Guo Xiang said things are ‘self-so’. Does that mean uncaused, or caused by everything?
Its coordinates: 1.1 Ontology · 1.1.1 Substance Theory · 1.1.2 Universals and Particulars +2 more
After my question about non-being, a friend at the park told me to read Guo Xiang, who wrote the commentary on the Zhuangzi that shaped every later edition. (There is an old story that he took much of it from an earlier commentator, Xiang Xiu. Scholars still argue about how much.)
Guo Xiang argued against Wang Bi. Non-being, he said, cannot produce being: if it is really nothing, it can produce nothing. So there is no root called non-being, and there is no creator either. Things are self-so (ziran). Each thing transforms by itself, and he uses a phrase usually translated "solitary transformation" (duhua).
At first I read this as saying things have no causes: they just happen. But other passages say each thing arises within a vast web of mutual conditioning, the shadow depending on the body, the body on the sun, and so on. So which is it? "Self-so" might mean that nothing outside the web made the web, while everything inside it depends on everything else.
If that is right, Guo Xiang has a strong answer to the question "what came first?": nothing came first, and nothing needs to. The web needs no maker because it was never made.
I am curious how this looks to people from other traditions, especially those who believe in a creator. Is "self-so" a serious alternative, or a refusal to answer?