Language: Where Literalism & Experience Meet

As Master Chuang strolls across the bridge above the Hao River, he knows the joy of the fish. His knowledge is not a priori, or from reason, but simply from Being, from having strolled over the Hao. Master Chuang is confident in his knowledge, and comfortable that Being was its source, but his companion, Master Hui, is skeptical of this inseparable sameness. He fails to see the “continuity between his world and the world of the fishes,” and so he is divisive, and works to separate himself from Master Chuang, and Master Chuang from the fishes; with critical thinking Master Hui wants to deny himself the universally available knowledge of Being. But ultimately Master Chuang is able to overcome Master Hui tendencies “toward independence and self- sufficiency,” and prevails, thus exposing his way to be the way (Ames 221).

It is not a coincidence that Master Chuang lesson takes place outside, while walking in the company of his friend, or that Heidegger’s “Conversation on a Country Path About Thinking” is titled such, and not “Theoretical Dialogue in a Classroom.” In his book, Wandering at Ease in the Zhuangzi, Roger Ames says that, to Zhuangzi, location is “integral to what it means to know.”O’Brien 9 Knowing, for Zhuangzi, is “radically situated, and is irreducibly social” (219). Zhuangzi makes this known in his intentional use of ambiguous language when he says “how do you know,” for this can also mean “from where do you know” (220). Within this model which gives priority to place and situation, knowledge becomes a “tracing out and mapping of the productive patterns of one’s environs in such a manner as to move efficaciously and without obstruction.” For Zhuangzi, knowledge is performative and tangible, it is a “function of fruitful correlations” in which the “knower and the known, the enjoyer and the enjoyment are inseparable aspects of this same event” (221). So on the one hand, language can retrospectively comment on the world, but according to Zhuangzi, it can, more profoundly, “command into being” the relationships that constitute our experience in this world. It is this power of command regarding reality that allows Zhuangzi such confidence in his observation that the fish are happy.