The Happiness of Fish

[Marblehead]

These are all changes.

Change requires time.

[Geof Nanto]

Change requires time.

 

It seems you’re entirely content with your existing concepts, hence there is obviously no need for you to explore further. I don’t see it as my role to try and persuade you otherwise. My posts here can only ever be glimpses of perspectives I find interesting to explore; anyone wanting more information will need to do their own research. These perspectives resonate with some people, for others they have no meaning – or worse, are perceived as a hostile attack…..

 

From Carl Jung -

 

“These melting processes [of conceptual reality] all express a relativisation of the dominants of consciousness prevailing in a given age. For those who identify with the dominants or are absolutely dependant on them, the melting process appears as a hostile, destructive attack which should be resisted with all ones powers. Others, for whom the dominants no longer mean what they purport to be, see the melting as a longed for regeneration and enrichment of a system of ideas that has lost its vitality and freshness and is already obsolete. The melting process is therefore either something very bad or something highly desirable, according to the standpoint of the observer.”

 

From Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions -

 

“Consider, for example, the men who called Copernicus mad because he proclaimed that the earth moved. They were not either just wrong or quite wrong. Part of what they meant by ’earth’ was fixed position. Their earth, at least, could not be moved. Correspondingly, Copernicus’ innovation was not simply to move the earth. Rather it was a whole new way of regarding the problems of physics and astronomy, one that necessarily changed the meaning of both ‘earth’ and ‘motion’.”

[dust]

I do love how much varied and interesting discussion a short Zhuangzi passage can seed.

 

 

 

Change requires time.

 

Time is change.

 

 

[Marblehead]

Time is change.

 

 

See?  Without time there is no change.  (Space would still exist though although it would be in freeze-frame mode.)

 

Hey!  We who are still alive would become immortal!!!

[AussieTrees]

Travelling at the speed of light,theories suggest of growing younger or not aging.

 

Time is a construct,there is no time.

[Marblehead]

Travelling at the speed of light,theories suggest of growing younger or not aging.

 

Time is a construct,there is no time.

Yes, traveling at the speed of light would keep us at our present age.  But it wouldn't cause us to grow younger, it's just that we wouldn't age whereas everything and everyone else would.

 

True, time is not a stand-alone concept.  It must be considered as time/space.

[doc benway]

See?  Without time there is no change.  (Space would still exist though although it would be in freeze-frame mode.)

 

Saying space would freeze without time is like saying there would be no length without yardsticks, no weight without scales.

Time is a measurement, created by the mind. 

Change simply is...

Time is contained by clocks and other measurements of change.

Change is independent of measuring devices and conventions.

 

Hey!  We who are still alive would become immortal!!!

 

It's true in a way, when you connect with what it is that does not change, you realize the nature of immortality.

[AussieTrees]

Happy fish,do fish feel happiness?

Or are they content after devouring another fish.

 

When frenzied into a pack of sharks eating a whale for six weeks,happy fish?

 

Fish show it is possible to survive.

[dust]

It does seem odd to talk of fish as being "happy".

 

With all the talk of ZZ's use of ambiguous language, there's a fairly obvious possibility that we haven't mentioned yet:  樂  pronounced 'le' means 'happy', but  樂  pronounced 'yue' means 'music'.

 

It originally meant 'music', and as a verb can also mean 'play' (music) and 'sing'.

 

What if we replaced 'happiness' with 'music' or 'rhythm'?

 

 

Zhuangzi and Huizi were roving along the bridge over the Hao.

 

Zhuangzi said, “The swift fish race and rove so freely, following the openings wherever they may. Such is the rhythm of fish.”

 

Huizi said, “You are not a fish, so whence do you know the rhythm of fish?”

 

Zhuangzi said, “You are not I, so whence do you know I don’t know the rhythm of fish?”

 

Huizi said, “I am not you, to be sure, so I don’t know what it is to be you. But by the same token, since you are certainly not a fish, my point about your inability to know the rhythm of fish stands intact.”

 

Zhuangzi said, “Let’s go back to the starting point. You said, ‘Whence do you know the rhythm of fish?’ Since your question was premised on your knowing that I know it, I must have known it from here, up above the Hao.”

 

At some point in the evolution of the language, 'music' came to also mean 'joy'. As far as I'm aware, we don't know precisely how the character was pronounced back in the day, but I'd imagine that it almost certainly did not sound like either 'le' or 'yue', and quite possibly only had one pronunciation for both meanings...

[Geof Nanto]

What if we replaced 'happiness' with 'music' or 'rhythm'?

 

Excellent! Even if it's not historically correct (which it could well be), it's totally Daoist - more so than the conventional reading of  樂 as 'happy'. 

[Marblehead]

Saying space would freeze without time is like saying there would be no length without yardsticks, no weight without scales.

Time is a measurement, created by the mind. 

Change simply is...

Time is contained by clocks and other measurements of change.

Change is independent of measuring devices and conventions.

We need to discuss this a little more.

 

Men's measuring devices are built upon the changes within the universe.  Without time change there would be no need for measuring devices.  The time would always be "Now".  But because the universe is dynamic and in constant change man decided that his life would be a little easier if he were able to measure the changes within the universe.  So the clock and calendar were invented.

 

It is not man who is changing things - it is the universe.

 

Time is real.  Count the minutes from sun up to the next sun up.  One can see that it is approximately 1,440 minutes plus or minus the shift of Earth's axis.  Man did not create this.  But man found way to measure it.

 

And the distance covered by a yardstick is three feet.  If you don't have a yardstick but have a 12-inch ruler you can measure that same distance with the ruler and find that three ruler distances is equal to one yardstick length.

 

But again I will say, without change there is no time.  That was always the biggest problem with the "Static Universe" theory.

[doc benway]

We need to discuss this a little more.

 

Men's measuring devices are built upon the changes within the universe.  Without time change there would be no need for measuring devices.  The time would always be "Now".  

 

Precisely - it is always NOW.

 

When it is ever THEN?

 

Similarly, everyone is always ME.

No one is ever THEM.

[AussieTrees]

The here and now,focus,stay with it,good,learn the ways of force,become a Jedi like your father.

[Miffymog]

Adding to the time discussion. It is true if we travelled at the speed of light, we'd experience no time, but it would help us a lot in getting to that speed if we had no mass

 

Just like there's no absolute position, there's no absolute measure of time. Each measure of time is made relative to another. However, just as it helps us in life to measure other positions relative to our own, so it is with time.

Edited October 31, 2015 by Miffymog

[doc benway]

My Daoist teacher used to speak of our mind of intent traveling faster than the speed of light.

It takes 8 minutes for light to travel from Earth to the Sun but our mind can do it in an instant. 

We were speaking in the context of martial arts but the principle can be applied elsewhere and is powerful. 

[Geof Nanto]

I've been browsing Zhuangzi and the Happy Fish. I like to read books randomly rather than linearly. And this is one I'll take slowly. Continuing Dustybeijing's insight, here's a passage I like from the essay entitled Yuzhile: The Joy of Fishes, or The Play on Words, by Hans Peter Hoffmann....

 

In a footnote to a passage in chapter 14, "Tianyun," Burton Watson explains as follows:

 

It should be noted that, because the words for "joy" and "music" are written with the same character, phrases translated here as "perfect music," "the music of Heaven," etc., can also be interpreted to refer to states of emotion. The phrase "perfect music" in fact appears later as the title of section 18, where I have rendered it as "perfect happiness.”

 

Here we find another completely different approach to interpreting our anecdote —as long as we allow it to be a piece of literature and do not force it to be philosophy, and that would also mean forcing it to be unambiguous. A literary text taken as a philosophical reading is seized by a characteristic and insurmountable horror; it is the horror of ambiguity, the horror of metaphor, the horror of the loss of the shelter of definition and notion. In short, it is the horror of language . It is because of this horror that philosophical readings very often cannot deal with ambiguity. They try to transform metaphor into notion and always try to decide which meaning in an ambiguity is the right one.

 

Normally it is impossible for philosophical interpretation of the text to take and accept a metaphor or an ambiguity as just that: a metaphor or an ambiguity. In other words, it is impossible for a philosophical interpretation of a text to take the different directions in which an ambiguity is pointing seriously as a statement, as maybe even the "real" meaning of a text. Not one direction but a variety of directions may be the answer—or, as in the Zhuangzi, the shifting sum of all of the various construals. In the Zhuangzi this is not only stated but also formed in a poetical or literary way. But this way of speaking or writing, again, is not just a quirk of the writer or the writers but is central to the philosophy of the Zhuangzi. This philosophy does not believe in fixed notions but tries to build up a literary language that is in motion and in the turn of a trope. 

[Wu Ming Jen]

The minnows swim about so freely, following the openings wherever they take them. That would make for a happy human that silly fish knows the happiness of humans, weird.