The Joy of Fish in the River Hao
A dispute on a riverside bridge over whether Zhuangzi can know a fish's happiness becomes a compact, still-cited debate about the limits of knowing another mind.
Zhuangzi and Huizi, the logician who serves as his regular sparring partner throughout the book, are walking along the dam of the Hao river when Zhuangzi remarks that the minnows are swimming about so free and easy — this, he says, is the happiness of fish. Huizi presses the epistemological problem directly: you are not a fish, how do you know the fish are happy? Zhuangzi's answer turns the logic of the question back on Huizi: you are not I, so how do you know that I don't know what the fish enjoy — pointing out that Huizi's challenge assumes exactly the kind of access to another mind that Huizi is denying is possible at all. When Huizi tries to hold the general principle, Zhuangzi ends the exchange by returning to where the question started: you asked me how I know it, so you already knew that I knew it when you asked; I knew it by standing here over the Hao.
I know it by standing here over the Hao.
Zhuangzi
Written about in
- What Taoism says about what to say and what to leave unsaid
On the dam of the Hao, Huizi asks how Zhuangzi, not being a fish, can know the fish are happy. The reply — you are not I, so how do you know that I don't know — ends the argument by turning the question back on the assumption inside it, which is a different skill from winning.