Thank you for the read! It’s time I look back at Zhuangzhi and give it another read.

This idea of knowledge by analogy is highly similar to Lakoff and Johnson’s metaphor theory of cognition. I recommend their book “Metaphors We Live By”. It’s an academic philosophical book, but I believe they answer your objection of analogies as infinitum quite well. We have what they call “grounding concepts” that aren’t understood metaphorically. These are concepts that we all understand by virtue of being embodied. We exist in a body in space, therefore concepts like up, down, left, right are common and understood by all. Yet we build up knowledge by applying metaphors like “good is up”, “less is down”, and others. It’s an interesting theory and deserves to be expanded upon.