The Self-Transcendence in Chapter “De Chong Fu 德充符” of the Zhuangzi—Starting from Kant’s Symbolic Relationship Between Beauty and Morality

Judging a person’s appearance as beautiful or ugly is not a factual description but an aesthetic act. Kant believed that the human figure is the ideal of beauty, and at the same time, beauty can positively symbolize morality. However, regarding the correlation between aesthetics and morality, the Chapter “De Chong Fu 德充符” in the Zhuangzi offers us a strikingly insightful perspective that is transcendent and religious. The characters depicted in “De Chong Fu 德充符” have incomplete physical forms and ugly appearances, which seemingly do not qualify as symbols of morality in Kant’s sense. Yet, their behavior and demeanor precisely reflect their detachment from external physical forms and their inner virtue being full. This inner virtue embodies a religious ethic that transcends individual and subjective perspectives. This paper posits that there is a deeper and more thought-provoking connection between virtue and physical form in Zhuangzi’s philosophy. The aim of this paper is to explore the issue of self-transcendence in Zhuangzi’s philosophy from the perspective of religious ethics, using the relationship between the body, beauty, and virtue in Lao–Zhuang philosophy as a guiding thread. This paper will be divided into three main parts: the first part introduces the topic through the symbolic relationship between beauty and morality in Kant; the second part discusses the transcendence of aesthetics and physical form in Daoist philosophy and provides a section-by-section analysis of Chapter “De Chong Fu 德充符” of the Zhuangzi; and the third part summarizes the relationship between virtue and form in “De Chong Fu 德充符”. The paper argues that the transcendence of the physical form by virtue, as reflected in Chapter “De Chong Fu 德充符”, is an embodiment of religious ethics. In Lao–Zhuang philosophy, due to their deep understanding of the nature of beauty and the nature of the body, there is no necessary positive connection between beauty and form. Virtue does not necessarily need to rely on beauty as a symbol to be realized, and there can still be a positive connection between a defective physical form and virtue. In conclusions, the paper proposes the modern inspiration of self-transcendence reflected in Zhuangzi’s “De Chong Fu 德充符”.