, an opponent of the utilitarian philosophy just beginning to be formulated in his day. Arendt writes:

Obviously there is no answer to the question which Lessing once put to the utilitarian philosophers of his time: “And what is the use of use?” The perplexity of utilitarianism is that it gets caught in the unending chain of means and ends without ever arriving at some principle which could justify the category of means and end, that is, of utility itself. The “in order to” has become the content of the “for the sake of”; in other words, utility established as meaning generates meaninglessness.¹

This point has always stuck with me, which is ironic because it’s just a passing reference within the context of one of the richest books of political theory published in the twentieth century. Arendt’s point, as I understand it, is not that there is anything wrong, exactly, with whatever is useful in accomplishing a particular purpose; it’s just that utility only makes sense as a sub-category within a broader field of meaning. When the category of ‘use’ takes the place of any larger horizon against which it might acquire its significance, what you get is rather meaningless.

This sort of observation, it turns out, goes back a long way, and can be traced to intellectual traditions falling well outside of European influence. While it isn’t well known in the Western world, the Zhuangzi is one of the most important philosophical texts from ancient China, and despite a number of accomplished translations over the years, it is still read much less often than the Daodejing, the more famous of the two Daoist classics. Equal parts literature and philosophy, the Zhuangzi is made up mostly of aphorisms, short parables, and brief conversations, each of which teaches some lesson, seldom coming to more than a few pages in length. Zhuangzi, its putative author and a frequent character in these exchanges, is understood to be the principal teacher whose ideas the work expounds.² The text is weird and profound in equal measure, and a delightful read.³ And it also has plenty to say about the philosophy of technology.

I won’t elaborate here on any of the more famous passages from the book: Zhuangzi’s butterfly dream, the knife-wielding mastery of Cook Ding, the discourse on the happiness of fish. These are all succinct and marvelous contributions to thought and literature which I recommend to your reading pleasure. Instead, I want to look at a much more obscure passage which makes an important point that touches on the Arendt passage I opened with. Here, Zhuangzi and his friend Huizi, a frequent sparring partner in philosophical debate, have a curious exchange which illustrates this point in a new way.

“Once Zhuang Zhou dreamt he was a butterfly, fluttering about joyfully just as a butterfly would. He followed his whims exactly as he liked and knew nothing about Zhuang Zhou. Suddenly he awoke and there he was, the startled Zhuang Zhou in the flesh. He did not know if Zhou had been dreaming he was a butterfly, or if a butterfly was now dreaming it was Zhou. Now surely Zhou and a butterfly count as two distinct identities, as two quite different beings! And just this is what is means when we speak of transformation of any one being into another—of the transformation of all things.” (Zhuangzi, ch. 2.) Pictured: The Butterfly Dream, Lù Zhì, sixteenth century.

Here is their entire exchange, which I quote from a recent translation by the scholar Brook Ziporyn:

Huizi said to Zhuangzi, “Your words are useless.”

Zhuangzi said, “It is only when you know uselessness that you can understand anything about the useful. The earth is certainly vast and wide, but a man at any time uses only as much of it as his two feet can cover. But if you were to dig away all the earth around his feet, down to the Yellow Springs, would that little patch he stands on be of any use to him?”

Huizi said, “It would be useless.”

Zhuangzi said, “Then the usefulness of the useless should be quite obvious.”⁴

You may want to read that a second time. I had to read it many times when I first encountered this. But I think it’s saying something which is worth unpacking.

It’s important to picture what Zhuangzi is describing here: the ground you stand on, of course, is useful to you because it supports your weight. But what if someone dug away all the earth from around you, so you were left standing on a tall pillar no wider than your feet, leaving you with nowhere else to step? Now the ground you stand on has lost a great deal of its utility; yes, it continues to support you, but now you have become trapped. It turns out that the support of your weight is not the only thing that you need: your freedom of movement—your ability to explore, to walk around, to decide where you want to stand in the first place—is equally important. You also depend, in some sense, on the ground you aren’t standing on.

Zhuangzi is making an argument here about where usefulness comes from. Here’s the paradox: we distinguish between what is useful and what is useless. But it turns out that when you remove what is ‘useless’ from the area surrounding what is ‘useful’ and separate the two from each other, the useful, too, ceases to be useful. How can this be? Zhuangzi’s point is that whatever is useful to you can only be so on account of the larger context of ‘uselessness’ which surrounds it. “[T]he usefulness of the useless”, as he calls it, is that what is useless is necessary in establishing the category of the useful as such.

A hammer is useful because it has been designed and constructed for the purpose of driving nails. But why is it necessary to drive nails at all? Well, for reasons having nothing to do with the hammer, like, say, building houses. Should those reasons disappear—if, say, we decide that all houses from now on should be made out of brick—the hammer would suddenly become useless: it would be a tool designed for a purpose nobody needs. The hammer acquires its utility from its place within the wider set of possibilities and purposes which supply it with its own, narrower purpose.

To know only of utility, of ends and the means required to achieve them, is to be trapped, isolated from the larger reality which makes it useful to begin with. Different versions of this idea are found throughout the Zhuangzi.

Socrates’ well-known critique of writing in Plato’s Phaedrus centers on his concern that this particular technology will separate us from knowledge, as words are printed onto papyrus rather than being inscribed in the human memory where they belong. Zhuangzi’s teaching, however, is not that technology—here defined broadly as whatever is ‘useful’—will separate us from knowledge, but that it diminishes the expression of a certain kind of freedom, or spontaneity—common translations of the classical Chinese word ‘ziran.’ This concept is difficult to define with precision, but it suggests something like the unfettered unfolding of things as they truly are, or what things grow into when they are not disfigured by external coercion. Directing our activity towards accomplishing pre-given ends obstructs the unencumbered exploration of the larger field of possibility which can be appreciated only outside of the determined logic of means and ends.

I hear in this short parable a defense of any domain in which a sense of breadth and investigative curiosity might be said to harbor an unsuspected ‘usefulness’ hidden inside its ostensible ‘uselessness.’ When Huizi accuses Zhuangzi of speaking useless words, he is accusing Zhuangzi’s teaching of accomplishing no useful function, implicitly suggesting that the purpose of words is limited to their instrumental capacity. Zhuangzi replies that a genuine teaching cannot be limited to considerations of utility, but must rather play freely among the undiscovered possibilities which are available to a truly comprehensive perspective.

Zhuangzi is defending the manner in which words are taken up in what today we might call the arts and the humanities: fields of creative enlargement and open inquiry which are ‘useless’ in the sense that they do not aim to bring about a particular, pre-selected outcome. Rather, these endeavors involve the imaginative investigation of reality and serve the larger ‘purpose’ of revealing possibilities that might warrant a utilitarian calculation in the first place. That is, their uselessness can be said to be useful in orienting us towards aspects of the real which we hadn’t previously recognized.

True, art is supposed to create things of beauty, and the humanities are supposed to shape the intellect and the moral imagination; each, it can be said, is useful in achieving those outcomes. But to do any of this first requires a posture of openness to the world as it discloses itself to the mind which approaches without design or intention. Art is not useful in the same way that technology is useful; the humanities are not useful in the same way that vocational training is useful: but both are ‘useful’ in the sense that they expose us to the wider reality within which any of these more straightforwardly useful pursuits has its place.

To return to Lessing’s question, quoted by Arendt—“what is the use of use?”—the answer is that this is the wrong question. The point at which we find ourselves asking this is the point where the chain of utility comes to an end and the need for a standpoint outside of utility is revealed: considered all by itself, ‘use’ has no use. It has been said before by opponents of utilitarianism that utility reaches its limit where morality begins: the moment that the chain of means and ends breaks down is the moment that you have to identify what it is, exactly, that you really value. In much the same way, we might conclude with Zhuangzi that usefulness reaches its limit where a more authentic relationship to the world begins: the moment at which you discover the dependency of the ‘useful’ on the ‘useless’ is also the moment that you are liberated from its blinkered and insulating assumptions.

1. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, pg. 154. More than once, I have gone in search of the source of this reference, and each time I have come up short. If anyone out there knows what Arendt is quoting here, I’d love to know!

2. The textural history of the Zhuangzi is complicated and mysterious. Scholars usually divide the book into three sets of chapters: Inner, Outer, and Miscellaneous. Scholarly consensus seems to be that some figure, purportedly Zhuangzi himself, is the author of the Inner Chapters, yet the teaching seems to have been handed on to Zhuangzi’s followers. By the time you reach the Miscellaneous Chapters towards the end of the book, it’s clear that the text is fully the work of later disciples. I won’t bother with these distinctions here.

3. For a good overview of the whole work, Jared Henderson has published a series of reflections here on Substack reading through the entire text. You can find the first installment here.

4. Zhuangzi, tr., Brook Ziporyn, pg. 222.