This article utilizes recent Western approaches to the ethical inquiry into human activities of forgetting, especially the approach represented by Ricoeur’s work on memory and forgetting and their ethical functioning. The three areas of Ricoeur’s investigation includes the therapeutic/pathological area; pragmatic area, which deals with the issue of individual and group’s self-identity in relation to time and otherness; and the more explicitly ethical (social and institutional) area. These three divisions are useful to start with, but Ricoeur’s work shows some narrowness in neglect of positive, productive and healthy forgetting, which has been deemed significant by the Zhuangzi. This paper is the first of the author’s serial writings to apply Ricoeur’s three areas of forgetting to investigate the forgetfulness of the Zhuangzi, and examines therapeutic forgetting and its ethical dimension only.

本文利用西方最近对人类遗忘活动的伦理调查方法，特别是利科关于记忆和遗忘及其伦理功能的工作所代表的方法。利科研究的三个领域包括治疗/病理学领域；语用领域，处理个人和群体与时间和他者相关的自我认同问题；以及更明确的道德（社会和制度）领域。这三个部分一开始是有用的，但利科的工作在忽视积极、有效和健康的遗忘方面表现出一些狭隘性，这被庄子认为是重要的. 本文是作者系列著作中的第一篇，应用利科的遗忘三个领域来考察《庄子》的遗忘，仅考察治疗性遗忘及其伦理维度。