[Dormant] moved to !historymemes@piefed.social

Ah, so a kind of "Where did you get the notion the fish was happy?"

"Where? On the bridge over the Hao."

The great thing about ancient philosophers is sometimes the difference between wisdom and being a smartass is a very thin line.

In Daoism, you don't necessarily even care about "happiness" as that's a quality internal to oneself. It is understood though that all things have a Way (a dao) which they ideally align with. Being at odds with your dao causes strife.

So a fish, swimming in the water "like it's supposed to be," can be thought of as happy because it is living it's Dao. Zhuangzi perhaps interprets the "how/where do you know" question as bad form on his friends part. Daoists often dismiss a lot of learned knowledge as obfuscsting one from the dao (a principle I don't fully agree with the old masters on) so trying to dig deeper into the question "but how can you know what a fish thinks?!" is missing the point entirely. Fish are "happy" because, as animals, they naturally live in accordance with Dao.

With daoism being what it is, both are probably correct as well as a secret third interpretation

I'm guessing the point of the story is to motivate the discussion on the subject of knowing another beings's experience. Unfortunately it's written in the ancient Chinese philosophy style, very foreign to modern audiences. Maybe it sounds better in the original Chinese, idk.

This is more parable than anecdote, meant to highlight the wisdom of Zhaungzi and invoke questions about how we know what we know. Zhaungzi in particular likes to be extra and speak in vague and often nonsensical ways that rely on contradiction and fundamentally unknowable aspects of reality to make/not make his point

it's reasonable to expect that people are able to explain how they know things.

Epistemological externalism enters the chat

https://iep.utm.edu/int-ext/