Zhuangzi is a creative and flexible author, so it is no surprise that later in the same work, Confucius is ironically appropriated as the spokesman of Zhuangzis own position. This Confucius says he wants to become the disciple of an amputee, Royal Nag, because he looks at the way things are one [or whole] and does not see what theyre missing. He looks at losing a foot like shaking off dust. Royal Nag (and Zhuangzi) saw, long before contemporary epistemologists, that similarity and difference are standpoint dependent: Looked at from their differences, liver and gall are as far apart as the states of Chu and Yue. Looked at from their sameness, the ten thousand things are all one. In short, the common assumption that it is bad to be disabled makes sense only if we project our parochial and historically contingent human values onto the fabric of the universe.

One response to this critique would be that disabilities are bad, not because they are violations of the objective teleological structure of the universe, but because they are inefficient. Those who are disabled are simply less functional, less able to achieve their goals, than those who are normal. This leads easily to the conclusion that eliminating disabilities would be better, not just for society but for the disabled themselves. Contemporary technology seems to have put this almost in our grasp. With the advent of both genetic screening technologies and Crispr gene editing, we are approaching an age in which we may be able to design the human body; perhaps soon the new normal for the American family will be designer babies. We may be approaching a world in which illness is eradicated, a world of physical and mental harmony and homogeneity among all peoples. This, many would argue, is surely the stuff of a utopia a brave new world.

The seductiveness of this argument illustrates the danger of the hegemony of instrumental reasoning reasoning employed to find the most efficient way to a given goal. It is an important aspect of wisdom, but it also carries the temptation, especially in modern capitalist society, to reduce all of rationality to means-end efficiency. In some cases, means-end efficiency results in an inappropriate and inhuman standard.

To think that we have moved beyond this pitfall would be nice, but we havent. It is still very much with us. As the coronavirus pandemic began to overwhelm medical capacity in the United States in March, the disability activist and writer Ari Neeman argued that the triage guidelines that certain states were putting into use indicated that it was preferable to let a disabled person die simply because it would require more resources to keep that person alive. The principle of granting equal value of human lives, Neeman wrote, would then be sacrificed in the name of efficiency.

We do not mean, in this brief essay, to dismiss all of philosophy outside of Zhuangzi. The sayings of Confucius include a passage in which the master is a respectful and congenial host to a blind music master (Analects, 15.42), and the later Confucian tradition includes the stirring admonition, All under Heaven who are tired, crippled, exhausted, sick, brotherless, childless, widows or widowers all are my siblings who are helpless and have no one else to appeal to. Readers of the New Testament will recognize this as a core value in the teachings of Jesus. In fact, many figures and institutions in the Abrahamic traditions have been at the forefront of caring for the disabled, precisely by appealing to the Platonic view that humans ultimate value lies in their immaterial souls rather than their contingent material embodiments.

But in this time of rampant sickness and social inequality, and given our fundamental duty to extend equal treatment, compassion and care for others, we think Zhuangzi is an important and insightful guide, a Taoist gadfly, if you will, to challenge our conventional notions of flourishing and health. With the 30th anniversary of the Americans With Disabilities Act approaching, this ancient Chinese Taoist reminds us that it is the material conditions of a society that determine and define disability. We have the power to change both those material conditions and the definition of disability.

John Altmann (@iron_intellect) writes about philosophy for general audiences and is a contributor to the Popular Culture and Philosophy Series of books. Bryan W. Van Norden (@bryanvannorden) holds a chair in philosophy at Vassar College and is the author most recently of Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto.

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Was This Ancient Taoist the First Philosopher of Disability? - The New York Times