Thinker of the Warring States Period, an Important Developer of Daoist Thought
Zhuangzi (c. 369–286 BC) was a thinker of the Warring States period, named alongside Laozi as "Lao-Zhuang," and one of the important founders of Daoist philosophy. His thought comes down in the book Zhuangzi, which reasons well through parable, advocating the spiritual freedom of "free and easy wandering" and the relativist epistemology of "the equality of things," holding that the distinctions of right and wrong, great and small, noble and base among the things of the world are often only relative differences of perspective, not absolute objective truth. Compared with Laozi’s more politically inclined "governing by non-action," Zhuangzi’s thought leans more toward how the individual spiritual world may transcend the bonds of worldly value judgments to attain true freedom, and the relativist and perspectivist stance embedded in his "equality of things" bears an intriguing cross-cultural resonance with Nietzsche’s "perspectivism" and Pyrrho’s skepticism in Western philosophy.
Zhuangzi records that he once dreamed he had become a butterfly, fluttering and dancing, wholly forgetting he was Zhuang Zhou; on waking he was plainly Zhuang Zhou again, and did not know whether Zhuang Zhou had dreamed the butterfly, or the butterfly had dreamed Zhuang Zhou. This parable explores the relativity of the boundary between reality and illusion, self and things, one of the most widely told epistemological images in the history of Chinese philosophy.
Zhuangzi and his friend Huizi were strolling on a bridge over the Hao River, and Zhuangzi, seeing the fish swimming freely in the water, sighed that "the fish are happy." Huizi challenged, "You are not a fish; how do you know the joy of fish?" Zhuangzi retorted, "You are not I; how do you know that I do not know the joy of fish?" This famous "debate on the Hao" explores the epistemological difficulty of "whether one can truly know another’s inner experience," and is still a classic case in the teaching of Chinese philosophy for discussing the problem of "intersubjectivity."
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