Inside-Out Reasoning

Chuang Tzu was a formidable logician, but he turned logic against itself. The scholar Victor Mair calls it a peculiar move: "What logic there is in Chuang Tzu is directed against reason itself, in particular against the rational choice between one course of action and another." Most reasoning works outside-in — weigh the options, score them, pick the rational best. Chuang Tzu reasons inside-out: he uses logic to dismantle the premise that the right move is the one you can argue your way to. The choice doesn't get computed from the outside; it issues from somewhere underneath the deliberation.