Hui Shi’s Ten Theses: paradoxes for their own sake, or a theory of space?
I am writing my dissertation on the Later Mohist canons, and I keep being drawn sideways to Hui Shi, Zhuangzi's friend and sparring partner. Almost nothing of his own survives. What we have is a list of ten theses preserved in the last chapter of the Zhuangzi, without the arguments.
Several are about space and size. The largest has nothing outside it, the smallest has nothing inside it. What has no thickness cannot be piled up, yet it extends a thousand miles. The south has no limit and yet has a limit. I set out for Yue today and arrived there yesterday. I know the centre of the world: it is north of Yan and south of Yue (that is, north of the northern state and south of the southern one). The same chapter attributes to other disputers the claim that if you take a stick a foot long and halve it every day, you will not exhaust it in ten thousand generations.
One common reading treats these as clever paradoxes, debating tricks. Another, which I find more persuasive, sees a theme: spatial and temporal distinctions are relative to a standpoint, and only the "Great One", the whole with nothing outside it, is not. The final thesis, love all things equally, for heaven and earth are one body, would then be the ethical conclusion of the series.
I want arguments. Are these a theory, or puzzles? And how do they compare with Zeno's paradoxes, which also attack the assumption that space is infinitely divisible?