This paper is an effort to explore a possible common ground for a discourse in comparative logic. Along with Roger Ames’ and David Hall’s inquiry into the lack of transcendence in Chinese philosophy, the author of this paper investigates why and how, according to Zhuang Zi’s wisdom, treating myriad things, wan wu 萬物, and I as one could be a way to understand dao. Using Cantor-Husserl’s set theory, especially Edmund Husserl’s contributions on the involvement of the intentionality or a subjective “I” in the process of knowing sets, the author argues that classical Chinese is a pictographic language and every radical groups a list of characters in a way that is similar to how a set includes its elements. Thinking in sets shapes a unique linguistical habit of dividing kinds and sorting things. Logic of sets is the alternative logic that Zhuang Zi practices. Two efforts are made for reinterpreting Zhuang Zi from the perspective of sets. First, borrowing a few basic concepts from set theory, the author compares four characteristics of Husserl’s concept of sets to Zhuang Zi’s way of sorting myriad things. Second, the author explores Zhuang Zi’s wisdom of meditating into a state of losing one’s self, which he calls as “an empty set, ji xu 集虚.” For both set theory and Daoism, an empty set or emptiness can be a subset of every set or every possible world. When the boundary between a subjective “I” and myriad things disappears, myriad things and I are one. On the basis of the logic of sets, Husserl’s “lived experience” in the cognitive process and Zhuang Zi’s “losing I” in meditation could open an interesting discourse.
