 Another case for substantial difference with the Western tradition rests on the strong skepticism in Daoist ethics about the benefits of conceptualized distinctions between good and bad, right and wrong. Yet these ethics make recommendations that add up to putting forward a way of life. In the Zhuangzi, that way of life involves not taking taking oneself and one’s ideas so seriously. Chapter two contains a story of monkeys who were furious with their keeper when he announced the policy of three nuts every morning and four in the evening. The keeper then announced a change: “four nuts in the morning and three in the evening,” this time to the great delight of the monkeys. Kupperman (1999) suggests that we are invited to view our own urgent concerns in the humorous light of the monkeys’ concern about the difference between the two policies. At the same time we are invited to question our own judgment of the monkeys. Why think the monkeys are silly if our urgent concerns might look to some other kind of creature the way the monkeys’ concerns look to us? The way of life recommended in the Zhuangzi, then, includes openness to what might escape our current conceptualizations and preconceptions. We are invited to see that our conceptualizations of the world are inevitably incomplete and distorting. We attempt to order the world by sorting its features under pairs of opposites, but opposites in the real world never match up neatly with our conceptual opposites. Real “opposites” escape our attempts to cleanly separate them. Despite our best efforts, they switch places in our conceptual maps, blur, and merge into one another. That is why chapter two of the Zhuangzi says that the sage recognizes a “this,” but a “this” which is also “that,” a “that” which is also “this.”The appropriate response to the inadequacies of our conceptual structures is to remain open to what those structures distort or hide. In chapter five, men who have had their feet amputated as criminal punishment are scorned by society, but not by their Daoist masters, who see what is of worth in them. In chapter one, Zhuangzi chastises his friend Huizi for failing to see beyond the ordinary, humdrum uses of some large gourds. Huizi tried using one of the gourds for a water container, but it was so heavy he couldn’t lift it. He then tried to make dippers from them, but they were too large and unwieldy. He deemed the gourds of no use and smashed them to pieces. Zhuangzi asks why he didn’t think of making the gourd into a great tub so he could go floating around the rivers and lakes, instead of worrying because it was too big and unwieldy to dip into things! “Obviously you still have a lot of underbrush in your head!” concluded Zhuangzi. He does not deny that the more ordinary uses are genuine uses for the gourds, and indeed, they are. Rather, Zhuangzi’s point is to clear the underbrush from our heads and to get an enlarged view of what is of value. Much of the value of Daoist ethics lies in its warnings against the constricting effects of conventional ethical codes, the blinkering of vision that comes with what we might otherwise regard as admirable integrity and dedication. The other side of this warning is an intriguing positive: that there is a way we can pay attention to the world that allows us to “see around” our blinkering conceptualizations, to see what is of value that we have missed, to move with the grain of things. One of the central interpretive problems concerning the Zhuangzi in particular is how to reconcile the skeptical themes about the limits of our concepts and theories with the recommendations for living in a certain way, since the recommendations are framed with concepts (see Kjellberg and Ivanhoe, 1996, Hansen, 2003, and Wong, 2005 for a variety of interpretations).