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Dream arguments East and West: Descartes, Zhuangzi and the Yoga Vasistha

Arjun Iyer Fellow
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SkepticismChineseIndianRené DescartesZhuangzi#dream-argument#skepticism
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Three treatments of the same worry.

  • Descartes, Meditations I (1641): there are no sure signs to distinguish waking from dreaming, so the senses can't give certain knowledge. He uses it as a method, a step towards certainty.
  • Zhuangzi, chapter 2: Zhuangzi dreams he is a butterfly, wakes, and doesn't know whether he is Zhuangzi who dreamt of being a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming of being Zhuangzi. He concludes there must be some distinction, and calls it "the transformation of things". There's no anxiety, and no rush to certainty.
  • The Yoga Vāsiṣṭha is full of stories of dreams within dreams, lifetimes lived in an hour, and its conclusion is closest to Advaita: the waking world itself is like a dream from the standpoint of the self.

What strikes me is that the same thought experiment leads to method in Descartes, to playful equanimity in Zhuangzi, and to liberation in the Indian text. Does the argument itself have a fixed conclusion, or does it take its meaning from the tradition that uses it?

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  1. Giulia Ferrante

    Fellow

    Plato raised it before any of them: in the Theaetetus, Socrates asks what proof we could give if someone asked whether we're dreaming at this very moment. So it's even older than Descartes in the West, and in Plato it's a puzzle about knowledge rather than a crisis.

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  2. Priya Raghavan

    Fellow

    I love the Zhuangzi version best because it doesn't assume one state is privileged. Neuroscience tends to agree with him in an odd way: dreaming and waking perception use much of the same machinery. The difference is mainly in the input.

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  3. Tomasz Wójcik

    Fellow

    Logically, I'd say the argument has a fixed core: you can't tell, from the inside, which state you're in. Everything else is what the tradition does with that admission. Descartes wants a foundation, so it's a threat. Zhuangzi doesn't want one, so it's a joke.

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