---
title: "To Name Is to Divide"
sousTitre: "Zhuangzi sees words as paths worn by footsteps; Spinoza traces them to each body’s experience. The quarrel over names fades when the gaze shifts."
description: "Zhuangzi: names emerge like paths, and dispute follows. Spinoza: they arise from each body’s encounters. Two ways beyond the quarrel of words."
date: 2026-06-11
lang: en
tradition: taoisme
auteurs: ["Zhuangzi", "Baruch Spinoza"]
---
# To Name Is to Divide

The path crossing the hillside seems older than time itself. Yet no one ever carved it: repeated steps have worn it into being, and every traveler who treads it deepens its groove. Zhuangzi invites us to see our words in this light: “Just as a path is formed by the multiplied footsteps of passersby, so things come to be qualified by what many have said of them.” What we call things—their names, their divisions, their camps—may be less a map of the world than the trace of our comings and goings.

The second chapter of his work, which the sinologist Léon Wieger titles “Universal Harmony,” holds this thought from beginning to end: what comes first is the one—the undivided ground of which the [Dao](https://viasophia.org/lexique/tao/) is the course; distinctions come later, and with them, the war of words. “To embrace is the great knowledge, the great speech. To distinguish is knowledge and speech of a lower order.” The text pushes to its most uncompromising point:

> Since all is objectively and in reality one, why distinguish entities with words, which express only subjective and imaginary apprehensions? Once you begin to name and count, you will never stop, for the series of subjective views is infinite.
>
> — **Zhuangzi**, *Œuvre de Tchoang-tzeu*, ch. II. éd. after the French translation by Léon Wieger, Les Pères du système taoïste, 1913.

Where, then, do our distinctions come from, if not from the world itself? Zhuangzi answers as a genealogist: from active life and its frictions. “From crossbow shooting came the notion of good and evil. From contracts came the notion of right and wrong.” From techniques, from dealings—then, he says, “we went so far as to attribute them to Heaven.” The rival schools of his time, followers of Confucius and Mozi, hurl their yeses and nos at one another; to him, they are but “idle chatter.” For “from my point of view, I see it this way; from another, I would see it otherwise”: the dispute does not pit truths against one another, but positions. Each defends the stretch of path where their steps have led them.

## What does Zhuangzi propose—silence, or a change of place?

Neither, at first: ascent. The sage does not choose the best point on the circumference but reaches the center.

> His own point of view is a point from which this and that, yes and no, still appear undivided. This point is the pivot of the norm. It is the still center of a circumference along which all contingencies, distinctions, and individualities revolve.
>
> — **Zhuangzi**, *Œuvre de Tchoang-tzeu*, ch. II. éd. after the French translation by Léon Wieger, Les Pères du système taoïste, 1913.

*[道樞 dào shū]* The “pivot of the norm” renders the Chinese *dào shū*: 道 *dào*, the way—which Wieger translates as “the norm”—and 樞 *shū*, the hinge, the axis on which the door turns. The [pivot of the Dao](https://viasophia.org/lexique/tao-shu/): the point from which opposites are not yet severed.

This pivot is no compromise. The middle remains a point on the circumference, equidistant from two others; the center lies outside the circle of positions. From there, the observer no longer sees one this against one that, but the whole wheel turning—and one thinks of Laozi’s [empty hub](https://viasophia.org/articles/2026-06-03-le-moyeu-vide/), that central void which bears the wheel precisely because it does not roll. To stand there does not forbid speech. The monkey keeper in the same chapter announces “three taros in the morning and four in the evening”: general outrage; four in the morning and three in the evening: general delight; the sum has not changed. “So does the Sage. He says yes or no for the sake of peace, and remains at rest at the center of the universal wheel, indifferent to the direction in which it turns.” He uses words without belonging to them; he practices, even in conversation, that [non-contention](https://viasophia.org/lexique/bu-zheng/) which yields on names because it does not play the game. And when speech reaches its limit, he lays it down: “To know how to stop where understanding and words fail—that is wisdom.”

Two millennia later, a philosopher who trusts only demonstrations reaches the same diagnosis—and takes the opposite path. Spinoza asks where our general ideas come from: Man, Horse, Dog. His answer invokes neither Heaven nor the essence of things; it invokes the body.

> Those who, for example, have more often regarded with wonder the stature of men will understand by the name of man an animal of erect stature; those who have been accustomed to consider something else will form of men another common image, to wit: man is an animal capable of laughter; a featherless biped; a rational animal; and thus for other objects, each will form general images of things according to the disposition of his body.
>
> — **Baruch Spinoza**, *Éthique*, livre II, § scolie 1 of proposition 40. éd. after the French translation by Charles Appuhn, Wikisource, 1913.

Each body is limited; it retains from its encounters what has most struck it, and condenses this residue into notions—“this is what the Mind expresses by the name of man.” Our general words are not grasped essences: they are sediments of affections. Hence, Spinoza concludes, “so many controversies” among philosophers who reason on these images: each defends what their body has deposited in them. The observation nearly echoes the Taoist’s—quarrel arises from the vantage point one occupies—but the remedy is the reverse. Zhuangzi moves back beyond words, toward the indistinct before divisions. Spinoza does not lay down speech: he refounds it. There exist for him notions that owe nothing to the thinker’s position—“what is common to all things and is equally in the part and in the whole can only be conceived adequately.” On this foundation Reason builds; and it is of its nature, he writes, “to perceive things as possessing a certain sort of eternity”—without relation to time, thus without point of view. Where the pivot falls silent, the *Ethics* demonstrates, defines, distinguishes to the end: Spinoza never holds distinction itself to be the evil—only distinction ill-born.

The two paths do not resemble each other in their course. One dissolves divisions into the primordial one and ends beyond words; the other purifies division to the point of adequate ideas and ends in theorems. The silence of the pivot is not the clarity of the geometer. Yet both gestures pivot at the same place: they lift the gaze from where it was planted—the stretch of path, the affected body. To stand at the still center, to perceive under a sort of eternity: in both cases, dispute falls away, not because one side prevails, but because there is no longer a side to stand on. Neither sage wins the quarrel of names; they leave it from above. Two paths—letting go of words, recasting them in reason—toward the same deliverance: ceasing to mistake one’s position for the world.

The question remains, which neither the pivot nor geometry settles for us: when a word divides—this and that, them and us, true and false—who speaks through it: the thing itself, or the path where my steps have led me?

---

**À lire aussi**

- [Le moyeu vide](https://viasophia.org/articles/2026-06-03-le-moyeu-vide/)
- [Ce qui dépend de nous](https://viasophia.org/articles/2026-06-06-ce-qui-depend-de-nous/)
- [Le bien suprême est comme l'eau](https://viasophia.org/articles/2026-06-09-eau-bien-supreme-laotseu/)
- [La joie est un passage](https://viasophia.org/articles/2026-06-04-spinoza-joie-puissance/)

## Sources

- Tchouang-Tseu, *Œuvre de Tchoang-tzeu* — Les Pères du système taoïste, 1913, trans. Léon Wieger (https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Tchouang-Tseu)
- Baruch Spinoza, *Éthique* — Wikisource (trad. Charles Appuhn, 1913), trans. Charles Appuhn (https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/%C3%89thique_(Spinoza))


Canonical source : https://viasophia.org/en/articles/2026-06-11-nommer-diviser-tchouang-tseu/