I was distracted the last two days by the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court designee Sonia Sotomayor.  Today, as I followed the proceedings on the excellent Scotusblog, I couldn't help but think of Chuang Tzu….

So much of the hearings – indeed, so much of legal practice – centers on language contests.  What is the meaning of "fundamental"?  What was meant by the invocation of the "wise Latina"?  And what is "empathy" and what does it entail?

Obviously, in these cases, political context critically shapes intended meaning.  And that is a simple reminder of the plasticity of language, the malleability of meaning.  Words can fail us; meaning can run off in directions that we cannot foresee.  Language, in short, is inadequate to its task.  And that is where Chuang Tzu comes in.  He knew this and wrote about it brilliantly.  Here is the great interpreter, A.C. Graham, summarizing Chuang Tzu's analysis of language:

The crucial point for Chuang-tzu is that words have no fixed meanings except in the artificial conditions of intellectual debate, in which one may as well accept the opponent's definitions, since they are no more or less arbitrary than any others. 

[Chuang Tzu:] "Saying is not blowing breath, saying says something; the only trouble is that what it says is never fixed.  Do we really say something? Or have we never said anything?  If you think it different from the twitter of fledglings, is there proof of the distinction?  Or isn't there any proof"

Yet words do order themselves in speech, not according to any rules of disputation, but by the unanalyzable knack which he discerns at the bottom of all successful behavior, and which is the sign that Heaven is working through us.  The meanings of discourse spontaneously right themselves as long as we "smooth it out on the whetstone of Heaven;" even the competing voices of the philosophers are the "pipes of Heaven," which blows through them as the wind blows through different noises from hollows of different shapes.

The one modification I would suggest, in the case of Sotomayor, is that  in political debate, unlike intellectual interactions, one cannot easily accept the meanings of one's opponents.  And one cannot simply wait for spontaneous fate – the "whetstone of heaven" – to smooth out meaning. To do so would cede the political battle, something that Chuang Tzu, admittedly, does not particularly care about.