Zhuangzi: the happy fish (the bridge over the Hao)
Chuang Tzŭ (Zhuangzi), Chuang Tzŭ: Mystic, Moralist, and Social Reformer (c. 300 BCE), translated by Herbert A. Giles
Two friends on a bridge argue about whether anyone can know what a fish enjoys, and the argument turns on where knowledge comes from.
Why it matters
Zhuangzi watches the minnows darting below the bridge and says that this is the pleasure of fishes. His friend Huizi, a logician, objects: you are not a fish, so how can you know what fish enjoy? Zhuangzi turns the objection back on him, and then, when Huizi presses, he returns to the original question. You asked me how I knew, he says, which shows you knew that I knew; and in Giles’s rendering he ends: ‘I knew it from my own feelings on this bridge.’ Giles adds a gloss of his own, that from his feelings above the bridge Zhuangzi infers those of the fishes below.
The passage is often read as a triumph of intuition over logic, or as a joke at the logician’s expense. I read it as a dispute about the source of a claim to know. Huizi treats knowledge of another mind as requiring something like being that mind. Zhuangzi locates his knowledge in where he stood and what he was looking at. Giles’s gloss makes the knowledge an inference from his own case, which is one way of filling in the answer; the text itself leaves more open.
That relational picture is close to the one I defend for testimony: what matters is not whether the knower shares the nature of what is known, but whether the truth of the matter figures, through the knower’s own engagement with it, in why the claim is made. It also says something about the questions people ask of AI. Whether a system has an inner life is the question Huizi would ask. What its outputs are responsive to is the question Zhuangzi’s answer suggests.
Chuang Tzŭ and Hui Tzŭ on the bridge over the Hao: the pleasure of fishes
Chuang Tzŭ, ch. XVII "Autumn Floods" (end), pp. 218–219
Chuang Tzŭ and Hui Tzŭ had strolled on to the bridge over the Hao, when the former observed, "See how the minnows are darting about! That is the pleasure of fishes."
"You not being a fish yourself," said Hui Tzŭ, "how can you possibly know in what consists the pleasure of fishes?"
"And you not being I," retorted Chuang Tzŭ, "how can you know that I do not know?"
"If I, not being you, cannot know what you know," urged Hui Tzŭ, "it follows that you, not being a fish, cannot know in what consists the pleasure of fishes."
"Let us go back," said Chuang Tzŭ, "to your original question. You asked me how I knew in what consists the pleasure of fishes. Your very question shows that you knew I knew.
For you asked me how I knew.
I knew it from my own feelings on this bridge."
From my own feelings above the bridge I infer those of the fishes below.
Questions for discussion
- Hui Tzŭ asks how Chuang Tzŭ can know the pleasure of fishes, not being a fish. Is the challenge a good one, and does it apply to knowing other people?
- Chuang Tzŭ replies that the question itself shows Hui Tzŭ knew he knew. Is that a clever evasion or a real point about how knowledge works?
- 'I knew it from my own feelings on this bridge.' What might it mean to know something from a particular place?
The text and its source
- Edition
- Chuang Tzŭ: Mystic, Moralist, and Social Reformer, translated from the Chinese by Herbert A. Giles (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1889), chapter XVII "Autumn Floods", pp. 218–219, as transcribed in Project Gutenberg eBook #59709 (Distributed Proofreaders).
- Source
- Project Gutenberg
- Status
- Public domain: published 1889; Giles died 1935 (public domain in the US and in life+70 and life+60 jurisdictions).
- Notes on the text
- The two short paragraphs "For you asked me _how_ I _knew_." and "From my own feelings above the bridge I infer those of the fishes below." are Giles's running commentary, which (his Introduction explains) is "introduced, in accordance with the Chinese system, into the body of the text"; in the e-text they are set as indented block quotations. They are kept, as separate paragraphs, so that the passage is verbatim; the editor may wish to set them in a smaller type or omit them. Without the commentary, Chuang Tzŭ's last speech runs on: "...Your very question shows that you knew I knew. I knew it from my own feelings on this bridge." Underscores mark italics. Original date of the Zhuangzi: c. 4th–3rd century BCE (left null).
Questions it bears on
Terms
Cite this page
Chuang Tzŭ (Zhuangzi). Chuang Tzŭ: Mystic, Moralist, and Social Reformer. Translated by Herbert A. Giles. In: Zhuangzi: the happy fish (the bridge over the Hao), abhinavsaxena.in library. https://abhinavsaxena.in/library/zhuangzi-happy-fish/