Ideography and Chinese Language Theory

A History

Timothy Michael O’Neill, Timothy Michael O'Neill

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9783110457223
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book is a much-needed scholarly intervention and postcolonial corrective that examines why and when and how misunderstandings of Chinese writing came about and showcases the long history of Chinese theories of language. 'Ideography' as such assumes extra-linguistic, trans-historical, universal 'ideas' which are an outgrowth of Platonism and thus unique to European history. Classical Chinese discourse assumes that language (and writing) is an arbitrary artifact invented by sages for specific reasons at specific times in history. Language by this definition is an ever-changing technology amenable to historical manipulation; language is not the House of Being, but rather a historically embedded social construct that encodes quotidian human intentions and nothing more. These are incommensurate epistemes, each with its own cultural milieu and historical context. By comparing these two traditions, this study historicizes and decolonializes popular notions about Chinese characters, exposing the Eurocentrism inherent in all theories of ideography. Ideography and Chinese Language Theory will be of significant interest to historians, sinologists, theorists, and scholars in other branches of the humanities.

Chapter One: Platonism and the Strong Theory

All of the epistemological assumptions of the strong theory of ideography were established in ancient Platonism. With the caveat that I am not attempting to describe the complex arguments of the historical Plato (428–347 B.C.E.) himself, these assumptions include the matter/form divide, a creator god who uses the Forms as a blueprint for cosmogonic endeavors, the nature of dialectic, the Greek alphabet as an analytical model, primary language, the block of wax analogy, and the recollections of an immortal soul.

According to canonical sources of ancient Platonic thought (which for our purposes include the texts of Plato, the Middle Platonists, and the Neoplatonists), the demiurge used the model of the Forms to fashion the world; the physical world is therefore an image of the world of Forms stamped in matter.52 In this mimetic cosmogony, the creator inserts the Forms into material envelopes and thus creates the universe as an imitation, a copy, an image of another perfect, static, timeless, and changeless universe where the Forms reside (and matter simply does not). The Forms, as the best things, are least liable to change; divine things, in fact, are incapable of change—the world of Forms is therefore eternal, unchanging, and invisible by definition.53

The images and copies of the Forms that exist in the substrate of matter are compared to dreams, to shadows, to reflections in water and mirrors, and to reproductions in drawings and stamp-impressions.54 We can only get at them with our bodily senses at one stage removed; we must therefore use our immaterial and eternal souls to seek after them.55 This is the basis of epistemology and ontology in Platonism.56 Dialectic, as a discursive practice, “draws the soul from the realm of becoming to the realm of what is.”57 By definition, dialectic “comes down to a conclusion without making use of anything visible at all, but only of Forms themselves, moving on from Form to Form, and ending in Forms.”58 It is a philosophical practice which leads to an understanding of the Forms.

“All the Forms,” according to the Republic, “each of them is itself one, but because they manifest themselves everywhere in association with actions, bodies, and one another, each of them appears to be many.”59 So how does one make the move from the many to the one? How does one move from the multifariousness of the material world to the streamlined perfection of the world of the singular Forms? Over and over, again and again, Platonism turns to one simple heuristic device, the most finely honed pedagogical tool in its pedagogical toolbox, the model that serves as the model for the Form of “modeling” itself: writing. And to be even more specific: the Greek alphabet.

By using the Greek alphabet as a model, ancient Platonism establishes the strong theory of ideography. Although the Greek alphabet is used in this way dozens of times in the Platonic corpus, I have here only selected one key passage to explicate this model to end all models:60

It’s a hard thing… to demonstrate any of the more important Forms (eidē) without using models… the Form (eidos) of a “model” itself in its turn also has need of a model to demonstrate it… when children are just acquiring skill in reading and writing… they distinguish each of the individual letters well enough in the shortest and easiest syllables, and come to be capable of indicating what is true in relation to them… but then once again they make mistakes about these very same letters in other syllables, and think and say what is false… isn’t this the easiest and best way of leading them on to the things that they’re not yet recognizing? …take them first back to those cases in which they were getting these same things right, and having done that… put these beside what they’re not yet recognizing. By comparing them, we demonstrate that there is the same kind of thing with similar features in both combinations, until the things that they are getting right have been shown set beside all the ones that they don’t know; once the things in question have been shown like this, and so become models, they bring it about that each of all the individual letters is called both different, on the basis that it is different from the others, and the same, on the basis that it is always the same as and identical to itself, in all syllables… have we grasped this point adequately, that we come to be using a model when the given thing, which is the same in something different and distinct, is correctly identified here, and having been brought together with the original thing, brings about a single true judgment about each separately and both together? …then would we be surprised if our minds by their nature experienced this same thing in relation to the individual “letters” of everything, now, in some cases, holding a settled view with the aid of truth in relation to each separate thing, now, in others, being all at sea in relation to all of them—somehow or other getting the constituents of the combinations themselves right, but once again not knowing these same things when they are transferred into the long “syllables” of things and the ones that are not easy?61

Letters, as the unanalyzable units of Greek writing, are thus directly analogous to the Forms—just as written Greek words can be broken down into their component units, so too all the complicated phenomena of the material world can be broken down into ultimate and unanalyzable units (the shadowy reflections of the singular Forms reproduced in complex combinations of matter). The juxtaposition of letters on the one hand, and the Form-bearing ontological bricks on the other, produce Greek syllables and words and the objects and events that make up worldly phenomena respectively. 62 The very succinct model of the Greek alphabet as functionally analogous to the cosmos is one of the most influential analogies ever made in the history of Western civilization—certainly more central to European thought than the so-called ‘Great Chain of Being’.63

This analogy is the origin of all theories of ideography; the ontological dialectic of the one and the many is echoed, reflected, reimaged, and reified in the Greek alphabet as letters compounded into syllables and words.64 Literacy in reading and writing Greek is equated to a kind of philosophical literacy in similarly working with the abstracted but intelligible world of the Forms—once you get a certain number of basic Forms down in your repertoire (like learning an alphabet), it is possible to begin to break the universe down into its component ontological parts through dialectic.65

How can human language function in such a way for Platonic dialectic? Dialecticians, by definition, are those who discover “how to display in words (logoi) the things there are.”66 In this view, words are tools to divide being. The first makers of these tools, wordsmiths as it were, looked to the Forms as a model so as to properly reproduce them in sounds and syllables. Although these word-tools may have been composed in different languages per se, because they used the same ‘morphological’ method (i.e., being constructed by reifying Forms), the different sounds and syllables could work equally well as signs for the Forms.67 Here, as Cassirer says, “each word governs a specific realm of being.”68 In other words, no matter whether the language is Greek or a foreign tongue, the relationship between things and words is neither arbitrary nor conventional; there is a natural correctness of words, in that they should represent what the Form of each thing actually is (perhaps even better than a material thing or phenomenon, in and of itself, can).69

Within Platonic language theory, the noun (onoma), obviously plays the key role; because the verb (rhēma) is not eternal and unchanging, but rather expressive of coming to be, it is a mere epiphenomenon unworthy of study.70 This manner of analysis assumes that unchanging Forms exist in the other world, and the changeable phenomena of this world acquire their nominal status by participating in these Forms.71 The etymological definition of the Greek word onoma in the Platonic canon is “this is a being for which there is a search.”72 Another language would have to be established if one wished to adhere to an ontology in which things are in flux; because onomata always represent fixed entities, if used correctly they cannot help but refer to eternal and unchanging Forms.73

Complex words can be analyzed by breaking them down into their smallest meaningful units—“primary onomata.” These primary onomata are imitations, images, copies, and reproductions in letters and syllables of the real Forms of things.74 Being an onoma and being a thing that has an onoma are two distinct states. Onomata are imitations of the Forms of things by definition, but due to the fact that they exist independently of said Forms and said things, humans can incorrectly assign onomata to inappropriate things. In other words, because onomata have an independent life of their own in human language, their application to specific things is a matter of speaking truly or falsely—correctly representing or misrepresenting the Forms.75 The natural correctness of words, by definition, is the proper embodying of the Forms of particular things in units of sound.

Within this epistemological framework there are two sorts of language, primary language and human language.76 Primary language is always naturally correct;77 normal human language is apt to flaws—mistakes in the representation of Forms.78 The difference between primary language and human language, according to the episteme of ancient Platonism, comes down to a historical break, a falling away from how language should work, and did in fact work in antiquity:

Then when we’ve divided off the things that are—the things to which we have given onomata—if there are some things to which they can all be carried back, as onomata are to the letters, and from which we can see that they derive, and if different kinds of Forms (eidē) are found among them, in just the way there are among the letters (stoicheia)—once we’ve done all this well, we’ll know how to apply each letter to what it resembles, whether one letter or a combination of many is to be applied to one thing… we’ll apply letters to things, using one letter for one thing, when that’s what seems to be required, or many letters together, to form what’s called a syllable, or many syllables combined to form onomata and verbs. From onomata and verbs, in turn, we shall finally construct something important, beautiful, and whole [i.e., primary language]… of course, I don’t really mean we ourselves—I was carried away by the discussion. It was the ancients who combined things in this way. Our job—if indeed we are to examine all these things with scientific knowledge—is to divide where they put together, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Egyptian Hieroglyphic and Chinese Characters
• Chapter 1: Platonism and the Strong Theory
• Chapter 2: Aristotelianism and the Soft Theory
• Chapter 3: Hellenized Egypt, Pythagoreanism, and the Primitivist Theory
• Chapter 4: Patristic Apologetics and the Scriptural Theory
• Chapter 5: Neoplatonism and the Hermetic Theory
• Chapter 6: Universals and the Scholastic Theory
• Chapter 7: Renaissance Neoplatonism and the Emblematic Theory
• Chapter 8: Athanasius Kircher on Egyptian and Chinese Ideography
• Chapter 9: The Great Chinese Encyclopedia
• Chapter 10: Zhengming 正名 “Making Words Correct” and Chinese Language Theory
• Chapter 11: Chinese Language Theory and the Interpretation of the Classics
• Chapter 12: The Erya and Lexicographic Classification
• Chapter 13: The Erya and Chinese Language Theory
• Chapter 14: The Shuowen jiezi and Chinese Language Theory
• Chapter 15: The “Shuowen Postface” (Annotated Translation)
• Conclusion: Ideography and Chinese Language Theory
• Appendix: The Metalinguistic Terms ming 名, yi 義, yi 意, and zhi 志
• Bibliography
• Footnotes